I played the D&D basic edition in high school (The Red, Blue, Green, Black and Gold box series). My friends were mostly much less nerdy than I was but were willing to give it a try. I remember I created an Adventure where they very early on had at fight on a boat with some Trolls and they totally got into it. We played several sessions for a few summers and it was a blast.
My first manual was a smallish Blue Book - I reckon that was Basic D+D.
I remember it only went up to about 3rd level and that ‘Dwarf’ and Elf’ were character classes.
That would have been the D&D Basic Set from 1977. It was intended as an introduction to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, also released in 1977, which was a massive revision and expansion of the the “white box” of 1973, now commonly known as Original D&D. The Basic Set had simplified rules and only went to third level, because the expectation was that once players had learned the basics, they would move on to the “real” game.
The “Red, Blue, Green, Black and Gold box series” was the Basic - Expert - Companion - Masters - Immortal series, aka BECMI, that began in 1983, with a different Basic Set. That was a whole sideline that ran alongside the “main” AD&D line through the 1980s. In turn, that was itself a revision of yet another Basic Set that was released in 1981, along with an Expert Set, often referred to as the Moldvay Basic Set, after the lead writer/designer.
Both the 1981 and 1983 Basic Sets were red boxes, the first with a cover by Erol Otus, the second with a cover by Larry Elmore, who would become one of the most popular and iconic D&D artists, especially for his work on various Dragonlance projects.
A lot of the current "Old School Revival* movement explicitly harkens back to the two “red box” Basic Sets, and a “rulings over rules” approach (present some simple rules to cover common situations, and leave it up to individual DMs to creatively rule at the table for anything not explicitly covered in the rules.) The “blue box” Basic Set, at this point, isn’t much more than a historical footnote.
My best friend introduced me to D&D, as little kids in 78’ or 79’. My first level character was quickly turned into jelly by about 10, boulder throwing, frost giants. My next character almost made it to second level and had found an entire potion of healing! I was very psyched.
Around 80’-81’ I moved to England and the kids on base turned me on to AD&D. At the time, a +1 flaming sword was truly magical and I guess I have been chasing that feeling ever since.
I member’ reading the basic set, the 1st edition books, all the modules, Dragon magazine and feeling like an infinite multiverse of creative possibilities had opened up for me. In a way it had.
I still love all that old artwork. Erol Otus, Jeff Dee, D. A Trampier, etc. I recently re-bought a copy of 1st edition Deities and Demigods. The one with Elric and Cthulhu in it. It is in great condition for its age and I am pleased as punch about it.
2nd edition came around and that felt weird to me, with all the settings that were emphasized along with it, such as Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. It felt like some DM had hijacked D&D with his trip. I know 1st edition had some settings but they were not as developed or in-your-face about it. I didn’t like the art style either. But I played it anyway.
Then 3rd/3.5 edition came along with all its feats, prestige classes, variant classes, paragon classes, half-vampire/half-dragon whatevers and it just seemed like a whole different game. So I didn’t bother with it. But I know a lot of people loved it.
I still DMed a rules light version of 1st/2nd edition for friends and also played with some really good DMs who were more home-brew than anything.
I know people like to bust on Gygax but I wrote him an email in the 90’s and he actually wrote back. Apparently he tried to answer most of his fan-mail. That is pretty cool of him, in my opinion.
I eventually found a local, 1st edition, Pathfinder group here in Oregon and played with them for about a year. I didn’t like the crunch or all the min/maxing that they were into. I didn’t like the minis and battle mats. I much prefer everything to happen in people’s imaginations.
I also didn’t like how magic items were treated as common things that were easily accessed. There was no magic to the magic items. That was partially on the DM but if you read the books, the progression of power almost demands a high magic world. Ultimately though, I quit because the DM’s campaign was just one boring cliche after another, even though he thought he was ground breaking.
I know nothing about 4th or 5th edition. I hear that 4th was a disaster but 5th is halfway decent.
I now play mini-adventures over the phone with my friend, with a self made, rules light system, that I just adapt to whatever genre we are playing. Unless we are playing AD&D. In that case I just use the combat tables, saving throw tables, spell lists and make up the rest.
It is still fun after all these years but nothing quite reaches the high of that first, +1 flaming sword.
