Dungeons & Dragons Tabletop Anyone?

[the Dagman]

Well, in the DM's defence, Dagman did say that he had stopped playing in the campaign months before his character's death.

I agree that, if someone can't make it to a playing session or two, then their PC should get a pass.

But if someone drops out of a campaign, they can hardly fault the DM for treating their former player character like any other NPC.

To not do so would be unfair to the active players. Why should a former player's character be treated as invulnerable and untouchable, when their characters aren't?

Maybe because he never did it to anyone else?

In that campaign there were many characters that were "written in" and "written out" as time passed (his campaign started in EQ2 in 1982. I left it in late 1985. Many players had come and gone over the years). He could have simply "written out" my character in a non-lethal way as he had for others who had left the campaign. I was forced to leave because of a schedule conflict with his game and my work, as I enjoyed playing with everyone there. But life happens. And because of my knack for survival in his campaigns had gained some notability within the Chaosium HQ, where everyone else had had at least one character die in one of his games, I had become something of a thorn in the side of his rep as a GM.

He had wanted to kill off one of my characters for some time, yet was unable to do so while following the rules and me throwing the dice. He could have simply stated that Harmast, an NPC and another Sword of Humakt used in the campaign, had sent for me and I returned to him alone. Instead he killed me off and let the other players loot my corpse, including taking my much coveted Cornucopia which alternately provided food/drink when you spent a magic point on it (negating the need to buy and carry large amounts of food on long journeys. Which combined with Simon's geas never to drink alcohol wound up making him rather rich as he never wasted his money).

Like I said, it was a chickenshit move.

 

[Goliath]

^Well, I don't mean to give offense, but that post makes you both sound rather petty, to me.

I can't even remember which games I was playing back in 1985--let alone the names of the characters therein.

 

[Mistral]

^Well, I don't mean to give offense, but that post makes you both sound rather petty, to me.

I can't even remember which games I was playing back in 1985--let alone the names of the characters therein.

1985? Hmm...I think we were hacking our way through a bastardized version of the Ravenloft module.

 

[the Dagman]

^Well, I don't mean to give offense, but that post makes you both sound rather petty, to me.

I can't even remember which games I was playing back in 1985--let alone the names of the characters therein.

Wait, I was petty because I had to leave his game due to the fact I had to work?

Like I said earlier, if he wanted my character dead, fine. I really had no problem with that. In fact, I had wanted him to kill off a character of mine for some time. Even going so far as rolling up several specifically so they could die (such as the P.H. Hatecraft character I mentioned). Had he struck down one of my characters I had played with a Blue Bolt from the heavens with me there, I would have had no problems with it. Shit like that happens to players in such games if they make a god angry or something. My only problem with it was he waited to do it behind my back, after life had forced me to stop playing with the guy. Then allowing players who had coveted my gear to loot it (and subsequently to squander it away) was the cherry on top.

I had spent years gaming with the guy. Something that he used professionally to make his living while I got nothing from it other than playing the game and being able to buy copies of the game from Chaosium at cost. I had helped him to refine the game for publication by working out the kinks of it. For him to do that to my longest running character of any of his games felt disrespectful of the time and effort I had put in to help improve the game, not to mention our friendship. He knew why I had left, and that I would likely not be able to return since he wasn't going to change his gaming night simply because of me, and I did not expect him to. Why he felt the need to do this after I had left, I can only go by what other friends in the game had said why he did it. Since he never bothered to tell me himself.

But to me, in the end, all it was was a game and I didn't mean to derail this thread on this tangent.

 

[SicOne]

Is there a website (or, more to the point, does anyone have a link to it) that shows entire old-school D&D and/or first-edition AD&D modules in their entirety, in PDF format or something like that?

Also, anyone have a link to a site that shows a listing of all modules/books printed for both D&D (i.e. Module B2:Keep On The Borderlands, Module X1:The Isle of Dread) and AD&D (i.e. Module G1-2-3:Against The Giants, Module S3:Expedition To The Barrier Peaks)? Some of the modules have other titles listed on the back, but I'd like to find a comprehensive list.

