About a year after DnD 3.5e came out, my parents gifted me the books, having no real idea what it was. I think they thought it was a choose your own adventure book, like the other sorts of 'adventure game' books my father was fond of giving me when I was... 12? 13? Somewhere in that age range. If you try and jump over the pit, turn to page 3, if you look around for something to help you cross, turn to page 12, that kind of thing.
Of course the dnd books were nothing like that. I read them cover to cover, twice. Then barely having any idea what I was doing, my friend and I each rolled up level 1 sorcerers, tried to fight against some giant rats, and admitted we could not really figure out how to play.
That was my only experience of the game in childhood. But I kept the books. And kept reading them. I can't really say why, I don't remember. Back then there was barely any internet where I lived. We got 2/kb per second. If that. But eventually we moved to the big city. And there, at around 18 years old, I had the pleasure of meeting some people and discovering that a 'local game store' was a thing that existed. And I promptly took my DnD books and my Ebberon Campaign Setting(purchased fresh from the store) and tried to run a campaign.
I walked up to people and talked. I put a post on the physical newsboard with my phone number, both at the game store and the community college. People called me, surprisingly. I told them what level, what campaign setting, and to be at the gamestore at X time and date.
I had eleven people show up. This was my first mistake. We quickly got into combat on one of those fun gnomish(?) rail trains. That was when I learned that players had built characters out of books I didn't own. There were more books?!
All told, that campaign lasted two sessions. But during it I met some people who I am still friends with to this day. I didn't really learn at the time-- I assumed the playercount and the system were at fault. I promptly moved to running Theater of the Mind mutants and masterminds for years, quite successfully, and formed a group of players from high school friends. We all grew into young adulthood together.
One of my friends wanted to run DnD, and wanted me to play. Thus under his direction, I got a better grasp on how to run. I played his campaign for three years, then went on to run some of my own. We saw the rise and fall of Fourth Edition together. A shitshow that was. Followed by Fifth Edition. In both cases, my group and I wanted none of that. We'd always made our own adventures, even I quickly ditched Eberron and took to drawing fantasy continents, stealing bits from the Eberron book and Forgotten realms only to add them to my own world.
But that sort of 'make it yourself' was not the new DnD. The atmosphere of the gamestore changed. Tournament games by the RPGA started to run. I tried one, and found it horridly distasteful in structure and narrow in scope. What do you mean we couldn't DO STUFF other than what was in the module? Ugh. It took me a long time to grasp that there were other ways of playing, and that my way didn't have to be the 'right and only way.'
Anyway. Ran 3.5 and played it for years. Started reading every edition just to peek. Fell in love with Gygax's personal touch in the 1E ADND books, though much of his running methods, I disagree with or do differently. Fell in love with OSRIC, of all things, back when the 1E books were no available at all in print.
About to go run my first campaign in a few years, with some of those same friends from 15 years ago. Using OSRIC as the base, because free pdf and I prefer the combat procedures in it, and pulling from the 1st Ed books as needed for stuff OSRIC doesn't cover. It will probably be great fun.
Welcome to the blog? I don't know where I was going originally with this.
