harami2000 wrote:Kids; who'd have 'em?

I can't wait. t-50 days (approx) and counting

One memory that still brings a smile to my face involved T1-4. I was DMing my usual players through the module back in high school and gave them a NPC M-U who I played as sort of a wise ass. He was constantly makes comments about the party's barbarian being slow in the head (based on his Int score which I think was around 7). At the time, the guy playing the barbarian and I had this real life friendly rivalry going on which extended into our D&D sessions.



Well, at some point in the module, the characters put up a Daern's Instant Fortress across a hallway to block off a hoard of baddies. In the middle of the baddies' attacking the fortress and the players firing arrows and spells at the enemies and basically all hell breaking loose, the NPC made some comment about the barbarian being useless and something about "peal me a grape" (don't ask me, it was just some stupid put-down phrase that was floating around at the time to imply that you were doing something stupid).



The guy playing the barbarian paused, looked at me and said "My barbarian attacks the NPC." At first I thought he was joking but the half smile on his face told me he wasn't. The barbarian proceeded to chase the NPC (who promptly took off) around the Fortress while the other characters where trying to hold off two dozen humanoids and a half dozen evil clerics - all the while yelling for support.



After a couple of reasonable hits, the barbarian backed off and everyone got back to the fight at hand - the guy playing the barbarian did take the game seriously and recognized that killing off a useful NPC would have been foolish in the middle of a long campaign. But he did make his point.



I'll have to bring this up next time I talk to him - see if he remembers it the way I do.

I first started playing in 74-75 at The Little Soldier Shop (of Little Soldier games fame, although that was later) in Wheaton Maryland.  The owner of the store and some of the older guys were a chaotic, backstabbing bunch.  This was before campaigns.  All of our games were one shot dungeons with new characters.  We started one dungeon with 8 or 10 1st and 2nd level characters.  One of the guys had brought a concealed beehive.  In the first hallway of the dungeon, he looses it on another character, and then all hell broke loose.  Most of the party died in that hallway.  That game was a standing joke for years afterward.

I'll stick to 1st edition only memories just to give it that "old timer" feel...



In the late 70's/early 80's I was DM of my group and they went from B1 to T1 to S2 to C1 to the Giants series (G1-3), D1-3 and ended up with Q1 in 1985 (five years after I'd bought the damn thing!) using the same group of players and characters.  At the time I just bought and ran everything TSR published, as I never had time to write my own stuff, so all the old "letter" series were played by anyone who gamed with me though the years. Almost all of us still hang out and it's rare when we game that someone doesn't mention an incident from that group's escapades.  



We had one guy with an elven ftr/mage who had rolled an 18 DEX, which he was constantly trying to parlay into advantages for his character.  I used skill checks even back then and always said if he could roll under his DEX with modifiers he could do the action he requested.  He was always trying something.  When the party went through G1, they managed to sneak in the Steading through the wolve's lair without anyone noticing (aka killing everything silently).  They crept up to the Great Hall just in time for you guessed it the big party with every giant there.  The group was frantically discussing how to deal with the situations. The Elven Ftr/Mage was invisible, and he passed me a note saying he was going to run into the room, jump on the table, run along the length drawing his bow, and when he got to the chief was going to leap over him, do a flip, and come up with his drawn and nocked arrow aimed at the back of his head and fire point blank into his brain.  The rest of the group had already decided to hit the room with fireballs and cones of cold but Elfie either wasnt' interested or wasn't listening, he was going to show his stuff.  

   Anyway, I let him do what he wanted, and right off the bat he started failing his skill checks and saves.  He fails every freaking one of them.  So instead of his grand entrance, instead he runs into the room, jumps on the table, trips, starts sliding down the length, knocking over food, goblets, etc, breaks his bow, loses all the arrows out of his quiver, and comes to a broken, sliding, stunned heap right on the Hill Giant Chief's platter.

  As everyone sits in stunned silence, their plans suddenly useless, Elfie panics and  throws his fireball at the Chief....unfortunately at point blank range...and all hell really breaks lose.  The 18 DEX barbequed elf ends up hiding under the table and barely surviving the ensuing bloodbath in the Great Hall with only 1 HP, never casting a spell or swinging a sword the entire battle (which almost kills off the entire party, mind you....).

