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Sunday, September 1, 2013

30 Day D&D Challenge - Day One - Making the Undead Deaderer and Such ;)


I don't normally do these "blog challenges", as most times I have way too many post ideas bouncing around my head to pay attention to yet more distractions, but this one seems like fun. So, I'm going to play along :)

I got started playing D&D (technically AD&D) back in my Junior High School days - late 1979 or early 1980 - 7th grade in any case.

My friend Kenny was introduced to AD&D at his school, and being best of buds decided he needed to share it with me. So, one afternoon after school, we sat down and he put me through a dungeon. My character's name was Cyrus (named after Cyrus Vance perhaps) and he was a human fighter. Really, for you first character, especially while playing one on one, is there any other character to choose?

I remember that I killed a bunch of skeletons and recovered a + 1 sword. The rest is kinda fuzzy, but that's because I both knew nothing about what I was playing and was so engrossed in the game on so many levels (story / first person persona / mapping / new fangled dice/ etc) that it was like an information overload. All that didn't matter, as I was hooked.

After the adventure was complete, Kenny had to call a classmate to see if I had leveled (of course I did - you had to bite the carrot to be fully hooked). You see, Kenny only had the Dungeon Master's Guide - limited resources and funds back in those days.

By the following summer, my parents got me the DMG, Plater's Handbook and a set of dice to start me on my own way into the depths of D&D.

4 comments:

  1. Sounds alot like our first days.. There was something about the complete package of role playing, character leveling and mapping that had me hooked. I found mapping one of the most appealing parts of the game.. watching the map unfold as you explored it. We were a bunch of pretty poor kids so we all would pool our money together to buy 1 copy of the book we needed.

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  2. Sounds pretty similar

    Glad you are doing this one btw. Always great to hear these stories.

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  3. My first experience was around the same time, 1979ish. My older cousin had got a copy of the Holmes edition of Basic D&D (blue box with the big red dragon sitting on his gold on the front). It was one of those "hey, come over saturday and check out this cool game I got" kinda' deals. Just prior we had been playing MetaGames Melee and the comment that this new game was "like Melee times 100" had me on the hook.

    I remember very little of that game itself. It was me, my cousin as DM and a mutual friend as the other PC and some NPCs to round out the party. I know we played "Keep on the Borderlands" and I played a Magic User (because hey, wizards are supposed of be powerful and awesome right? Gandalf was a wizard! What else would I want to play?) We did the whole thing of having a mapper (me) and a Caller (uh...me again). That was the first and last time I ever played a game with a designated Caller. I got hooked from that moment on!

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  4. My first experience was around the same time, 1979ish. My older cousin had got a copy of the Holmes edition of Basic D&D (blue box with the big red dragon sitting on his gold on the front). It was one of those "hey, come over saturday and check out this cool game I got" kinda' deals. Just prior we had been playing MetaGames Melee and the comment that this new game was "like Melee times 100" had me on the hook.

    I remember very little of that game itself. It was me, my cousin as DM and a mutual friend as the other PC and some NPCs to round out the party. I know we played "Keep on the Borderlands" and I played a Magic User (because hey, wizards are supposed of be powerful and awesome right? Gandalf was a wizard! What else would I want to play?) We did the whole thing of having a mapper (me) and a Caller (uh...me again). That was the first and last time I ever played a game with a designated Caller. I got hooked from that moment on!

    ReplyDelete