 

[SicOne]

I did play Call of Cthulhu briefly...but my PCs always ended up going insane.

Dying and going insane is part of the fun.

It is a horror game, after all. Plus, Lovecraft is all about a cold, indifferent, incomprehensible universe that would laugh cruelly and mockingly at human hopes and dreams--if it gave them any thought. So if PCs aren't dying or going insane, then the GM isn't doing his job.

Once I got some experience as a CoC GM, I always made my players generate two Investigators: their primary character, and a backup, with some close connection to their primary character, who could be plugged into the game quickly when the first one died or went mad.

(Note that I said 'when,' not 'if')

But it's a balancing act. If PCs start dying or going insane too often, then the game starts to resemble a slasher movie, or Paranoia, or something. The prospect of death or insanity has to be real--even inevitable--but not so frequent that it ceases to be shocking.

Like the song says: an Investigator is here for a good time--not a long time.

Heh heh, good idea! Though to last long as a CoC investigator, one needs to have an insanity resistance factor along the lines of Ashley J. Williams...

 

[Silvercrest]

I started playing D&D in the autumn of 1979. 1st edition AD&D had just recently come out, and you could still buy the original game, in its white box, along with its supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, et al.)

I started with the blue Basic D&D booklet. I bought it with babysitting money. But we soon moved up to AD&D.

Jesus Christ--was that really thirty years ago?

I was given a basic set around 1980 or 1981. That started an irregular campaign that moved into AD&D, and lasted all the way to 1999. (Three or four different gaming groups, that spanned about 70 years of time. My username is from one of the characters.)

One of the villains from the original "Keep on the Borderland" set became a master villain of the campaign who fought every one of the groups, and lasted until the very last game in 1999. How cool is that??!!

Remember 2nd edition with the 200 supplemental booklets designed to leech every last cent from you? I just went with the Monster Manual, Players Handbook, and Dungeons Master Guide. I didn't really feel like relearning a whole new system for 3.0. I have the books, but only play about once a year now adays. The new 4.0 seems like another money leech since they just had 3.5 recently.

I do remember those awful 2E supplements: FULL of typos. I have a bunch of them. They were stupid to buy, as there is nothing in them that's original, and nothing better than what we came up with ourselves.

Ugh, 2nd Edition. Several of my players were obsessed with importing rules from 2ndEd into our 1stEd game, so I had to deal with that increasingly from 1991 on. In 2000, after I retired, one of the players started a 2ndEd campaign. But we found that we had to import rules from 1stEd just to deal with some of the holes in the later version! Do you realize that a thief in 2ndEd can get the Forgery skill with no trouble at all, but he has to pay through the nose to get the ability to read and write? How does that work?

In 2003 or 2004, we moved into 3rdEd, and I fell in love with it. We've shifted to 3.5 since then, but I don't intend to change again. 4thEd sounds like a waste of money, and I have zero interest in all their online whozits.

This fall I'm starting a new campaign that will be based around the 3.5 rules. It will import stuff from d20 Modern and the Stargate SG-1 roleplaying game, and it will be set in the Stargate universe. It ought to be pretty cool, if everything works out.

Ask me sometime about the characters who stumbled across a Logan's Run Maze car and went for an unexpected ride. Or the Drow with the Luger.

I once sent my players to the tomb of a mad wizard that was done up like a funhouse from hell. Some of their deadliest opponents were demonic killer klowns, who would bowl them over with cartwheels, beat them with slapsticks, spray them with acid seltzer, and pelt them with green-slime creampies.

I once had my 1stEd group encounter a flying house with a continuous party that was straight out of Douglas Adams. It had all started with a bunch of wizards who got drunk and started casting spells around the house. So the adventurers kept finding everyday objects with weird properties. In the kitchen, they found a +2 skillet, a broom of flying that would throw you off and beat you over the head about one time in five, and a refrigerator full of green slime. And lurking outside the bathroom was a mind flayer who'd had three of his tentacles ripped off, so he had to use a toilet plunger to suck your brain out...

