Happy 50th Dungeons and Dragons

The Game Room
1

Depending on the definition of “published” and “available” late January 1974 is a reasonable date to choose:

No 4th edition / OGL / Hasbro gripes please, good stories only.

My Gary Gygax story:
PlatteCon Alpha (University of Wisconsin – Platteville) someone who knew someone got in contact with GG and it turns out he liked visiting the area. He agreed to be the Guest of Honor for $100.
I got my Monster Manual signed. For various reasons I did not play any games with him, but did watch some. (he introduced Shogi to someone and I did watch)
This part is a bit fuzzy as I heard it second hand. The treasurer forgot the check when they (Plattecon organizers*) took GG to dinner. Somehow GG got the impression that they couldn’t pay and said it was OK. The check and a profuse apology was issued. GG must have been OK with that, because he was guest of honor at PlatteCon Beta.
So I have heard bad tings about GG, but my experience was nothing but positive.

Brian
* I ran a game and was tangentially involved, but was not an official organizer of PlatteCon Alpha

2

I think I first heard of D&D around 1981, when I was a junior in high school; the neighbor kids were playing it, and I became curious about it – I’d read The Lord of the Rings a few years previously, which had started my interest in fantasy fiction.

In March of '82, I’d gotten some money for my 17th birthday from my grandmother. I went to the Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby store at the mall, intending to buy an Estes model rocket kit, but when I got there, I found that they didn’t have any kit in stock that interested me. As I turned away from the rocket kit display, I saw an endcap display which had a Basic D&D boxed set:

I played some games using that boxed set with one of the neighbors (exploring the “Keep on the Borderlands” module), and bought the AD&D books (Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual) a few weeks later. About 2 months after making that first purchase, I was invited to sit in on a session with a group (who all turned out to be several years older than me); I had a blast, and kept playing with them.

42 years later, I’m still playing with some of the people from that session – in fact, at this very moment, I’m playing in an online 5E game with three of them, over Discord and Roll20.

Over the years, I’ve played extensively in 1E AD&D, 2E AD&D, 3E and 3.5, 4E, and now 5E. It’s not my favorite system any more (I prefer more rules-light, RP-oriented systems like Fate these days), but D&D and other tabletop RPGs have been a big part of my life for over 70% of the time I’ve spent on Earth. Most of my closest friends – as well as my wife – are people whom I met through playing RPGs.

3

I have the pictured original 3 book set pictured in the OP’s link, though not first printing. Mine came in the white box. I have some of the other early small format books from that time.

I had the Blue Starters book from 1976. I bought it in 1977.

1st Printing of the DMG, missing several appendixes.
My Players Handbook & Monster Manual were far from First Printing.
All 3 of these are in terrible shape now.

I recently used the Judges Guild Dark Tower module, updated for 5e.

I overwhelmingly played 1st Edition. But did play 2nd and for years now 5th. 5e is the best edition, though 1e with my large book of house rules beat everything in between.

I have apparently been playing for 80% of my life and I’m in my late 50s now.

My daughter has her friends over today for a game and my son is playing online tonight. I’m prepping a dungeon crawl for my game this week.

I enjoyed running a game here and on Mellophant for years, but when I tried it again, I couldn’t capture the magic of the first epic run.

Now gone as of 2020, my first gaming store was Hobby Masters in Red Bank, NJ.

I really need to sell by 2nd Edition stuff. Silly to hang on to it. I’m keeping my first edition books though.

4

Having been a member of that group for part of that campaign, it was a whole lot of fun!

5

I still have all of my 1E books (PHB, DMG, MM 1 and 2, Deities and Demigods, Unearthed Arcana), all of which are well-loved, but still in pretty good shape. We played a 1E D&D campaign for a short time, about five years ago, and it was both entertaining, and interesting to see (or remember) just how different the old rules were.

My first long-term character was a human fighter named Olivia, whom I’d rolled up in the spring of '82; over time, our group transitioned to 2E, then 3E and 3.5, and the characters (including Olivia) were revised for those rule sets. As a result, I played Olivia on a semi-regular basis for over 25 years: it wasn’t until that group switched over to 4E in '08 or '09 that we finally retired that set of characters.

Other than Olivia, my favorite characters have often been bards, including Ceoile Dunlaoghaire (a Moonshavian bard in the 4E Living Forgotten Realms organized-play campaign), and Emma Blackthorne (the “Pirate Bard of the Sea of Fallen Stars” in a 5E home campaign).

