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D&D Is 30
mainframemouse writes "For those who have not seen the Beeb article, Dungeons and Dragons is 30 years old.
After many years of role-playing is wonderful to see the mother of all RPG's given respect and mention in the national press. There's even a note about the false accusations of the 80's." And for the record - flanking & attacks of opportunity in 3/3.5 Edition still irritate me. Combine a familiar with Master Tactician and some rogue levels, and you're off to the races.
Ah, D&D -- the flagship of geek hobbies. Many people do video games or comic books and want to include themselves in the group, but until you've re-written your character sheet 15 times, had discussions about what makes a good DM/GM, and carried around a fuzzy bag full of expensive dice, you aren't the real deal. :)
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Just last night I printed off a bunch of polyhedra polyhedra for my six year to cut out and assemble for fun.
...
I remember before the Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Footbook and Monster Manual (which our DM forbade us to read), there was only a thick pamphlet-like book with a few monsters (giant rats, hobgoblin, gelatenous cube), and a sample 1/2 level. There sure were a lot of gelatenous cubes for level 1
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
It still hasn't kissed a girl!
And still proudly living in the parent's basement!
And for the record - flanking & attacks of opportunity in 3/3.5 Edition still irritate me. Combine a familiar with Master Tactician and some rogue levels, and you're off to the races.
Yep you are a nerd.
'Is there any Mountain Dew? Can I have one?'
The other day with a friend about which type of dice hurt the worst to step on. we decided that, while a d4 was bad (the worst if you step straight down hard), that a d8 was really the worst because it rolled with your foot.
My girlfriend immediately said, "oh my god, i'm dating a nerd."
Thank you D&D.
~dijjnn
If they irritate you, change the rules. One of the things a good GM needs to do is to keep the game from becoming too cheezy. If they players are abusing the rules, nerf them! The 3rd Edition Harm spell is a perfect example of something that desperately needs it.
In my opinion, rules like flanking and attacks of opportunity add a whole lot more tactical depth to the combat without slowing it down much. It's certainly more fun than combat in old D&D.
it paved the way for my favorite game, Knights of the Old Republic and really, the whole genre. Makes me want to dust off the ol' board and get the gang back together for another all night game.
It really works, you know.
...Ex-girlfriend?
G
http://www.chick.com/bc/2002/dnd.asp
Quote from the link: "The goal of the game [D&D] would be to see who could obtain the most erotic pleasure"
As my friend who sent me the link originally so accurately stated, "I don't know about you, but my D&D sessions were never like that."
Btw... D&D is 30... But what about its other attributes? What's its alignment? Strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc? Okay I'm a nerd.
It was even a cult at a Wisconsin naval base. "At one time every nuclear submarine had a D&D group," says Arneson.
... do you think the Commander-in-Chief knows about this?
- from the article
Nuclear submarines? D&D groups?
My God
-kgj
-kgj
I remember that "expose'" where they made D&D out to be some big satanic training session because (gasp!) there were demons and devils listed in the Field Folio. And then some shooter someplace had a DMG in his backpack or something like that...
Parents just ate that shit up. I think a lot of them couldn't understand why we just weren't spending our time watching TV like normal kids. We basically had to operate under the radar or risk losing a several of our players to easily paniced parents.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"The game was wrongly implicated in a missing persons case, a teen suicide and a number of murders. Some schools banned the game, and many parents refused to let their children play."
It bugged me at the time that for the amount of people playing the game, the incidence of suicide seemed lower than in the rest of the general public, but the press never seemed to report that.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Of course I ripped through all of the SSI games and the Baldur's Gate Series. Then came Neverwinter Nights. A beautiful game, but instead of controlling a party of people, it's just one character and a side-kick. This was a big mistake. However, the fact that one could assume the role of Dungeon Master made this game somewhat revolutionary.
But after playing multiplayer online a bit, I must say, that although I have found some new places to explore (people have spent some time on putting together some very cool levels), it still seems to come down to everyone being 40th level and killing each other. Maybe I'm just not playing in the right places?
Maybe I'm just missing the old days of getting together with pen paper and the dodecahedrons? I don't think so - who's got time for trying to orchestrate that?
And yes, I've tried Everquest and just couldn't seem to get into the flow of it. I couldn't see what the "big deal" was ...
on the 30th anniversary of the game, an article about it completely fails to mention the new edition (released 1999) or the revision that came several years later. and you'd think that a journalist would supply sales numbers to support an assertion as to whether or not something is "popular".
ed
..will argue rules in the DM's Guide better than the highest paid lawyers. You don't know arguing until you watch two more geeks citing obscure sentences in backwater paragraphs as evidence in supporting claims that you would swear held the fate of the world in the balance.
