Dungeons & Dragons Anniversary Gets Further Celebration

Thanks to GameSpy for its series of articles helping commemorate the 30th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. Continuing previous articles about the occasion, the week-long feature includes a look back at SSI's Gold Box series (" the first series of games to truly bring the D&D experience to video gamers"), The Daily Show's Stephen Colbert discussing his D&D schooldays ("We were all complete outcasts in school -- beyond the fringe, beyond nerds"), and a feature on Planescape: Torment ("One of the greatest, and certainly the weirdest, RPGs ever made.")

Comments

Re:So much fun!

[plover]

I haven't played in probably ten years now, but I agree that it was always a good time. (Except for the rule nitpicking, and our DM would usually solve it the "Paranoia" way. The Paranoia GMs guide has one cardinal rule -- "Action is good, reward it with success. Be boring and you're dead." So, arguing about the rules ended up causing way more pain than it was worth.)

My biggest regret is that I loaned my boxed set of original D&D books (along with another dozen supplemental rule books, monster manuals, etc.,) to a friend just at the end of high school, and I never got them back. I should probably check eBay to make sure he hasn't sold them! :-)

Re:DnD replaced by MMORPG

[Creepy Crawler]

If anything, NWN is a really handicapped version of AD&D 3.0 with too many bugs to count.. I'd name them off, but if you play more than 1 hour, you'll find them.

Never the less, to make NWN more enjoyable, I suggest you get NWN, SoU, and HotU along with downloadable pacthes CEP and PrC (http://nwnprc.netgamers.co.uk/). PrC attempt s to fix a lot of bugs, while adding in about 50 new classes, modifying the epic spell system so that it does NOT require feats, and adding of a bunch more feats in general.

I, so far, have played on 2 servers with all of these patches. It's quite interesting to see a floating skull casting magic at rapid fire (demilich class).

Mods:

[Mongoose Disciple]

The parent post, while short, actually is not off topic. Al-Qadim was a setting for the AD&D game in its 2nd edition, and a computer game was made for it.

The articles' "dis" of it is definitely on topic.

Re:DnD replaced by MMORPG

[microTodd]

I realize this is a joke, but I was listening to a commentary on the radio the other day and I realized how relevant this is.

Take any group of guy friends (or gals, for that matter). They enjoying spending time together. "Bonding", if you will. So what do they do? Go fishing? Bowling? Drink beer and watch Monday Night Football? Or get together and play a table-top RPG?

Yes, despite ironic jokes to the contrary, this is REAL LIFE. Real life is spending time with your friends in person, having conversations, participating in activities you enjoy together.

How come a poker club is "socially acceptable" as having a life, but D+D is not? In both cases you are sitting at a table for hours, drinking beer and talking to each other.

Its all about social stereotypes. But as the demographics of the population changes (I'm only speaking for the US...I don't have too much experience in other countries) I think that ideas about these things will change. Are videogames still "geeky" pasttimes? A lot of us who started the video game craze are now in our 30s with disposable income. And as my kids grow up I won't harbor any negative feelings against them for wanting to play a lot of videogames. The same is true for D+D.