So you’re sitting in a bar, when a fight breaks out, and spawns a slew of much-improved systems for pretending that you’re actually capable of surviving a bar fight 
I’ll represent the story of Might Honknar from a previous thread. I was not the player in this case, I was the DM:
Many of the incidents of our previous campaigns become the legends of our current campaign. The touchstone of all of them is the story of Mighty Honknar.
Honknar, and his fellow adventurers whose names have been lost in the mists of memory, ventured out from the Keep on the Borderlands to explore the Caves of Chaos. They were attacked by stirges in the forrest. The only survivor was Honknar. He buried his comrades and went back to the keep with their stuff. He sold what he could, but kept several weapons, and went to the inn and recruited more adventurers.
With a new party, he set out once more for the Caves of Chaos. And once more they were attacked, this time by kobolds. With a fearsome shout, Honknar reached for his two handed sword and unsheathed it with a mighty metalic shinnng and it slipped from his grip and went tumbling into the forrest and landed in the underbrush. But mighty Honknar didn’t blink. He shouted to the kobolds, “See that? I didn’t need that to kick your ass!” Whereupon he reached across his back and drew his deadly long sword, which he immediately lost his grip on, sending it flying into the advancing kobolds ranks, but no where near close enough to hit one of them. “See that one?” he cried, “Hell, you can have that one!”
All this time, Honknar’s companions are fighting and dying at the hands of the kobolds, but thinning the enemy’s ranks as well, so that by the time Honknar got out his sturdy mace there was only him and one battered kobold left standing on the field of battle. Honknar rasied his mace to smash down on the kobold, but lost his grip on it and it landed somewhere behind him, and he shouted, “I sure as hell don’t need this to kick your ass!” Whereupon, Honknar headbutted the kobold, and it died.
Mighty Honknar buried his companions, collected their equipment and returned to the keep. He sold whatever he could, but kept most of the weapons, knowing full well how important it was to be well stocked. At the inn, he called out for a new party. Some of the adventurers hanging around suggested that it was too dangerous. After all, his party had been wiped out twice. But Honknar showed them how much money he’d made in so short a time, and a handful of lusty souls greedily signed up.
And so he was off again to the Caves of Chaos, where his party was attacked by stirges once more. He held firmly to his weapon, as he missed, missed and missed again, one stirge after another. But the stirges could not seem to miss him at all, and each stirge that stung him did as little damage as it could possibly do. By the time he had routed them from his back, his face, his neck and his other regions, he found himself once more the sole surviving member of his party, and was barely surviving himself.
When Honknar returned to the keep, the pool of potential party members at the inn had begun to be quite suspicious. To allay their suspicions, Honknar pulled off his chainmail shirt and showed them the horrible stirge scars. And so another brave band agreed to join him.
Into the woods they went, and upon hearing the buzzing of the stirges Mighty Honknar shouted, “Hit the ground, men, and cover your necks!” as he drew his broad sword, which he lost his grip on and it spun off into the trees. As the stirges closed in, he unstrapped his powerful two-handed axe from his back, reared it back and slipped from his hands, beheading the priest behind him. The stirges overwhelmed him and though their stingers scarcely managed to do any damage, their numbers overwhelmed him until finally, Mighty Honknar went down gurgling his own blood.
That is why at temples of Tempest, or on tapestries across the realm you may see the image of a powerful, powerful man beset with stirges. And the tapestry bears the sad refrain recanted every night at taverns and campfires, and wherever adventures gather, “Fors Honknarus Descendit” – reminding us that if Mighty Honknar can die, so can we.
I started in 76 or 77 and continued to enjoy DND until I discovered Traveller and Chivalry and Sorcery. I stoped playing entirely in 82. Don’t miss it DND, but miss the role playing.
I started in '77 and played off and on throughout college and after. I don’t think I’ve played since the late eighties.
…but I played long enough that when I saw “5d6” in the title, I was confused.
“5d6?” I thought. “The average roll on 5d6 is only (pause) eighteen or so. D&D is older than that.”
Surely you’re allowed to sixes on your birthday? 
I started in 74, in Wisconsin.
I continued to play for decades, including winning a prize in tournament.
Today, I can’t even find a group to join.