AD&D lawyers have always been the best and worst to play with!
I wish I had your mother. Mine was "progressive" and just let me go ahead and play. Now my soul belongs to Mephistopheles and I can look forward to an eternity in boiling excrement.
Isn't yours the 4" one handed sword?...and haven't you been playing with it enough already?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
The best part of the golden D&D years for me was reading Phil Foglio's cartoon in Dragon Mag.
Did the characters ever managed to play Sex&Dungeons&Dragons or did I miss that issue entirely?
Another trait of geeks is obsessive hairsplitting. I mean my god, man.
Who cares about the obsessive hairsplitting? The important thing is the successful karma whoring.
-kgj
-kgj
Are you sure? The act of observing disturbs the observed. Until you have looked, you must consider D&D to be both 30 and not 30.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
...of no content.
Pardon the slight off-topicness... but some friends of mine from college started their own production company, and made a movie called "The Gamers". It certainly ain't no hollywood production, but that's the charm of it. Do yourself a favor and grab the DVD and watch it with your gaming buddies to celebrate D&D's 30th... I promise it'll be a good time. I think they have a quicktime trailer and stuff here.
If you remember your times long past playing D&D fondly - heck, if you're still playing it - you really owe it to yourself to check out some independent roleplaying game producers. They're cheap, they're great, they're a break from THAC0 and saving throws and god only knows what else. A great place to start is with The Forge, which specializes in such games.
And while you're their, a shout out please for Lumpley, an old friend of mine, and the author of kill puppies for satan: an unfunny roleplaying game. (I'd link directly to his site, but I doubt it could take the slashdotting. Still, I must advise folks to look him up. And send him money.)
I tried to play D&D, fairly seriously, at three different points in my life.
:)
In 7th grade, my next door neighbor declared openly that girls couldn't play. Unfortunately, my female friends weren't that interested. I made my sister play, but having never played myself, I was a rotten DM and kept killing her off.
I had all the books, though, because my Mom was Gary Gygax's divorce lawyer. (He, it seems, thought it was great for girls to play.)
In high school, a few of us were invited to join the gang playing, but the group was too large and unruly, so extremely little RPing actually got done. The (male) leader of the group blamed the girls and told us we couldn't come back.
And then a few years ago, when the last big D&D update came out, I thought I was FINALLY going to get to have a full bore D&D adventure.
Unfortunately, the relationship and social circle exploded fairly dramatically, and I was *not* invited to continue the game. That was the only time it actually felt fair to me, but I was still disappointed. And I've still never ACTUALLY played a game beyond creating a char and playing for an hour or so that day.
Ah well. On the up side, I'm married and have a great life.
Liza
These opinions are my own. My employer is not aware of them, does not endorse them, and is not responsible for them.
And sometimes, D&D gives back:
~wavylines~
Speaking of people overreacting to D&D, did you ever see the movie "Mazes and Monsters" starring Tom Hanks (no, I'm not kidding)? It was made in 1982, and Hanks played a D&D obsessed kid who ends up killing his friend because he thinks he's a gnome (or something like that).
Check out the imdb listing here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
Anyone remember when mainstream thought D&D was evil and was corrupting our young minds? Apparently anyone who played it couldn't tell the difference between Fantasy and Reality and ended up killing themselves.
My father (by chance a paranoid hypocondriac) read or heard one such article. This is when I was 18, and not living with him, which of course made him even MORE worried. He tried to sit me down and discourage me from my Evil Ways, and said that he read an article where someone said that people who play D&D can't tell fantasy from reality.
I told him that that's nonsense, and if I ever see the person who wrote that article I'd cast a fireball at them.
So he tried to get me into counselling.
Oh, did I mention my dad has NO sense of humour?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
And for the record - flanking & attacks of opportunity in 3/3.5 Edition still irritate me. Combine a familiar with Master Tactician and some rogue levels, and you're off to the races.
First, I don't know what "Master Tactician" is; you are probably referring to "Expert Tactician" which allows you to make an additional attack whenever someone is denied their dex bonus to AC. Since a Rogue also adds sneak attack damage to any attack when the opponent is denied their dex bonus to their AC this is a good combination.
However flanking does not deny the opponents dex bonus to their AC, so the familiar flanking example you used would not work to give you an extra sneak attack as you suggest. Additionally if your familiar is killed there are harsh penalties. You must make Fortitude save DC 15 or lose 200xp per master level (save for half). You also cannot get another familiar for a year unless you raise dead. Since you will be progressing as a Rogue and not a Wizard or a Sorcerer, your familiar will not increase along with you. By level 6 opponents will simply squash your familiar like a bug, costing you 6750gp each time for a scroll of raise dead.