6

Yesterday, we were fighting some big minotaur-fiend. One of the bards cast Heat Metal on its armored codpiece, to which it responded by taking it off (the other bard had cast Irresistible Dance, so it did so while dancing). My idiot paladin (a worshiper of Chauntea, the goddess of agriculture) was happy to find himself in a situation he knew about, namely, teaching the fiend the difference between a bull and a steer.

7

in 1989, I read a free-spirited, imaginative column in a computer / gaming magazine about role playing and decided I want to do that. Luckily, D&D 1st ed. had just become available locally, translated.

For the next five years or so, my free time was pretty much engulfed by D&Ding, Runequesting, GURPSing etc.

8

Back in sixth grade 1981, my friend’s older brother got some of the books and led us through one of the early Slave Mine modules before getting bored with us. Naturally, he wouldn’t let us use his books so we were forced to wing it with what we remembered until we could get some actual materials of our own. I was first with the Basic D&D Red Box, then my mom bought me the AD&D Player’s Handbook for Christmas that year. We played with a hodge podge merging of the two systems, collecting more stuff, until we finally had a full set of the AD&D Player’s Handbook, DM’s Guide and Monster Manuals 1 & 2 (and later the Fiend Folio). I never really took to 2nd edition and played 1e AD&D through college, then dropped it for lack of a group. I played some other systems as well – the White Wolf World of Darkness system took off during that time, Twilight 2000, Shadowrun and others but AD&D was my main love.

My first “real” character was a human cleric named Silverblade. Which strikes me as pretty funny these days since clerics in 1e could only use blunt weapons like maces and warhammers. I went to GenCon once where I was so flustered at meeting Larry Elmore that I forgot to pay for the prints off his table that he signed (I went back and paid) and caught Weiss & Hickman coming back from lunch and got to talk to them for a couple of minutes before people noticed they had returned and a crowd started forming.

I didn’t get back into things until 5e when I popped into a hobby store on a lark and asked about it. They got me hooked up with a MeetUp group and it was good going until Covid killed the momentum and it never picked back up again. But one of the guys I knew from there invited me into a Roll20 online group where we’re playing Pathfinder. It’s not as socially satisfying as leaving the house to interact with warm bodies for a few hours but it’s still fun.

9

This reminded me of a fun D&D story.

When the original Ravenloft module came out, in 1983, our group played through it. The guy who DMed it was the sort of DM who not only played everything by the book, but actively viewed himself as an adversarial player to the other players (a style that wasn’t uncommon in those days).

Ravenloft was a very challenging and complex module anyway, and even though we had a very large group of player characters (ten or so), we had several characters die early in the module. And, then…

One of the players was one of those sorts who liked to hoard magic items, and among the wealth of crap that his character, Oberon, had, was not one, but two Rings of Shooting Stars (don’t ask, I wasn’t the DM back then :wink: ). Oberon wandered off from the group while we were exploring the catacombs beneath Castle Ravenloft, walked through a teleportation trap, and had his body transposed with that of a wight…but the wight was now wearing all of Oberon’s gear, including those rings.

The wight charged the back of the party, and one of our clerics turned it, causing it to run away, through a doorway. The cleric got my attention (I was playing a magic-user), and said, “I just turned a wight, it ran off that way, it’ll be back in ten minutes, after the Turn Undead wears off.” What he didn’t tell me was, “oh, and the wight is wearing all of Oberon’s stuff.”

Thinking I was smart, I laid out a trap for the wight: I placed a Fire Trap spell on the doorway, paced out the size of a Fireball, and gathered the rest of the party out of range of the Fireball. “When the wight sets off that Fire Trap, I’ll Fireball him.” Everyone agreed this was an outstanding strategy. :smiley:

The wight triggered the Fire Trap, and then I hit him with a Fireball; the DM reported that the wight had rolled a natural “1” on both saving throws. “Now I need to make magic item saving throws for all of that stuff he’s wearing.” And that’s when things got ugly. Both Rings of Shooting Stars failed their item saving throws, and the DM ruled that they exploded, in a conflagration with a much larger area of effect than my Fireball.

He made us make some saving throws, but it was academic; we all took several hundred hit points of fire damage, and were burned to a crisp. TPK.