5d6 = 30?! I don’t think I’d let you roll up a character with those dice
Memories? Let’s see:[ul][li]The first party I ever killed off, I did it with sheep. Yes, a flock of sheep. I was still new to DMing, and they’d just changed editions on me (it was suddenly second), and I was using the encounter tables in the Monstrous Compendium. I rolled up “a flock of sheep” Now, being a bit of a stickler fo rules and dice rolls in those days, I decided to go with it. But one of my characters was playing a Chaotic Neutral cleric named Dweemish, and decided to sacrifice it to his god. It never occured to me that the sheep would just run. I had them counter-attack. They wiped out the party.[/li][li]When I was playing Ravenloft, one of my players decided he was going to have his character become a Dark Lord. He kept playing the most vile monsters imaginable, and the other players kept killing him off. He had one – a “defiler” drawn in from Dark Sun – who poisoned a group of kids just for an afternoon’s entertainment. The rest of the party had him burnt at the stake.[/li][li]That same campaign, two of the players were playing a married couple – a druid and a fighter. During a lover’s spat, the druid used call lightning, and the fighter discovered his heavy armour was highly conductive.[/li][li]This one’s from today’s adventure. My players took a commission to capture a Ravid that had gotten loose in a merchant’s richly-appointed, antique-stuffed mansion (a Ravid is a creature composed of pure life energy, that automatically animates one object each round). The merchant had bought the Ravid to have it stuffed and mounted, but the Ravid had other ideas. The party hunted the creature through the house, and subdued it back into its cage while it attacked them with magically-animated, priceless antiques. The creature was sold back to the beast-seller, the merchant was refunded.[/li][li]My all-time-favourite module was Desert of Desolation. I DMed that one for every group I ever had, until I lost it 
It was this ridiculously long adventure that took the players through pyramids and buried temples, into oases, and finally to a Cursed City in the centre of a Sea of Glass, to reach the floating castle of a sleeping archmage. It was brilliant. [/ul][/li]
The only other thing I have to say is that I’ve met some of my closest friends through this game. And it’s helped hone my imagination to the point where I think I might actually be able to make a career writing. So I owe it a lot 
I started playing in '76, and we started our three-year old son playing in '78. He’s about to marry a woman he met at a GenCon, and he brags about being a second-generation gamer. Most of his friends are in awe that his parents encouraged it.
[QUOTE=Hamish]
[li]This one’s from today’s adventure. My players took a commission to capture a Ravid that had gotten loose in a merchant’s richly-appointed, antique-stuffed mansion (a Ravid is a creature composed of pure life energy, that automatically animates one object each round). The merchant had bought the Ravid to have it stuffed and mounted, but the Ravid had other ideas. The party hunted the creature through the house, and subdued it back into its cage while it attacked them with magically-animated, priceless antiques. The creature was sold back to the beast-seller, the merchant was refunded.[/li][/QUOTE]
Hamish forgot to mention that at one point, my character (Kokuin) came across the ravid by myself, so I altered myself into a sort of semi-ravid to try to corral the thing. When the rest of the party found me, they didn’t know I had done this, and Daryus (our monk) tried to capture me. He grappled me, so I had to prestidigitate a big neon sign above my head with a big arrow pointing at me saying KOKUIN.
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My character actually is a gentleman of the evening by profession.
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It’s interesting to note that our party currently has gender parity.
I was the DM for this one.
Party needed a very important key in the hands of a noble, so they hired a Lady (of the evening) to obtain it from him after . . . well, after. The plot was successful but in a totally unrelated tangent, Hack, the half-orc female fighter, asked the Lady if she had any make-up tips to, you know, improve her looks a little.
“Why not?” sez I. "“Okay, roll a d6 to see how much your Charisma improves after an hour of applying make-up.” It came up a 1, which raised her Cha to 4.
“Sorry, Hack. There’s only so much make-up can do to hide that scar.”
DD
The summer before junior year in high school I ran a campaign all day every day at a local park. However, the ony book I had was the 2nd ed PHB, so I had to make up a lot of rules and monsters. At one point I had a group of animated cactus attacking the party.
My favorite D&D/AD&D memory?
Why, it was AD&D 1st Edition that inspired me to write The Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters, which gained a cult following of sorts as the ultimate (or at least the penultimate) example of Munchkindom.
It is, if you apply the “Maximized” metamagic feat to it.
You’re the author of that piece? The one that to this day inspires me and one of my friends to continually ask our GM if the party centaur has any two-million GP gems in his pockets?
Luck stiff.
My only published piece was in a contest. Magic rules for Car Wars.
“Summon Demon Cyclist”.
My work has inspired a generation! snif
Though of course, you realize that the 1st Edition DMG limited gems to being worth only a paltry one million gold pieces each, max. It was just that a centaur could be carrying up to four such gems at the same time.
Sadly, the 2nd Edition DMG’s random gem value tables limited the value of a single gem to an even-more-paltry 100,000 gold pieces. This rule change formed the basis for a central plot point in my sequel to the sequel to IUDC, which I’m still not done writing.
Cool! I remember reading that article. Though, I have to admit, the only Car Wars spell that stands out in my mind is the “Cyclone” spell that won first place in the contest.
My IUDC story wasn’t so much published as posted on Usenet and then archived in various FTP sites. Surprisingly, two people, independently of one another, took it upon themselves to translate IUDC into Hungarian!
Some folks would be in awe that gamers successfully breed.
Not me, of course. I know better.
I work for Wizards of the Coast (as a member of a retail support program) and was at the D&D 30th Anniversary Epic Level Party at Gen*Con. It was a great night, and lots of freebies.
I started playing D&D in '86, but set it down when I found Vampire in '92. I am about to start another D&D campaign soon.