AC: Armor Class, how hard you are to hit in combat.
Dex Bonus: Dexterity is a measure of how nimble a person is, the bonus from this score adds to your AC.
XP: Experience Points, a measure used to determine the level of your character.
DC: Difficulty Class, in order to succeed you must roll a twenty sided dice (d20) and add your relevant bonus and get a result equal or higher.
GP: Gold Pieces.
of Mephistopheles, I'd like to point out that the excrement is kept boiling due to Federal regulations. I'd also like to point out that the AC will not, in fact, be spending all eternity in the boiling excrement. Every 10 years, the vats of excrement are switched out. During the 15 minutes that this procedure involves, the AC (and all similar clients) will be kept in a pit of superheated beaver vomit. Again, this is the mandated Federal procedure.
I work in a research lab. We have been studying the herpes virus recently. I was quite amused to find out that it's shaped just like a tiny d20! The shape is quite distinctive in our electron microscopy images. In fact, I showed the principal investigator a photograph of a d20 last week from an RPG web store as a sample of other things with the same shape - he was quite amused and surprised!
... I'm just waiting to see what kind of responses I get.
My blog post earlier today, which links to the same Beeb article, was entitled "30 years of playing games with giant herpes viruses"
i am a soviet space shuttle
People talk about D&D as just the kids playing with friends, but sometimes it was a family affair. My grandmother taught my cousin and me D&D in the late 70s when we were both under 10 years old. All of us sitting out in the garage playing late into the summer night are still some of the fondest memories she has of me and my late cousin.
But man was she a harsh dungeon master.
The "rules" are guidelines like stabilisers on a kid's bike: once you get the hang of role playing you can take them off. In that sense there never was any need for second and thrid edition, although TSR generated that need by producing more and more "Modules for Dummies" that encouraged lazy play by DM's and players alike.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
1. The typical customer is male, unattractive, and socially handicapped
2. Both are frequently enjoyed in dark basements
3. The size of your collection is obscene
4. It's not a good idea to talk about either on a first date
5. Both revolve around fantasy and obtaining the unobtainable
6. The artwork depicts images impossible in the real world
7. When purchasing either in a store, you always ask for a bag
8. It may be fun to make your own at home, but rarely turns out as good as the professionally produced stuff
9. If you saw a woman buying either, you'd probably want to ask her out
10. Extra excitement can be added with the use of props and / or costumes
11. Low quality versions of both can be found for free on the Internet
12. Countless Usenet groups are dedicated to both
13. In either case, a gang of heavily-muscled men in leather with whips spells trouble
14. Everyone uses a silly, made-up name
15. It is not uncommon for participants to assume the opposite gender
16. Both are frowned upon by the conservative right
17. You usually take interest in both around age 13
18. New purchases are usually looked at once, then put on the shelf
19. The best and worst examples of each was produced in the '70s
20. The German versions of each are the most bizarre
21. Both are plagued with bad dialogue
22. You usually spend a lot more time enjoying each alone than with a group of friends
23. Everyone's called in to work sick at least once to stay home and enjoy one or the other
24. Both make excellent bathroom reading
25. There's always a big finish when you get to fire your gun
26. Hollywood's attempts to mainstream both have been largely unsuccessful
27. The hero's prized possession is his big, black gun
28. Plots are often present only to serve the action scenes
29. The story can be set anywhere from spaceships to dungeons
30. While the person directing the action is usually blamed for a bad experience, it's usually the fault of poor writing
31. Characters can have either high APPEARANCE or STAMINA, but rarely both
32. You can tell the climax is imminent when the characters start screaming
33. Candles and music enhance the mood
34. You can meet your favorite B-list stars at the annual convention
35. One word: Dwarves
It also led me to gaming conventions, where I made lifelong friends who later got me jobs, helped me out of tough times, etc... And yeah, sure, I might have gotten the same thing out of being a Rotary Club member, but I didn't have the grades, and besides, they never give you a +5 dancing vorpal blade to fight that 15d8 monster ... at least, anymore.
I met Gary Gyagax at Imaginecon 2000, and despite all the stuff said about him over the years, I found him personable and approachable.
I still have all my D&D stuff. It's worth over $3000 in cover price, but I think in actual current value, maybe $600 (and only because I have some first edition stuff, like the "Deities and Demigods" with Melnebonie and Cthulhu mythos in it). I can't bear to part with it because I feel I owe it so much, it's like an old friend ... in several boxes ... in a closet.
Man, I felt like Dahmer there, for a second.
I started gaming when churches actually allowed it in their function rooms, along with the civil war gamers and chess players. Then in the 1980s, they connected the game to some poor sucker who got lost in university tunnels or something, then it got this Satanic cult label, and then it was fun to play it because you were an outsider! Woo hoo!