  We still laugh about the stunned expression on the elven player's face as he failed throw after throw and I described the escalating comedy of errors, and the rest of the guys gave him hell over that for the next few years and to this day....



Mike B.

well i would have to say that my most memorable charicter that i was with was a ranger that was pure luck. the one time i was in a icey terrain and we encounterd 5 ice giants. at the time we were only lv 4 through 6  and we thought that we were tost (there was only 5 of us) and right off the bat one of the giants hurled a huge bolder at us and it did 400 points of damage to our dwarven fighter and all the other charicters were fine because they all we fast and able to dodge it. than the ranger was just lucky. he was using a 2 handed sword and he swong at the largents head and rolled a 20 than another for overage damage and than another 20 and decapitated it. than the next round he did it to the next biggest giant for a total of 6 20s in a row.  we almost sh*t ourselvs.  but i dont think i will forget that anytime soon. (needless to say with him rolling like that we defeted them with only one charicter lost and all the others were fine.


by the way i play v1

Ah, good old 3E. Half lizardman/ half succubus level 4/4/3 sorcerer/paladin/rogue wielding a +27 holy vorpal flaming sword of allslaying................ The realism is astounding!

Hello shiny happy people.
A very interesting theme!!!
I started play D&D quite late ... I was 13-14 and it was 1990 (plus or minus).
I started play with some friends of mine, in a quite regular company: an elf, a dwarf, two warriors, a cleric and my magic user (I prefer "wizard"), Gandalf the Grey . Then I change some groups (adding people who wnted to play, losing some other who were tired of the game ...) and, even if I've played with every character class, I had developed my Gandalf up to level 20.

But I would like to tell you about an episode occurred not to me.
I was not playing but I was watching some other friends of mine playing (let we say that I was learning ... )
Keep in mind that the DM was a simply mad person, in the true meaning of the word.
BTW, the party (high level characters) meets an army of 9, 10 thousands kobolds. With some spells (not regular spells) created by the DM itself, the party destroys the whole army in two (2!!!!!) rounds.
The DM, to add pathos, decides this: "the bodies of the dead kobolds join together and form a huge, gigantic, enormous mega-kobold, 1 Km tall, with a sword 400 metres long!!!!"
(How can I define this clever idea?!?! ).
But the best is still to come.
The party slains even that mega-Kobold and, with a reduction spell (created for this occasion), reshapes the Kobold's sword into a normal sword (that can be wielded by a normal human).
The problem was that this sword had a little bonus: a + 516 bonus  8O  8O !!!!!
Can you figure it???
A warrior can erase a whole army only by wielding this sword.
And if the warrior accidentally hurts himself with the sword?????

I don't know how it had developed but, after one play session, the party changed the DM. And the mad guy started with a PC: a 1st level halfling.

That day I understood what D&D could be and what, in my opinion, D&D must not be!
Have a nice day
Giorgio

I'll start off by saying my memory is a little foggy, considering I first started playing in late 1978.

DanZ brought up a memory of my one of my first convention Wintercon 1978. I had only been playing D&D for about two months. It was awesome. I couldn't believe how big gaming was.

Anyway, I actually played in the (TSR) AD&D tournament and we got our collective asses kicked. It was't Ghost Tower that was the next year, I think. Again, my memory jumbles stuff from back then and I am too lazy to check the date right now.

I also bought a copy of B1 (or maybe the basic set - not too clear, here) on Friday of convention. Read and stocked it using Monster and Treasure Assortment that night and we played it Saturday and Sunday between other events and stuff. It was a blast.

Finally, at the same convention there were a group of guys running an event called "Visual D&D"??? They basically had a dungeon built from wood (maybe 8 x 12 feet or so) for miniatures. Each player took a character and the one who had the most treasure (ala TSR's Dungeon game) won the event. You could team up, etc. It was very cool.

All that stuff at one convention...no wonder I got completely hooked.

Yeah, that would be correct. Jim and Laura V. were nice people. They were still big into MDG at the time. But I was just a 13 at the time and they were older (late 20s maybe) so I did not mix with them other than through the conventions and MDG events (I was on staff as a convention help, registration and the like).
That being said, I did not buy a copy of the adventure...not sure why exactly...other than I was not exactly flush with cash.