4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

First bit of RP’ing was recess when I was in like the 4th or 5th grade and an older kid I knew was really into the Lone Wolf choose your own adventure books.  So I would talk to him about it and he would run me through “adventures” in the Lone Wolf world.

My first PnP RP’ing was Marvel Superheroes in high school study hall, through that friend I then met the Dnd DM and the rest is history.  First Dnd adventure was 2ed and we fought a bunch of Darro(sp).  I had an elven fighter with a 7 Dex.  I lived longer than any other party member.

Fourth grade...9 years old.  A rainy, nasty day.  My best friend brought his fairly newly acquired D&D Basic box set to school, and proceeds to trip and drop it in a puddle.  Since he was more generous than sensible, he declares it “ruined” and gives it to me, planning on spending his allowance to buy another one.

I took it home, and lay down on the living room floor, under my parents’ wood stove.  One page at a time, I dried the basic rulebook (yes, the red box version) out as I read each page, going through it all in one night.  A few days later, he was DMing me and my party of four characters (we didn’t have many friends between us, and knew NOTHING of the actual role-playing part of the game) through parts of Keep on the Borderlands.

One of my friends introduced me to d&d (red box) around 87’ (I was 11 or 12 yo). We had some photocopies of the system in english (not sure actually what edition it was exactly). And English was not so easy for 12 year-olds in Finland. We had some help to translate it though and we wrote a lot of that stuff into out own format. We had all kinds of crazy rules back then. A year or two later, we got the red box d&d in Finnish and other rulebooks followed. I still have those around somewhere - the translations are hilarious to read nowadays.

After playing the basic d&d for some years, we developed it into our own version of the system and had a lot of fun with it. Around 92´I got into the AD&D game. I ended up buying the books from the group I started with when they stopped playing and started my own games. I loved those Monster Manuals with the binders… A lot of pages. This time we had all the books in English and by that time I had little trouble with the language - I have to say that playing d&d has helped my English a lot.

After playing AD&D for couple of years, I got into GURPS and started to get this kind of strange negative feelings about AD&D. At that time I wanted a more realistic and complex system. We played GURPS quite a bit, along with some other games like Cyberpunk 2020.

In the university, I started to experiment with d&d again, this time it was 3.0. I did not own a lot of the 3.0 books before 3.5e came along, so no trouble to switch there.

Now I am happy with my 4e I still would play GURPS if I could, but I don’t have opportunities to play tabletop RPG’s now.

I “played” D&D a little in last middle/early high school but it was more a mini game the way we played it.  We usually played in the cafeteria during basketball games with 2e characters the DM pre-gen’d for us on a nice grid map he had drawn up in class that morning.  I did not actually roleplay until college.  It was the fall of 2000 and third was on the horizon.  My Resident Hall Director started up a 2e game and I decided to join in.  I knew the mechanics of the game from the “mini-style” games before, from the first Baldur’s Gate game, and from reading a lot of RF novels, but I had no idea how to roleplay.

I went with a true neutral (with chaotic tendencies) ranger/druid half elf.  The DM game me a lot of leeway because I had a very specific idea for the character.  I even got a dire wolf mount that telepathically talked to me.  I’ll never forget that character because he slowly went insane, which by the way was not the idea I had for him (I don’t remember what that was anymore, either).  Most of my best game table stories come from that character.

My first encounter with D&D was the winter of 1980.  We were in 7th grade and my best friend recieved the boxed set for Christmas.  We already had a weekly game of “Risk” or Chess going and he suggested this new game!  I remember being a bit sceptical of a “new” game, but as soon as we started reading...man we were hooked.  Gary Gygax had an interesting writing style which helped to bring forth the feel of the game.  We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, but it sure wasn’t just another board game.  We didn’t even have dice!  Just those horrible “chits” we pulled out of a bag.  I played a fighter named Luke.  I think I got his name from the Dukes of Hazzard!!  OOOHHH GAUDDD Me and 3 to 4 other guys have been playing at least once a week ever since.  You know...we never played Risk again.

I had already been playing Palladium RPGs for a couple years before I came across a DnD adventure a friend of mine was running. I was probably 16 and in my first encounter, I rolled a 1 against a skeleton that had ambushed me and the skeleton proceeded to crit me and I would have died within my first few minutes of playing if the DM hadn’t taken pity on me.

I forgot about DnD until 3.5 came out and played it for about a year before becoming too busy to play. Then when 4e came out and hearing it was more streamlined, I got very interested as that’s the experience I was looking for. I’ve been playing over the internet using Skype and Maptool with friends across the country and it’s been awesome even though it’s tough to co-ordinate schedules. I should write up my Skype/Maptool experiences in case other people want to try it. Hmm.

vinny9 - 09 October 2008 06:53 AM

I’ve been playing over the internet using Skype and Maptool with friends across the country and it’s been awesome even though it’s tough to co-ordinate schedules. I should write up my Skype/Maptool experiences in case other people want to try it. Hmm.

I would love to hear about your experiences with this as my group has been talking about trying this out as a remedy to our increasing difficulty in getting together on a regular basis.