Keith the Thief wrote:
My point here is not to make fun of them.  Far from it.  I simply think it was interesting and enlightening to look at our hobby from the perspective of gamers who are not serious collectors.

Keith

To be honest, looking at it from a non-serious collectors stand point, I think that if they are having trouble finding 1st edition D&D material either real printed material or even fan based stuff , they are not looking very hard for it.  Aside from Ebay there is a ton of fan based sites that cover 1st edition D&D and that continue to support and play the game.  IMO they are really not that hard to find, especially in these days of the internet.

I agree that they are probably not looking too hard, but there also seemed (to me) to be a lack of understanding of what to look for.

bclarkie wrote:
Well if thats the case the it must be being done as a satirical piece.

Totally.  It is wickedly incisive to all editions - 3e is spared not a whit.

A personal favourite of mine is the sequence where the heroes run across an area in the dungeon housing all the critters that haven't been converted over to 3e.  Issue #55, iirc ...

This is great!  I was laughing my ass off and I was only on #5  

The Bard singing to inspire competence......OMG my sides hurt!

bclarkie wrote:
To be honest, looking at it from a non-serious collectors stand point, I think that if they are having trouble finding 1st edition D&D material either real printed material or even fan based stuff , they are not looking very hard for it.  Aside from Ebay there is a ton of fan based sites that cover 1st edition D&D and that continue to support and play the game.  IMO they are really not that hard to find, especially in these days of the internet.

Reading throught the posts, their problem seems to be that they do not have a clear idea of what is "1st edition."  They do not seem to even have  a clear concept of OD&D, AD&D, D&D, 2nd Edition AD&D and 3rd Edition D&D.

One guy talks about the "1st edition" books...when what he clearly means is OD&D.  The other guys answer as if he were talking about AD&D...and then confuse it with D&D.

Clearly, they are also not Ebay rats.

They appear to be a species I have never actually encountered in real life...players of Mentzer Set D&D.  I have never met a gamer (face-to-face) who played the Mentzer sets...

I think you had to be about 5 years or so younger than me to start with Mentzer Basic D&D and progress through the Expert and so on....

I find the discussion refreshing, since these are guys who seem to actually play the game...somehow overcoming their lack of expertise in how tall or how green various printings of the Players Handbook might be.   

Order of the Stick is very funny...and dead on.  I love the scene where the characters sense that they are being upgraded to 3.5 edition...and the halfling thief gets boned.

Mark

That would be a nice example of the age differences, Shane.

If you were not a collector you would logically be entirely ignorant of AD&D, and the tectonic (techtonic?) shifts that created it.

(Which is it...tectonic or techtonic?)

It is 2nd Edition AD&D that stinketh in mine nostrils.  

I played 2nd Edition, but I never warmed to the doofy art and the plethora of splatbooks (new vocab word this week!).

(I have mentioned this before, but anyone who has not read it, try this:

Leaf through the 2nd Edition Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide.  They will be those books on your shelf that are missing the spines. Beginning with the cover of the PH, there seems to be a silly hat festival going on.  Everyone seems to be competing to see who can wear the most ridiculous headgear.  That is what the dwarves on page 19 of the PH are contemplating.    Page 16 of the PH shows the beginning of a silly hat festival, with the festival action really heating up on page 69 and going full tilt on page 114...during the silly hat modeling event.

The winners of the silly hat festival (as I recall) were an anti-paladin whose evil helmet is actually wearing its own evil helmet....and a dwarf wearing a stool upside down on his head.  Try it...you'll see.)

that's funny, i know someone IN columbus ohio who has quite an extensive collection...  

Keith the Thief wrote:I stumbled across this thread on a site known as "Giants in the Playground", and their discussion about 1E D&D.

I'm guessing these players must be college students (perhaps younger).

Here's one of the quotes:
"I know of only one person who has 1st ed stuff, and he's probably the only person several hundred miles from columbus OH to have it. The books are not very common."

The site is

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30788

My point here is not to make fun of them.  Far from it.  I simply think it was interesting and enlightening to look at our hobby from the perspective of gamers who are not serious collectors.

Keith

MShipley88 wrote:Leaf through the 2nd Edition Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide.  They will be those books on your shelf that are missing the spines.

Oh god, how true.  Thankyou for starting my day with a chuckle!

My gf started with the Mentzer Basic set, and a couple of gamers in my group bought it after we had been playing for a bit (because the Moldvay one had gone out of print by then).  We switched over to AD&D shortly thereafter, though, so I don't really know if they would have continued buying stuff from that line.  When I worked in the game department of a local bookstore, though, I do recall that the D&D game was still selling strong (of course, the line had moved into the bewildering series of seemingly neverending different versions of the Basic game by that point, so it's largely academic as far as Mentzer is concerned).  It did seem to be a pretty good introductory set, though, for those who were completely new to gaming in its entirety.  Not so hot on ease of reference, but great as a primer.