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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2022 21:45:06 GMT -5
 (that's Mrs. MRP haging out with the Beholder at Gen Con lo many moons ago) Whether you are a grognard whose been playing since the white box, or a Critter who just discovered D&D through Critical Role, welcome to this thread for all things tabletop role-playing games. Whether D&D is your jam, or if you prefer wearing black and engaging in the Masquerade, if you prefer exploring and exploiting the universe playing Traveller, staring down cosmic horrors in Call of Cthulhu, or throwing pies in the face of your rivals in Toon, this is a thread to discuss your favorite tabletop games and your experiences playing them. Any tabletop roleplaying game or its tangential hobbies-miniature painting/collecting, game design, costuming and props, cartography, etc. are fair game here. This is not a thread for buying or selling as such are not part of this forums purview (you can discuss places to buy or trade gaming stuff, FMV, grails you are looking for etc. just not buy and sell on the forums) but any other aspect of the gaming hobby is fair game for discussion. This includes media (books, comics, movies, etc. that inspired gaming or were inspired by gaming genres. Whether you are a veteran gamer or a complete newbie who is curious about such games and never played, all are welcome. No trolls allowed though, not even this friendly guy I was hanging with at Gen Con 15 years ago or so...  i.e. be nice, no edition wars, disparaging play styles or game choice. All gamers and anyone curious about gaming is welcome. -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2022 21:56:39 GMT -5
I first discovered D&D on Christmas break of 1981. We were living in Maine, but had traveled back to CT to visit friends and family for the holidays. We were visiting one of my mom's friends who she had grown up with and who were our neighbors before moving to Maine, and her son had gotten the Moldvay Boxed Set for Christmas and asked me to play. I rolled up my first character, an elf, and set out to explore the Caves of Chaos. I entered the first cave, fell into a pit, and got bit by a giant rat as I tried to climb out and died. It lasted all of a half hour, 15 minutes to roll up the character, and 15 minutes to play before my first character death. I was hooked. When we got back, I mentioned the game to some schoolmates. We were all big fans of Tolkien, Narnia and the Prydain Chronicles. A couple had played and invited me to come play with them. I talked about the game so much that on the first day of February Winter Break, my dad came home with the Moldvay Basic Set and the Player's Handbook for me, a rarity as I never got stuff from my parents outside of Christmas and birthdays. While there have been periods I haven't been actively playing, D&D and rpgs have been a part of my life ever since. these three things, gotten that day, fueled 40 some odd years of imagination... /pic504099.jpg)   -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2022 21:58:33 GMT -5
If you look closely in Crimebuster's youtube videos shot in his comic room, you can see a copy of the AD&D PHB on the shelf in the background. -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2022 22:02:43 GMT -5
And one more post here before (hopefully) others chime in...here's two pieces of fantasy art I drew trying to evoke the AD&D visual aesthetic, now over 10 years ago for a game I was running at the time. They were part of the Player's Guide I made for players to start our campaign, a member of the thieves' guild...  and a member of the Necromancer's Guild...  -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 7, 2022 23:47:54 GMT -5
I'd heard about D&D but wasn't quite sure what an RPG was. I was fascinated by the covers of the 1st edition hardcovers at... Osco? Walgreens? Some convenience store, anyway. Browsing the interior of the PHB, I knew I had to try it out. We were dirt poor, and the only way I could afford to spend $20 (I believe) on a book was to not buy a full lunch at school with my daily lunch money. So after a month or so of buying only Nutter Butters for lunch, I bought the PHB, and was hooked. With some birthday money and more Nutter Butter lunches, I eventually got the DMG and Monster Manual. Being anti-social and extremely introverted, though, I had no one to play with. But it was great imagination fuel and there was the random dungeon generator in the back of the DMG. Then in the early '90s, I played a bit of D&D while in the military. A few years later, I DM'ed a small campaign with a few other family and friends (based on Rainbow's Stargazer, but nobody else was a metal fan). I also wrote 2 PC RPGs in the '90s. The first one was in BASIC, which was mostly a random quest generator: go to the tavern (ugh), spend money, hear rumors (which were of the formula "Treasure ABC is somewhere near town DEF guarded by monster XYZ"), and pick which one to track down. Rinse and repeat. The second was an attempt to create a living world that carried on with or without my player's input, and reacted to the player's actions. A year ago I got a wild hair to return to the "living world" program. While surfing the web for ideas, I came across solo TTRPGs. The idea intrigued me, and once I got knee-deep into this seemingly-impossible world, I decided to hold off on my programming plan and just go table-top solo. "Solo" is slightly inaccurate, in that it's really DM-less gaming. After I started buying the dice to use for an oracle (there's all kinds of things which can use for an oracle, which helps take the place of the DM), my kid wanted in on the action, so now we play a two-player DM-less game. He doesn't care much for the crunch side of things, so for us, it's just some silly role-playing and world-building with a bit of combat for Dad, who still likes to pretend to cut up bad guys with swords. I'm still building a complex, crunch-heavy system just for me, though. Some day I'll probably return to the living-world RPG program, just for the challenge of designing one. |
