Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Inspired by the "Gah!" thread, I figured I'd ask the question: how many of you here that play an old-school version of the game started after that edition was discontinued? Which of you bucked the trend of playing what is "new and kewl"?

- Wheggi

Wheggi wrote:Inspired by the "Gah!" thread, I figured I'd ask the question: how many of you here that play an old-school version of the game started after that edition was discontinued?

Well, I'm currently running OD&D, which I never played, back in the day. I started with Holmes, but that quickly morphed into AD&D as I acquired the books. I never owned the OD&D books until recently.

I started with the Mentzer boxed set, then combined it with the 1e player's handbook. I didn't realize they were separate games, back when I was in grade school. By the time I got older and tried harder to understand the rules, 2e was out. I spent a number of years playing 2e, but then I joined a 1e game. I haven't looked back to 2e since.

Philotomy Jurament wrote:

Wheggi wrote:Inspired by the "Gah!" thread, I figured I'd ask the question: how many of you here that play an old-school version of the game started after that edition was discontinued?

Well, I'm currently running OD&D, which I never played, back in the day. I started with Holmes, but that quickly morphed into AD&D as I acquired the books. I never owned the OD&D books until recently.

I am sort of in this boat. Although I suspect there were many OD&Disims in my first few games as it was 1979 in the summer rec program, and we started with only fighters, magic users, clerics, and thieves, and the races of human, hobbit, elf, and dwarf.

As I said, I started in 1997, with the DM running a standard (at the time) game of AD&D 2e + Forgotten Realms + Planescape.

After a few years, 3e came out. No need to enumerate the reasons I didn't like it. However, 3e trumpeted the return to the good old days of 1e. Incidentally, I think every edition does this to some degree. 1e will always get that special love as the golden days of D&D. Anyway, it sparked an interest in 1e, starting with little things like "how can I play a Monk in 2e?" Answer--use the 1e Monk (or the OA monk, or the Scarlet Brotherhood monk... same thing). One thing led to another, and...

Let's just say that I have plenty of NOSTALGIA for 2e but ZERO desire to actually play it again!

As for finding more "new blood" for our games, I've never had any problem.

1. My wife and I make friends with adults (usually couples) our own age--cool/interesting/fun people with whom we enjoy hanging out and who have never played any sort of RPG before.

2. Hang out with them doing stuff other than D&D. At some point mention D&D. "Yeah, the newer versions have rightfully earned a geekiness stigma, but the original game from the 70's isn't like that at all. It's just, like, a really fun game." Infect them with enthusiasm and interest.

3. Have one or two couples over for dinner followed by a nice game of The Keep on the Borderlands or something, using just Holmes rules (or OD&D or OAD&D but of similar level of complexity). They're hooked--no way around it! Regards.

I can't get back to OD&D because I enjoy so many creatures of AD&D. Just the other day when the getting everybody together for the game failed, we ended up playing Star Wars Trivial Pursuit The Sage Edition DVD Game (movie questions only) and then followed up with 2 players on Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy on the console (goofy but incredibly violent) all taking turns. During this time, two of the usual D&D players were commenting that playing with the old characters has become tiresome and they want to start with 1st level characters to make it more dangerous. So I've been considering playing a pre-supplements OD&D game since then...

No thieves!

Dream of dreams!

I started writing a reply to this, but it rapidly began to look like a Campaign Journal. Short answer is that, after a lengthy hiatus from D&D, I started a new AD&D Campaign at University in around 2002. It was set in my old Home Brewed Campaign World and we played more than ninety sessions over the course of three years. The Characters progressed from Level 1 to Level 6 and the core party was made up of four regular Players. Two of them had never played D&D before, one had played 3e and another had played AD&D. My girlfriend participated in about a third of the sessions, she was also new to D&D. In the last year we were joined by a sixth player, whose experience of D&D was also 3e. There were also several 'guest' players who occasionally participated. Mainly these were friends of mine who were familiar with AD&D, but couldn't join us regularly for various reasons.

The exact rules that we used changed over time (shifting between 2e and 1e), but it was predominantly an 'Old School' Campaign, in my opinion, and one enjoyed immensely by all involved.

My story isn't too dissimilar from those you've all told; I was cleaning up "stuff" in the apartment we lived in and found my copy of B2, and I had a Player's Handbook on my shelf that I have no idea how I acquired, and I just suddenly got a hankerin' to play some AD&D again. I'd heard about 3rd edition and looked at it, but I had no real desire to play it. I got roped in to not only playing it but DMing it a few years later but man, man did I not enjoy it in retrospect.