 

[Prydonian]

Is there a website (or, more to the point, does anyone have a link to it) that shows entire old-school D&D and/or first-edition AD&D modules in their entirety, in PDF format or something like that?

DriveThruRPG.com used to have a lot of the old D&D material from the Original/Classic, 1st, and 2nd editions for sale as PDFs at very low prices. Unfortunately, WotC pulled out of the PDF market several months ago, so these are no longer legally available.

Also, anyone have a link to a site that shows a listing of all modules/books printed for both D&D (i.e. Module B2:Keep On The Borderlands, Module X1:The Isle of Dread) and AD&D (i.e. Module G1-2-3:Against The Giants, Module S3:Expedition To The Barrier Peaks)? Some of the modules have other titles listed on the back, but I'd like to find a comprehensive list.

You could try tomeoftreasures.com - the lists there seem pretty comprehensive, although I'm judging that on the basis of the Classic D&D/Known World material, 'cos that's my area of interest.

 

[SicOne]

Prydonian, excellent link on www.tomeoftreasures.com! I checked the module list, and I can't think of any I've played/owned that were not on the list.

 

[Mistral]

I started playing D&D in the autumn of 1979. 1st edition AD&D had just recently come out, and you could still buy the original game, in its white box, along with its supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, et al.)

I started with the blue Basic D&D booklet. I bought it with babysitting money. But we soon moved up to AD&D.

Jesus Christ--was that really thirty years ago?

I was given a basic set around 1980 or 1981. That started an irregular campaign that moved into AD&D, and lasted all the way to 1999. (Three or four different gaming groups, that spanned about 70 years of time. My username is from one of the characters.)

One of the villains from the original "Keep on the Borderland" set became a master villain of the campaign who fought every one of the groups, and lasted until the very last game in 1999. How cool is that??!!

I do remember those awful 2E supplements: FULL of typos. I have a bunch of them. They were stupid to buy, as there is nothing in them that's original, and nothing better than what we came up with ourselves.

Ugh, 2nd Edition. Several of my players were obsessed with importing rules from 2ndEd into our 1stEd game, so I had to deal with that increasingly from 1991 on. In 2000, after I retired, one of the players started a 2ndEd campaign. But we found that we had to import rules from 1stEd just to deal with some of the holes in the later version! Do you realize that a thief in 2ndEd can get the Forgery skill with no trouble at all, but he has to pay through the nose to get the ability to read and write? How does that work?

In 2003 or 2004, we moved into 3rdEd, and I fell in love with it. We've shifted to 3.5 since then, but I don't intend to change again. 4thEd sounds like a waste of money, and I have zero interest in all their online whozits.

This fall I'm starting a new campaign that will be based around the 3.5 rules. It will import stuff from d20 Modern and the Stargate SG-1 roleplaying game, and it will be set in the Stargate universe. It ought to be pretty cool, if everything works out.

Ask me sometime about the characters who stumbled across a Logan's Run Maze car and went for an unexpected ride. Or the Drow with the Luger.

I once sent my players to the tomb of a mad wizard that was done up like a funhouse from hell. Some of their deadliest opponents were demonic killer klowns, who would bowl them over with cartwheels, beat them with slapsticks, spray them with acid seltzer, and pelt them with green-slime creampies.

I once had my 1stEd group encounter a flying house with a continuous party that was straight out of Douglas Adams. It had all started with a bunch of wizards who got drunk and started casting spells around the house. So the adventurers kept finding everyday objects with weird properties. In the kitchen, they found a +2 skillet, a broom of flying that would throw you off and beat you over the head about one time in five, and a refrigerator full of green slime. And lurking outside the bathroom was a mind flayer who'd had three of his tentacles ripped off, so he had to use a toilet plunger to suck your brain out...