That’s not really “on” the DM at all - 3rd edition/Pathfinder was designed around very “magic rich” settings, and characters are expected to accumulate magic items at a pretty fast rate. The monsters are all designed with this in mind - a fight designed for a party of fifth level character would absolutely crush the players if they don’t all have magic weapons and armor, and at least a few other item buffs. There’s actually a chart in the DMG for how much money a character gets to spend on magic items if they’re starting higher than 1st level. By 10th level, a character should have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50k in magic items - and usually more if you’ve actually leveled your way to 10th, instead of starting out there.
@by-tor; I ref’d 1st Ed with a lot of house rules until maybe 3 years ago. 5e is easily the best version since 1st.
I also never went near 4e but its reputation appears to be well deserved.
5e is extremely well balanced and flexible. Loads of tools available. More classes, sub-classes, races and etc than any prior version. It just works.
The only thing 1e does better than 5e was large combats and that might have been partially house rules I had for 1e.
I don’t want to set off an Edition War in this thread, but I’ll say that I thought that 4th was an interesting experiment, and it was actually a subtly powerful and flexible system, but it just didn’t feel like D&D. 5E (officially just “Dungeons & Dragons”) actually feels like D&D to me.
That’s very much in the vein of the “Old School Revival” movement, and there are quite a few “heartbreakers” out there that do exactly the same thing as you’re doing.
Nothing ever does.
Miller, yeah I really hated that about Pathfinder. But the DM could have put at least a little originality and personality into the magic items. He did not.
What_Exit: do you have to use minis and battle mats with 5th edition?
Not if you don’t want to.
There was also a reasonably fat “Rules Cyclopedia”, but I never picked it up.
Obviously not @What_Exit, but:
5E is very explicitly designed to be played with minis and battlemaps or in “theater of the mind” - or with a mix. They really tried (and personally I think mostly succeeded) in creating a game system that’s suitable for both approaches.
I ran across a documentary on Amazon Prime Video: Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons and Dragons.
gdave, that is an impressive feat (no pun intended).
I have the DVD of that (I think I might have supported it on Kickstarter) – it’s really enjoyable, and it’s great to see the interviews and hear the stories about some of the art.
I’ve played some 5E (not a ton), and while I think it works better on a battlemap than with no visuals, it’s not as profoundly dependent on the battlemap as 3E/Pathfinder or 4E were. For instance, the 5E rules care if you’re next to a bad guy or not; in 3E and 4E, not only did they care if you were next to a bad guy, but your exact position, particuarly relative to your allies (for determining flanking).
You really don’t have to, but my group loves the minis and I now have a giant gaming table at my new place with a proper 1" grid for it.
click to expand
As gdave said, “theater of the mind” still works. It also lends itself well to online gaming. Loads of tools for that, some are great.
For what it’s worth we are playing 5e with my wife and son lately and we are strictly theater of the mind for now (partially because we couldn’t find the damn minis), and it adapts just fine.
As other said, it can work better on a map but doesn’t specifically require it, I think we are going to start using minis but not a map, just the minis to know where we are relative to each other and the enemies is more than enough.
I think that that approach is a good one. I’ve run quite a bit of 13th Age: a small-press fantasy RPG, written by Jonathan Tweet (one of the designers of 3E D&D), and Rob Heinsoo (one of the designers of 4E D&D); a friend of mine, who’s done a fair amount of writing for WotC, calls 13th Age “a love letter to D&D.”
Anyway, in that game, positioning and range are all relative: you’re either adjacent to someone, “near” them, or “far away” from them. Like 5E, it’s built to allow for theater of the mind, but minis and a map do help the players visualize where everyone is, without it becoming a tactical wargame on the battlemap.
Nice gaming room @What_Exit !
Just by the way, and not on topic, but I’ve noticed you’ve directly addressed a couple of posters by name. You may be aware, but they way you’re doing it doesn’t alert them to the response. If you hit the “Reply” button on an individual post, rather than the “Reply” button on the bottom of the thread, it will generate a response linked to the specific post you’re responding to, and alert the poster that you’ve responded to them.
If you use their username prefaced by @ , as I did with your name in this post, that will also alert the user that you’ve mentioned them.
If you just use the thread reply button, and use a username (without the @ ), the person you’re responding to will only see the response if they open the thread and look through all the replies and just happen to see your shout-out.