In the meantime, I was slowly planning to return to AD&D1. I was running one-offs for my wife, two of which wound up as DD1 and DD2 on me webpage

Slowly but surely I gathered a group of players (Jose, Scott, Sean, Krystal, Colleen (mrs. Delver), plus some other folks who were in and out...) and started with B2, turned over DMing for a while to Scott, who ran us through T1. Things petered out, and I took a group of the same core players (Scott, Colleen, Colleen's parents who are geeks) through part of C1...the game petered out again, and we restarted with high level characters and tackled G1. I had a good group there: Scott, Colleen, Colleen's folks, Jose, Jose's son, Tom...the TPK that resulted in G2 is archived over in Dragonsfoot's forums. Scott stepped up again and for about a year and change ran a Rules Cyclopedia/Mystara based game that was good fun but lost steam after real life intervened.

The next big campaign started in January of 2005. The owners of a local comic/game shop asked me to come run a big dungeon crawl, using all of my Dwarven Forge, minis and D&D. So I broke out the Original D&D rules, knocked together about a dozen or so characters and took a group through a section of dungeon that would lead them up against Erac's Cousin (it was big enough that had time permitted there would have been leveling and so on). While they barely made it past the introductory area (with about 30% casualties! ), some of the players stuck around for a full-blown campaign game that is still ongoing to this day.

This current group consists of: Myself (as DM), Scott, Steve, Jason, Kamal, Dan, Richard, Larry, Jason "2" (who lives in Lake Mary, literally right up the road from me, yet we did not meet until we both went to Lake Geneva gaming convention!), and Colleen (as soon as we find a sitter for Charlotte on Sunday evenings). This weekend, joining as guests and possibly as permanent are Brian and Stacy (Stacy is an old former co-worker of mine whom I just re-discovered thanks to idle curiosity and Google...!) and Eric (Petersen, creater of Mechwarrior II - how I know him is a long and weird story).

So the current game is two, almost three years old, and sports thirteen players. Our ages range from mid 20's to mid 40's, professions are all over the map. It's a good group and I consider every participant a friend if not a close friend.

Phew!

I can't say I've actually "played" OD&D/AD&D. I've only ever known two people who would play, one of them got employed and we never see him anymore, and the other is married and his woman is a stupid close-minded git who doesn't know anything and thinks she has final say over everything he says and does. Please no joking--I know a lot of people say ALL women are this way, but I've met more than enough who weren't.

That being said though, I personally never ever bought 3e. I considered it once, but then decided that, well.... The Gold Box games are some of my favorite computer RPGs, right up there with Ultima, Might & Magic etc, and I wanted to play the edition that inspired those games. I ended up getting Mentzer Basic first (a friend had misinformed me and said it was the original D&D and not an updated edition, and it was only ten bucks), then later got AD&D 2e then 1e after being at this forum for awhile.

DD If only we had met when I lived in Orlando in '96 I was so desperate to find players and had no luck whatsoever.

I consider myself fairly "old school" (hi, new here!), but have not actually played AD&D (1e) since around 1993. I got sucked into AD&D (2e) by the Dark Sun campaign setting, which I found very alluring, and DMed that for about 5 years, until my group drifted away for various reasons. Subsequently, I took a hiatus of approximately 3 years, then jumped into 3rd edition without so much as glancing down at the precipitous drop (the "money pit"). I have recently been jolted awake from this terrible nightmare by the "recent announcement" and have dumped my entire 3rd edition collection on eBay. The top shelf of my bookcase (stacked with all of my AD&D 1e hardcovers, modules, and Dragons) has begun to look very, very attractive since. I can almost feel my 10' pole striking the dry, sandy earth as I probe inch-by-inch into the Caves of Chaos or the Steading or some other classic locale. I've even started bugging my old 2e pals over the phone to start playing again, which is not getting the enthusiastic respone I might hope for.

Never played OD&D, although I've owned an OCE and all supplements in the past. Started with what I call the "Otus" Basic Set, not sure which one is by Mentzer. Switched to AD&D about a month later. This was all in 1981.

Good to be here, and glad to know there are others who still carry the torch (both "literally" and figuratively).