I stopped gaming when I got married. I just didn't need it anymore. I now had a steady job, social life, and the game was just too time-consuming. I have run a game or two here and there for old times sake (mainly to show my teen son what it was like). Recently, I was with my son's school group at a Science Olympiad, and a girl there had a bunch of the 3rd Edition rules. I thumbed through them, and thought, "Jesus, this is even more complicated than the Slackware manual! How EVER did I memorize all those rules and terms?" She was just impressed I knew 90% of the monsters.
you can not get Array out of Bounds errors on pen and paper D&D
You enter a 10 x 10 array. You see a Null Pointer Exception guarding an Object of type Chest. What do you do?
Whine that it's all MS's fault and reboot.
I was indoctrinated into the world of D&D while getting computer technician training at Keesler AFB, MS back in '77 (made less than $5k income that yr). Some of us spent much of our free time trying to make saving throws. That carried over to my next 2 yrs at Offutt AFB, NE...nothing else worth doing in Neb anyway. I've still got all the books & dice, but haven't played since about '85...went back to college, got married, had a kid, became a responsible adult (YUCK!). Now, nearly 25 yrs later, with a household income nearly 40 times what I made back then, I think I was enjoying life alot more in my D&D days :-(
Just another day in Paradise
This is definitely a trip down memory lane.
I got into D&D as a sidebar to military wargamming, starting with Risk and moving onto several Avalon Hill games (Third Reich, Blitzkrieg, 1776 (I got massacred by my brother at this one), & Squad Leader).
When I went to the hobby shop to see what other cool games they had, I saw a box for the original Basic Edition of D&D, together with the 1st Edition Monster Manual. The DM Guide was released just a little after that, and trying to get polyhedrial dice was almost impossible. We actually used the old chit system at first to generate our characters becuase we couldn't find any polyhedrial dice at all. When I finally got some dice, the d20 was badly misshapen in manufacturing, and gave some really wild results when used (I wish I still had it now).
The best fun I had was a week at Boy Scout Camp where we also turned it into a week-long D&D marathon. The logistical planning for this was something that could only be done by a bunch of hard-core D&D players that were also boy scouts. The D&D manuals were smuggled in with the camp kitchen supplies, talked our parents into a week's worth of munchies & pop (with some extra money on the side for buying stuff that wouldn't keep in the cooler for more than a couple of days), and took off to camp looking like a group of real trustworthy, loyal, helpful (etc.) boy scouts our parents thought we were. We also hid miniatures, dice, DM screens, map graphs, and pens & paper (that was more out in the open.. . but in retrospect our parents should have realized that we took too MUCH paper and too MANY pencils with us).
Our Scoutmaster (actually an assistant who could get the time off from work) was this young guy that looking back now was just totally snowballed by us boy scouts. I was about 16 at the time, and he placed a lot of trust in me as a junior leader. I did what I could, but this adventure took a life of its own that this poor assistant SM couldn't keep under control.
After about 5 P.M. we would finish up our camping chores every evening and start playing D&D. In addition to the munchies, we brought along 4 gallons of Camp Fuel for the Coleman lanterns we placed under the tarp and played well into the night with the group of about 10 scouts in our troop. My younger brother was the D.M. for this whole affair, but there were several experienced and hard-core players, as well as a few totally new initiates into playing D&D (the kids who were really there to attend Scout Camp for real).
During the day some of these new initiates would get a chance to read the rule books and get them explained as we were building fires, cooking breakfast or supper, and doing the other camp stuff (like swimming, firing shotguns, making crafts, etc.)
For this experience, we decided to try out the Gary Gygax module series (Giants & Drow stuff) that we bought (because it was from the grand master... we bought everything from him at the time) but we always seem to put it off doing other stuff when we were normally playing D&D. I didn't realy how awful they were until after we really started to play them, and I knew just what Monty Haul Dungeons really came from.
The sad part was the aftermath to this whole event. Needless to say our parents were absolutely pissed at us (my dad was the regular Scoutmaster and was unable to attend camp due to some other things that came up in his personal life). Some of the scouts in our troop also failed to complete any merit badges while at camp, and the D&D game was directly blamed for it. (I think we did make up an "unofficial" D&D merit badge for the event, however.) One set of parents totally forbade their kids from ever playing D&D again (the born-again Pat Robertson follower type), which was quite sad. My parents were more of the attitude that neither I nor my brother should "corrupt" the minds of the innocent, but they would rather that we pour our energies into D&D rather than dating or drugs or cars. In that respect D&D was a rather cheap hobby by comparison.