Swords & Wizardry Light - Forum

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Tuesday, August 2, 2011

My First Time Was Magical

My first time playing AD&D was magical. There was something about the dice, the crude map on graph paper, killing skeletons and the like that just can't be recreated. Heck, my first time was a one-on-one session with just the DMG - my friend Kenny had to call another friend with the Player's Handbook just to find out when my fighter Cyrus leveled up.

I believe that was early in the summer of 81. For my birthday my mother got me copies of the DMG, the PH and a set of dice that I still have to this day. There was magic in having the world of RPGs opened up to me. Holy crap, I've been a gamer for 30 years!


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6 comments:

  1. Stacey ChancellorAugust 2, 2011 at 10:49 AM

    My first time was in around 91, and was not as enjoyable. After taking three hours to create/understand the game, the Gm killed me five minutes into the game. I eventually stayed and loved 2nd edition, but I almost quit and who knows, may have never played again.

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  2. Human's FollyAugust 2, 2011 at 2:48 PM

    Mine wasn't D&D-it was the old West End Games Star Wars RPG, which I got from Half-Price books without knowledge of what an RPG even was.

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  3. vizAugust 2, 2011 at 3:06 PM

    My first AD&D session was in March of 1980. The group entered a dungeon, and in the first fight my fighter was incapacitated by troglodyte stench.

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  4. BardAugust 2, 2011 at 3:25 PM

    Very true, very true (as with so many first times). Mine was around that same year, I was in 6th grade, and my first character was a ranger very unimaginatively named Aragorn (imagine that). But it was an awesome experience even though we made mistakes left and right (like going up multiple levels from a single adventure session--oops).

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  5. austrodavicusAugust 2, 2011 at 7:45 PM

    I started with Holmes in '81 and to this day every time I open its pages I can still feel that sense of magic, wonder and discovery that I felt 30 years ago.

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  6. mtdesingAugust 2, 2011 at 9:49 PM

    I did a solo session with the 81 Red Box rules... I remember being absolutely baffled how goblins could have 1-1 hit dice... doesn't that mean that have 0 hit dice? So aren't they already dead?

    It took me several days to actually find the rule for how to roll hit dice/hit points. Up until that point, every creature had a number of hit points equal to its hit dice- so I was ripping through dragons like mad, as long as I got a good hit in first.

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