Revisiting the writing event from last year, I’m checking to see if my answers have changed at all. However, the first few entries in the month are all about the first game played or purchased and barring access to a time machine, they’re not gonna change. For these few, it’s a repost from my G+ feed from about this time last year.
#RPGaDAY, Last Year: Day 2: What was the first roleplaying game you GMed?
That’s answered a bit in Last Year’s Day 1 post, but I’d like to expand on it a bit.
The first adventure I GM’d was included in the D&D boxed set. I don’t remember too much of it, but I do remember the door maze. Something stupid huge like a 60’ x 80’ room divided into 10’x10’ rooms with doors on all four walls. I thought this was amazing! The players would be spending time mapping out the room, opening doors and there is an identical room with three more doors to go through! This was such a great idea for a dungeon that I included it in nearly every one I created over the next two years until I realized it was pretty stupid. Lost? We just leave the doors we walked through open. Or just mark all the doors. Or break them all. And what dungeon lord decided to purchase/build two hundred-odd doors and install them all in an oversized room?
Gods, that was dumb.
I ran that module several times. One time we had a large group of adventurers and they decided to split up right at the beginning of the dungeon, so I had to split my time between each half of the group. You know the phrase “never split up the party� It’s not because the GM will kill off the characters, it’s because half of the people at the table aren’t playing for half of the game. And the GM will kill off the characters.
We played the heck out of that, but weren’t sure how to continue with D&D. The choices were very strange. We could play D&D, but then there was Basic D&D and Expert D&D and Advanced D&D… We didn’t understand what the deal was with those and that some were in a series, but hey, we were the smart kids. We could totally handle Advanced, so we skipped over Basic, Expert, and whatever came after that. We were better than Basic. We were Advanced.
AD&D 2nd Edition was the flavor of D&D for me. I played the heck out of that until I discovered Shadowrun, but that’s a tale for day five.