With yet another version of D&D in the wind, Chatty, at Critical Hits is doing a regular piece on his experience of the various versions, and how that expereince differed, and asking others to provide theirs. This was the response I posted at Critical Hits. I plan to post another for each of the versions of the game that I have played.
AD&D (or 1st Edition)
For me it was like this:
Age Range when played : 12-18
Nostalgia Factor: Very High
Rules Mastery: Moderate
Living in South Africa, in the early eighties meant isolation (with no web and economic sanctions). I got word of this game called Dungeons and Dragons through movies and in particular reading the novel written from the screenplay of the movie E.T. (Anyone remember the D&D references in that? I’m not sure they were very clear in the opening scene of the film itself).
Then a kid from the States made the mistake of coming to high school and made the further dreadful mistake of mentioning to me that he had played D&D back home. For the whole of 1983 I hounded him, armed with a note book, and tried to wring every piece of information about the game out of him. In retrospect, he was very obliging, and showed no more than the slightest signs of irritation. The game sounded so fascinating, that it captivated me, before I read any of the books. By the second half of ’83 I had drawn about 50 dungeon maps on graph paper and had created my own version of D&D, which was essentially the Lord of the Rings, represented in the form of a table (actually about 60 tables). Merely trying to explain my tables to anyone was a labour that required extreme effort on the part of the unlucky listener. Needless to say, I never got to play my game, and by the end of the year I had become frustrated and slighly despondent.
This ended abruptly when I came across the AD&D PHB on the bottom shelf of the hobbies section in a local book store. It seems the gods had smiled on me, and I instantly began behaving irrationally and begging a family member to buy it for me, offering all manner of bizarre repayment terms, while beseaching her to buy it before anyone else entered the shop. Even the cashier tried to discourage me, by saying she had no idea of what the book was, and didn’t I want to buy somthing else. I knew what was, and I wasn’t going to let it go.
When I went back to boarding school at the beginning of 1984, the world was different. I had spent the Christmas break reading the book form cover to cover. What I loved most about it was how arcane it seemed. As I read I felt I was being let in to some hugely important secret. Now converting people was easy. I merely had to show them the book and they would become absorbed. A group of about six of us had already begun planning our first game when we came across the DMG in a local toy store. We all clubbed in and bought it and our first dungeon crawl started a few days later.
Sam, a friend of mine agreed to be DM. He had a map on graph paper and great imagination. He also understood how to create tension, and how to deliver a story. I played a Half-Elven assassin. Several amazing things happened in the game, including a 3/3 split between the party members which he ran in two separate groups. He then contrived to have the two groups meet up at precisly the place in the underground caverns where the adventure became an underground river trip, and where there was only one boat. Suddenly we were facing a PvP fight in our very first game. It was simply amazing to me that these things could happen in this wonderful game. My side lost and I, the only survivor, was taken captive. What speaks most for that game, and for Sam’s natural talent at DMing, was that the two players whose characters had been killed came to every subsequent game session, just to watch. Unfortunately the rowing boat was later attacked, and capsized, and being tied up hand and foot, I went into the water and drowned. There were no dice rolled. Sam just said “Well, your feet and hands are soundly tied, naturally you are going to go rown”. He then described the feeling of sinking steadily deeper into this dark subterranean river, as the light above got fainter and fainter. I accepted this, because it just made sense.
I too then became a spectator and watched the rest of the game. As you can probably tell it was one of the most memorable I have ever played in. Possibly the most memorable.
I played AD&D until 1989 and throughout that period was DM and played games run by several different DMs. What struck me the most was that the game experience in those days varied from average, to mind-blowing based entirely on the skill and personality of the DM. While the later systems ushered in more logic and certainty to the rules system, I feel they also started to muzzle some of the DM’s on the upper end of that spectrum. I have enjoyed all the versions since, but have never seen DM’s, like Sam, who, given creative freedom and a sense that they were truly not wedded to the rules system, could really create magic.
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