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,201 
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Post by Confessor on Jan 8, 2022 0:09:24 GMT -5
I first played D&D (the basic edition) with 5 or 6 of my mates round at a friend's house in 1983 or 84, when I was 11 or 12. I'd never encountered the concept of a role-playing game before and it pretty much blew my young mind. This encounter sparked off a real passion for TTRPGs and between the ages of, say, 13 and about 20, I had a group of good friends who were into RPGs, and regularly playing different adventures with them was a lot of fun. I always enjoyed playing D&D and Advanced D&D -- it's an all-time classic RPG for a reason. But fairly quickly I began to branch out and play other games, both fantasy and non-fantasy, such as Call of Cthulhu, Judge Dredd, Tunnels & Trolls, Runequest, Star Trek to name just a few. Unfortunately, my group of role-playing friends started to drift apart as our 20s dawned: we got proper jobs, serious girlfriends, joined bands, people moved away etc...you know, life happened, basically. I don't really see any of those guys anymore. I don't play RPGs anymore at all really. I had a game of Call of Cthulhu with my wife a year or two back because she was curious about the whole concept of role-playing games, and while it was enjoyable, I think that was a one-off TBH. On occasion I get a hankering to get back into playing TTRPGs, but I basically have nobody to play with anymore, which is why I haven't played for 25+ years. I have considered joining a local roleplay gaming club, but...to be frank, I detest a lot of the "usual" dorky, role-playing gamer types. Not to disparage anyone here in this thread, of course.  There were a bunch of role-players attached to my local comic shop when it still existed, and they used to play in a room above the shop twice a week, but the interactions I had with them buying comics were enough to put me off of wanting to voluntarily socialise with them. They were just too dorky and socially awkward for me to want to hang out with. Maybe that's snobbish of me? So, at this point I don't really see myself ever role-playing again -- especially in a big group, and I'm pretty much fine with that really. But I'll always have tremendous affection for the RPGs I played in my teens. |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Jan 8, 2022 8:16:23 GMT -5
I've always wished there was a quick and easy way to play online with others.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Jan 8, 2022 10:25:51 GMT -5
I've always wished there was a quick and easy way to play online with others. A while back someone recommended this to me for the same you reason you mentioned, but I haven't gotten around to trying it out personally. roll20.net/Hmm, I'll have to check that out. If its not too pricey maybe I could set something up for everyone here to play. |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2022 14:57:58 GMT -5
a look at one of the set pieces we used in one of the campaigns I am running-the party's sponsor had been captured by a band of orc raiders in the employ of a warlord eyeing the valley where the game is set as his next conquest, and taken the prisoners to a ruins of an old hill fort where they were to hand them over to the warlord's agents. The party was trying to mount a rescue mission...    -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2022 14:59:19 GMT -5
and a hand drawn map of the area of the world where both campaigns I am running is set...  and a hand-drawn map of the port city where one of the campaigns is set. The design of the city is loosely based on the design of medieval Lisbon.  and the rural valley where the other campaign is set  -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2022 15:04:54 GMT -5
And the large figure scale (1 inch squares where 1 inch equals 5 ft.) maps I made of the part of that city where the characters reside...  -M |
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2022 16:37:26 GMT -5
And the large figure scale (1 inch squares where 1 inch equals 5 ft.) maps I made of the part of that city where the characters reside... -M That's so cool. If I walked in and saw something like that, I'd be stoked to start playing. |
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Post by The Captain on Jan 8, 2022 17:03:55 GMT -5
I discovered D&D in 1982, when I got my first boxed set at the age of 9 for my birthday. I didn't really get into it until middle school, when I DM'ed a few campaigns for my friends, and then in high school, I found another group of guys who were really into it and we played a lot through graduation.
