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.
My first roleplaying game was the same thing as several other people in my feed: the Holmes version of Dungeons & Dragons. It was the one with the chits you could cut out and draw from a cup in case you didn’t have any polyhedral dice.
I still have some of those dice from the first dice purchases. There’s a powder blue set that came from another box set (or a separate purchase) and a multi-colored set. Of the multi-colored set, I still have a green d8 and yellow d20 that I can see. The d4 is around here somewhere. The powder blue one, I have a d6 that is still in fantastic shape. There’s a d10 (probably in the basement) and d12 in my stein of dice, right by the computer monitor I’m typing this on.
I hadn’t played D&D proper since AD&D 2nd Edition — third edition (and Pathfinder) seemed like an overwrought mess, fourth edition seemed to stray even further afield yet devolved into an overly-complex miniatures battle game. By the time 5e came out, I was done with fantasy roleplaying, but the new edition brought me back to the land of make-believe. And WotC’s campaigns, borrowing heavily from Paizo’s Adventure Path concept, have been…more or less good. The Elemental Evil campaign book could be a complete setting guide for the middle/interior of the Sword Coast. It’s just fantastic. The Starter Set’s adventure is also crazy fun. And we’ve been playing (off and on) as a family. It plays quickly, reminding me of the best of AD&D2ed with some goodness from the past decade of gaming. 4e didn’t feel like D&D to me. 5e does.