I was doing a computer back up and I found some old pdfs of Chainmail and 1st ed D&D (little brown books) that I bought at Drive Through RPG (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/index.php) back when WOC was selling all the old TSR stuff in pdf several years ago. I was glancing through and I got a bit nostalgic:
Remember when there were only 3 classes (Fighting Man, Magic-User, and Cleric)?
Remember when there were only men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits?
Remember when all weapons only did 1d6?
Remember when there were no prestige classes? No splat books? Green large print character sheets? Only one blue stapled together rulebook?
Those were simpler, magical, times for me. When my imagination filled in what my character carried and no need for an Arms and Equipment Guide or encumbrance . One set of dice (the DM's). No miniatures. No multiple copies of rulebooks and laptops filled with rules. The DM was law. He set my imagination in motion and anything he said was cannon. I lived the adventure in my head. My mind's eye saw my Prince Valiant like fighter (he didn't even have a name) fight terrible goblins and scary animated skeletons each encounter a near-character-death experience. 45 minutes of excitement until I had to get off at my bus-stop. The thrill of my first real game session that lasted an evening! I cherish those first role-playing experiences and miss the simplicity and innocence/nativity of rules. Part of me wishes to go back to 1983...wipe my mind of all things rules, game systems, business of gaming, marketing, popular opinion, media, and movies and to experience it all again for the first time and FEEL the magic again.
Props to the old Skoolers Gygax and Arneson. I met them both before they passed and that I treasure. I even gamed with Dave Arneson back in the day at Origins. They were guys like me just wanting to have fun and experience the magic.
My first D&D book, $2 at the Montgomery Wards mail order damages store:
It was 1984 for me. I remember fighting gods out of Deities and Demigods like they were just another monster (I kicked Thor's ass and took his hammer!), playing through the original red box solo adventure, exploring the Keep on the Borderlands and the Isle of Dread. Waiting desperately for Unearthed Arcana to come out because it had new classes, new spells, new magic items- shit I had never seen before that blew my mind. Reading modules by myself in my bedroom and imaging a party of adventurers trying to get through them. Coloring old Erol Otus art in with colored pencils. Drawing dungeon after dungeon on graph paper. Going to my first convention, a few years later, in awe of all the older gamers. Checking D&D books out at the library and using their free photocopier to copy the entire book because I was too poor to buy my own. Playing at lunch break outside the library at school, desperate for just a few minutes of gaming each day and thrilled when we could manage to all get together on the weekend.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I still love what we do now, but things sure have changed.
I kind of wish I'd had the classic D&D experience in school. As it happened, I never really buddied up to any D&D guys in school, so my early experience was limited to simply reading and re-reading my brother's copy of The Monster Manual. I was pretty obsessive about it, and eventually found myself buying the Fiend Folio and Dieties & Demigods - still without having played the game :D
ReplyDeleteMy first experiencing "playing" D&D was playing Pool of Radiance on my old Commodore 64, and after that Curse of the Azure Bonds.
Not quite the same as the real thing, but close enough, damn it!