Months later, my girlfriend and I were at GenCon '84, which was at UW-Parkside; my girlfriend had been among the players in that Ravenloft game, and her beloved fighter was among the casualties. We were going through the exhibit hall one morning, and as we walked past the TSR booth, we saw a guy sitting at a table, with a badge that said, “Tracy Hickman.” We noticed this, stopped in our tracks, and my girlfriend pointed at him. “YOU!,” she said, in mock anger.

Hickman looked startled for a moment, then grinned. “Let me guess. Ravenloft, right?”

:smiley:

10

I still have the original books 1 and 2 from 1974, but I can’t find book 3. Alas. I also have Greyhawk. Okay, two stories:

  1. It was 1976, my friend and I were 13, and while waiting in the vestibule for junior high we listened as two kids talked about the crazy game they’d played over the weekend. My friend later asked them in class, and they invited us, and so we played D&D with that crew all the way through high school and partially into college. Really a formative bit of luck for future friendships.
  2. One day my friend says, “where were you, we were looking ALL over for you. Dave Arneson was at the Royal Guardian (the one gaming store in Dallas) running people through Blackmoor!” Umm, so less the story of what I did do, and more the story of what I didn’t. But they had fun!

Anyway. A lot of good memories associated with that game.

11

I read about D+D in a computer magazine in 1979. (I’m in the UK.)
I still remember one sentence from the example of a dungeon:

  • to the right, there is a corridor that goes on infinitely

I wondered how long players would keep walking down it!

Anyway I set up a 1st Edition group - and there are still two of us originals going. :sunglasses:
We use 1st Edition with a manual written by the group giving additional material and explanations.

I met Gary Gygax when he came over to the UK D+D Championship. He refereed the final, which I had reached.
Towards the end of the module, a dragon breathed on a player, who failed the saving throw.
Gygax said to the player “How any hit points do you have left?”
(I remember thinking “he’s going to make up the damage!”
The player replied “I have 20 hp” and Gygax continued “You take 19.”
Given the dragon must have had 38 hp to achieve this result, I knew from the Monster Manual that there were no 19HD dragons.
So I asked Gygax if the number was correct. :scream:
He looked annoyed, said it was … and I came last in the rankings!

Of course I am immensely grateful to him for over 40 years of enjoyment. :heart_eyes:

12

At some point during the '82/'83 school year, I found an extracurricular group for D&D, with one of my former teachers as DM. That guy always was a bit of an odd duck.

That was my only experience with the pen & paper game but I put a lot of time into the computer games.

13

That was surprisingly merciful of him. The modules he wrote were always full of instant-death-with-no-saving-throw traps.

14

Only Tomb of Horrors which want meant to be a real campaign game.

I started playing in 1974!

15

When I was in Jr High, a classmate of mine was an early adopter of D&D. It would have been around 1978. He started a little club called Mace and made a little monthly newsletter. He had little figurines and everything. I recall that he had a few that were Lizard Men and I think had a campaign every Saturday morning. I didn’t really take to it so I stopped after five or six times. It’s truly impressive how much it’s thrived over the decades.

16

Well it was the final of a tournament with about 100 spectators!

I think it was clear that he wanted to let the players ‘just’ survive to make it exciting. But he did make it obvious what he was doing…

17

Just about every module had one such trap.

I will concede that he was good at the role-playing aspect. The player characters were always horribly outnumbered and outgunned, but the adversaries were always riven with factions, with whom one could negotiate a bargain. Which makes me wonder why he bothered with Alignment.

18

I played a little 1st edition AD&D, but it wasn’t until 1989, when I turned 13 and 2nd edition was released, that I had money to start purchsing my own books. I stopped playing around 1998 because I got sick of AD&D, so I sold all my books and back back in 2000 for third edition. I ended up leaving again with 3.5 and didn’t return until 5th edition. Good times.

19

I still have a 1E DMG sitting on my shelf here.

If nothing else, I really enjoy the random dungeon generator in it.

20

Almost my exact same path! I stuck around for 3.5 though, then didn’t touch DnD until recently. My son was finally old enough to get into it so I got all the books and started learning the game again. Also realized I suck as DM/story teller. I’ve been using AI to help me create little one shot adventures for my kid. I’m trying to get his friends to play with us, but they don’t seme interested in anything but Roblox ::sigh::