1E AD&D was still the current edition when I started playing (1984), but even then I was drawn toward the older stuff -- the 'face logo' modules and books, then the pastels & wizard logo, and eventually all the way back to OD&D. I feel some nostalgia for AD&D (especially those goldenrod character sheets), and what little affection I retain for the Mentzer/Elmore Classic D&D sets is almost entirely nostalgia-based, but that doesn't explain my affection for OD&D and the Holmes set, neither of which I ever saw anywhere near when they were still in-print (I got my Holmes book c. 1987 and my OD&D set in 1988).

Hi Nerelas! Welcome.

I played OD&D and then AD&D right up through college when I began to branch out into Runequest, C&C, Traveller and later Champions.

My group of friends was pretty hard wired into the Hero system since one of our gamemasters actually wrote and did artwork for Hero games. So for quite a few years that was our game group's system of choice and thus my own.

I played 3.x for a while and invested a good chunk of dinero into the books for it. Right around then I began writing my own campaign materials again / got serious about working on both the fantasy campaign and the science fiction campaign I run.

About six months before the announcement of 4.x I was already looking at my old books and considering doing AD&D again / ditching the 3.x stuff. 3.x was just too unfamiliar and unwieldy for me as a DM. I missed the more familiar AD&D system.

Then I discovered this site and Osric / Dragonsfoot etc... That made me even MORE enthusiastic to play AD&D again. When the 4.x announcement came I was so blistering angry looking at my collection of 3.x books that it was a slam dunk where I was going to invest my time and energy.

The only thing I am interested in with Wizards right now is the online game table and the possibility of how 4.x might play as a game system for something like a pulp / action science fiction game. The system doesn't seem so great for fantasy to me any more. Maybe as a pulp / super hero sort of game it might be ok. Who knows. I do like the idea of the online game table and getting together with friends to play online.

Art

Stonegiant wrote:DD If only we had met when I lived in Orlando in '96 I was so desperate to find players and had no luck whatsoever.

Ah don't feel too bad; I think I was in a gaming drought at that time; if I was playing at all I was having a poke at the on-again/off-again one-shots that never included any D&D.

Still if you make it back down this way, always up for a guest shot at the table (assuming there's any physical way to get you in the house!)

Considering I started not to long after dirt was new in the realm of RPG's it seems I have always played the latest and greatest.

However that was usually without giving up the older games. They were still played, usually with other groups or on alternate game nights.

But with the advent of AD&D 2e I ran into my first stumbling block of playing the latest and greatest. I didn't like it. I didn't care to play it or run it. So after a handful of games it was shelved with the spines of the core books barely creased. We had always played Traveller and Megatraveller wasn't bad at all - then we hit "the new era" and again bang, there was that blocked road.

In short, it happened sooner or later to all the games I have played except for less than a handful that either

1) Never radically changed the rules i.e. Call of Cthulhu and Cyberpunk
2) Died on the vine due to lack of fans i.e. Recon

(not the only ones I'm sure but those are what immediately jumps to mind)

Not checking exact dates mind you, but I would guess that I have been playing "out of date" games for more than a decade now. But back in the day, you couldn't help but be a latest and greatest type. Everything that was under the sun WAS new.

I am really not surprised anymore when I hear someone lament how they hate this or that new game/version and that they are going back to previous editions (even ones that they never had played).

Let's face it. Latest and Greatest really is a myth. Back in the early years there were many "latest" games but not all were really great. Only a handful really stood out! As time has rolled on and from the mid-80's up till today, greatness is a commodity that is terribly lacking and that lack of greatness or even so-so'ness is the rule not the exception. Again, only a handful of games has really made a true impact on the realm of RPGs. The rest were/are dogs out of the gate or recognized as rehashes of better games from the past and they are soon forgotten or the publisher cranks out yet another edition to "try" to make up for the suckatude of the previous version. (this of course fails miserably 99 out of 100 times).


Another thing that doesn't amaze or surprise me anymore is the number of people that still live by the "latest and greatest" creed. But one only has to hearken back to those famous words of David Hannum, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Someone summed it up better than me a while back. I wish I could recall who it was because they hit the nail on the head - so much so that I quote it in my Sig Line...

"It was a helluva romp in the 70s. The choices were D&D in the white box, Traveller in the black box, or if we wanted something really bizarre, Empire of the Petal Throne in the colourful box! ...You know... it's stunning. Between them, those three games cover so much ground, everything since has been footnotes and elaborations."




Jerry