My world was based on the idea that magic came into ours and disrupted technology, leading to a general Armageddon. Bits of the old world still existed in this new, AD&D magic world-allowing me to pull all kinds of weird dungeons. I once had a whole party of high levels blowing spell after spell trying to determine the exact function of...a telephone booth. Another time they went on a quest for bullets. (the Drow I mentioned) Damndest thing-apparently balrogs are attracted to gunpowder and like to build up caches of it. Something to do with their mating rituals, as it turned out...

 

[FPAlpha]

^Well, I don't mean to give offense, but that post makes you both sound rather petty, to me.

I can't even remember which games I was playing back in 1985--let alone the names of the characters therein.

To inject my opinion.. the GM was, at least reading about him, a total dick. In my 10+ years of GM experience i've seen many styles of Gamemasters and those who would regularly kill of player characters just because they could (and go out of their way to do so ruining every atmosphere they may have built up) quickly lose their group.

It was always uncomprehensible to me that some GM seem to get their joy in killing of PCs. I have done it but only under the most extreme circumstances.. mostly due to extreme boneheaded maneuvers the players pulled like some idiot i GM for at a convention when playing Shadowrun.. part of his background was that he hates asien people. He went on a violence spree and beat up some Chinese in Little China.. in broad daylight.. on Main Street. I asked him multiple times if he really wants do to that and when he did i sent the Triad after them. They caught him and tortured him to death..

If a character leaves a group for a big amount of time (ingame or real time) then i either retire him from the group for good or "write him out" as has been mentioned but only after clearing it with the player.. that's a decent thing to do but that GM was just having ghis revenge and clearly forgetting that it is a game and should be fun.. the 1st rule of every game.

 

[Pindar]

If a character leaves a group for a big amount of time (ingame or real time) then i either retire him from the group for good or "write him out" as has been mentioned but only after clearing it with the player.. that's a decent thing to do but that GM was just having ghis revenge and clearly forgetting that it is a game and should be fun.. the 1st rule of every game.

One of my players recently left my game for good and now his character is dead.

His character wouldn't have left the group half way through the adventure so he had to stay as an NPC.

Climbing the inside of old rickety clock tower someone dropped a massive bell on the party, a random roll said he was hit, his character never spent any time trying to raise his dodge, his minimal dodge roll was failed and he was flattened.

The rest of the group thought it was pretty bad, but it was random, it was fair and that character had become a permanent NPC.

If he had survived the adventure he would have been retired.

As a GM I don't feel bad about killing players, most party deaths in my game seem to result from PC's not knowing when NOT to fight.

Retreating or regrouping never seems to be an option for them.

We have all been playing for around 20 years and they have still to learn that lesson.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

I just played my first Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game a few weeks ago and I'm hooked. I've wanted to play D&D for a while now, but never had the opportunity to try. I went to a local Meetup.com event, jumped into a game and now, like I said, I'm hooked. We're playing a 3.5 version game. I'm looking for to trying out a 4.0 (the latest version of D&D) game soon.

Anyone else into D&D?

I stopped playing D&D when TSR canned the creator of the game, Gary Gygax. After that, my associates and I dabbled with GDW's Dangerous Journies Game system, also created by Gygax.

Then the late 70's... STTMP and Star Wars made us crave space adventure, and we found it in GDW's Traveller. I still have all my little black books, the snapshot game for interior combat, and the Megatraveller stuff, along with my Martian Metals 15mm miniatiues and the 15mm scale 100 ton Type S Scout that I built.

These days though, I get my thrill from a robot and raygun MMOPRG, Entropia Universe.

I still have my polyhedra dice and my 16th level Druid & AD&D books somewhere though.. just in case.

 

[Alpha_Geek]

If a character leaves a group for a big amount of time (ingame or real time) then i either retire him from the group for good or "write him out" as has been mentioned but only after clearing it with the player...

In one D&D campaign, we had a player character that went awol and then stopped playing.