Got to college and one of the guys down the hall in the dorm was a HUGE player, so he and I alternated running campaigns for a couple of years for people (guys and girls both) in the building. He left school before I did, so I lost my partner in the endeavor and the games came to a slow halt (he had WAY more books than I did, and I didn't have the resources to get my own copies that the time).
Since college, I've only played a couple of times in the past 25 years or so. There were a couple of guys at my first company who played and one guy pulled together a group that included his girlfriend, encouraging the rest of us to get our significant others involved, whether they'd played before or not. However, it got awkward real quick when it became clear they were using it as a way to find swinger partners, as there was a lot of alcohol involved during game nights and the game encounters were quite sexually charged. It made working with him uncomfortable as well, but thankfully, he got fired shortly thereafter and the rest of us just laughed about it for the rest of our time there.
I've looked at a couple of those "Looking for D&D player" posters at the various LCS I frequent, but I think that my time with the game is long past. I still love the concept of the game, but I'm not the most social person and just joining a group with a bunch of total strangers isn't in my comfort zone.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 8, 2022 17:06:51 GMT -5
I also wrote 2 PC RPGs in the '90s. The first one was in BASIC, which was mostly a random quest generator: go to the tavern (ugh), spend money, hear rumors (which were of the formula "Treasure ABC is somewhere near town DEF guarded by monster XYZ"), and pick which one to track down. Rinse and repeat. The second was an attempt to create a living world that carried on with or without my player's input, and reacted to the player's actions. That's awesome! This totally reminds of the old BASIC games I would play back in the day. We had an IBM PC in the early-mid 80's and I remember playing all the time a version of the old 70's Star Trek text based strategy game. You would enter text codes to take each round of action and there was a little ascii based map to let you know where everything was and ongoing stats to the side...had a bit of the rpg feel to it! The first one, in BASIC, was actually graphical, and the second one, in c++, was text-based, because I wanted to put all my effort into getting the world running. When I say "graphical", though, it wasn't animated (except for the Blink spell, which moved the mage's image to random spots on the screen), it just had static pictures for characters, monsters, weapons, and a few generic indoor/outdoor scenes. I wish I could find it and get it to run again, since it was complete in that it met the specs I had for it, regardless of how unambitious those specs were. The images were like two steps above stick figures, but still the best art I ever did for anything. For the solo tabletop game, I find that I'm reversing what I did for my living-world program. I don't want to know anything my character wouldn't know, so if my character gets unexpectedly caught up in the hidden machinations of one of the world's factions, I wouldn't know it until the first random encounter, and then I need system to generate a random but logically-consistent series of further revelations of the plot. That's an area where an oracle could be used, but I also like the challenge of designing rules for such a system. This is an addition to whatever publicly-known adventures await in the sandbox, and other plots which which manifest as a series of escalating portents whose source is unknown unless investigated or the plot comes to fruition, or maybe just peters out. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 8, 2022 19:02:53 GMT -5
I never really was exposed to D&D as a kid, sadly, but as an adult when I found my tribe we have a semi-Regular game. My group prefers Pathfinder these days (the rules are pretty much an extension of D&D 3.5 ed), though right now we're doing the space version (Starfinder). I LOVE my character, he's a former low budget action hero that decided to become a REAL hero...(picture Steven Segal as a 'real' Jedi and you get the idea).. it's become a brilliant challenge/running joke with the DM to continually come up with new pretend films for NPC to have recognized me character fun.. quite a good time.
I played a bunch of stuff in College as well.. we had a great Gamma World campaign (The DM was amazing, put in just as much effort as it appears MRP does.. well done, btw), where I had a Wolf character that was not the most creative (he was basically a more animal version of Wolverine), but very effective. Many of my friends at the time were also into the Masquerade (as every gamer was in the mid-late 90s), where I did succumb, despite my hatred of Vampires (only tabletop... couldn't do the LARPing thing)... I had a good time breaking the game by turning a Ravenos Clan vamp essentially into Kyle Rayner, which was great fun for a while, but I eventually completely broke the campaign, which my buddy didn't let me forget for years.
I don't have much of the stuff myself, but one of the guys in my group (the DM, naturally) has a fantastic D&D collection, he has an original set in the original box with the original (really terrible) dice, and what I suspect is every 2nd and 3rd edition book, as well as more minis that one could ever use.. it's a good time.
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