During the grace period, the DM got tired of playing him as an NPC, and he took an arrow to the head and fell into a river. To give the player an opportunity to resume play should he return, every natural body of water we passed (and a few fountains in cities as well) happened to have a body with an arrow in its head floating around. This continued for about a year of RL time before the DM gave up on the player.

 

[Silvercrest]

My world was based on the idea that magic came into ours and disrupted technology, leading to a general Armageddon. Bits of the old world still existed in this new, AD&D magic world-allowing me to pull all kinds of weird dungeons. I once had a whole party of high levels blowing spell after spell trying to determine the exact function of...a telephone booth. Another time they went on a quest for bullets. (the Drow I mentioned) Damndest thing-apparently balrogs are attracted to gunpowder and like to build up caches of it. Something to do with their mating rituals, as it turned out...

Hey, sounds reasonable to me!

My world was the site of a very old high-tech civilization that collapsed and reverted to medievalism thousands of years ago, after the principles of magic were discovered. There were a lot of pieces of technology buried here and there. My players also had an amulet of the planes and access to several dimensional portals that could take them to all sorts of worlds. So, there was no problem introducing technological gadgets of one sort or another.

At one point, the characters accidentally teleported aboard an old space station and wandered around trying to figure out where they were. There was one door that I didn't allow them to open, because it led to a depresssurized section of the station. I figured that was safe, since they had no means to pick the electronic lock-- but someone used a knock spell on it! They almost died before they got the door closed again.

On multiple occasions, the group went up against this cheesy scientist/warlord named Doktor Krautenstein , who built all manner of attack robots, energy weapons, etc. They captured a lot of toys from him. At one point they picked up a tactical nuke! They wound up using it on Krautenstein in their last encounter, which was appropriate.

Over the years, there were two player characters who were androids. Three characters had VISORs like Geordi La Forge wears (although they could see normally as well). There were a handful of radio headsets, and one woman had a combadge (all on the same frequency, conveniently). One character had a boom-box and a collection of cassette tapes.

One character had a Green Lantern power ring. (To keep him from being too powerful, I gave him Alan Scott's vulnerability, which was wood.)

There were also some items that didn't belong to any one person. There were two powered ground vehicles, and a hovercraft/shuttle. There was a "construction suit" like the one from "Aliens", except that it had a lot more functions built in. Once, the group came into possession of a 17th-century British warship, complete with cannon. (They couldn't figure out how to duplicate the formula for gunpowder, though.) The characters were running their own kingdom at this point, so all this stuff was considered kingdom property.

At the end of the campaign, I had the entire kingdom fall under the influence of Demogorgon and turn against the adventurers. They wound up having to fight all their former allies, who were armed with the vehicles, the battleship, the energy weapons, etc, and most of it was destroyed. At one point, there were two Apparatuses of Kwalish (one good, one bad) in an underwater dogfight, just like in "The Abyss".

Oh, and did I mention the time the characters went through a dimensional rift and met their own players...?

 

[Mistral]

We actually had a game where the Dm asked us to empty our pockets as we arrived at the apt. in question. He made us write down what we had on us(our possesions list) and then handed us character sheets based on US. We were then teleported to the World of Greyhawk(in game, of course). I was about 118 lbs-he gave me a STR of 9! I had to battle a goblin with a freakin plastic comb. Hardest dungeon I ever played in.

 

[Silvercrest]

Yeah, well, in the game I was referring to, my counterpart was killed in combat about five minutes after he showed up.

 

[Davros]

While D&D is behind us, I am still gaming with some of the same people I played D&D with back in 1978.

 

[Mistral]

While D&D is behind us, I am still gaming with some of the same people I played D&D with back in 1978.

I haven't played in years-but I never threw anything out. I still have a city map(and key) composed of 14 pages of centimeter graph paper. The thing covers half the living room floor when put together. And a 3" thick ring binder holds the Key to it. It's dated 1989. Took me 3 years to make, as I fleshed out the place in various dungeons.

 

[SicOne]

It is fun to look back through old D&D notes and maps...and remember a more carefree time, pre-kids, job, mortage, bills...