Dungeons and Dragons?

[cavalierlwt Profile]

Did any of you play Dungeons and Dragons at some point in your life? How recently?
I was just wondering if that kind of game survived in the advanced video game era of today.
If you did play it, did you play it openly, or did you play it in CIA-style secrecy?
Or were you the guy/gal who beat up D&D players and took their lunch money ---Bam! Pow! Heh, heh, roll a savings throw against that motherf---er! Should have worn your +4 cloak of bully protection!

[CodeRed68 Profile]

I played D&D regularly. Early to the mid-80's. Me and my friends would gather at one of our houses to play and also join community groups that would gather every other riday night on and off, at the public library, and play all night.
I don't know if i would say i am embarrased by that or not. I thought it was fun and a great passage of time. Especially when you are 11-18 yrs old like we were.
You needed a lot of imagination to play, obviously. I remember taking pride in my drawings of everyone's character for them and of NPC's (non player characters).
We then branched out to other role-playing games like D&D. One was set in the future called "Traveler" and another was based on comic book style heroes.

[Rand0m Profile]

never played it, don't plan on it.

[SavageParrot Profile]

Was the game any better than the god awful film they made about it?

I sure hope so...

[=ender= Profile]

CodeRed, was that hero one Champions or Marvel SH (other)? Champions had an awesome system, though I only played it a handful of times.

Yep, I played D&D. First time I did was back in fifth grade and I loved that you could do so much more than the crappy boardgames everyone else was playing (being able to fight against monsters and search for treasure and being a hero as compared with pushing a car around a straight path to see how many kids you end up having before you die... yeah, no contest for someone in fifth grade). It took skill, intelligence, and imagination to play, something that a lot of boardgames can't say for themselves.

I kept playing on and off (and at some points fairly regularly) until college. After college, some buds and I decided to sit down and try to get a weekly game going which lasted for a few months. That was a lot of fun: beer, scotch, snacks, and dice rolling.

Nobody ever bullied me about playing D&D though it did get banned from my school (early 80's... the game was thought by many Christian groups to be Satanic and that it would corrupt anyone that played it). Then again, no one has ever been a bully to me. I know that the game is still being played today and is still popular (they just released a new version last year) but I doubt it'll ever be as much of a hit as it once was. My guess is that video games really have cut into the sales of D&D and other Tabletop RPGs (it's even funny to have to write it that way... years ago, it was just "RPG"... everyone knew it meant "tabletop"... sort of a clue that video games have pushed them into a more niche category).

We still play D&D today... sort of. Every now and again we dust off our copies of Neverwinter Nights and download a module and play for a few nights. Since all my good friends live everwhere but here, it's the closest we can get to that old social dice rolling.

[=ender= Profile]

Originally posted by SavageParrot
Was the game any better than the god awful film they made about it?

I sure hope so...

The movie was... ugh. Don't even get me started. As a huge fan of films in general and as a dried up old D&D player, that movie just plain pisses me off that it was even made. Game was fun, movie was... torture.

[Chin_Sack Profile YIM]

I played all through Middle/High School. Heck, we played at school for hrs befor out Mid turms, Finnal exams started. Dont play it much anymore sence all my buds left an did there oun things.

Ones in erupe<sp> for the navy/airforce, can never remember wich one hes in. A nothers in the army, back in the states for a few years or so. But hes like 4 hrs away still. An the last 2 friends I had moved to NYC. So now im pritty much alone lol.

The guys still want to get to geather an play again. we had 2 good DMs out of the 6-7 of us. Its just hard to get everyone in the same spot, when everyone is so far from everyone else. One of the guys has a mission all set up an everything. Just everyones all to buissy to free up time for 2-3 days of D&D.

haha, one day my mother was at work, an D&D came up some how durring some talk with her friends. They got worried I guess. An asked my mother if she was afraid the we would come up stairs one night, an kill her in her sleep. Everyone get a good chuckle when ya bring up the satanic connections to D&D

[nameless Profile]

played first d&d and, after this, ad&d at my time at university. i'm still playing it now, but only once every two or three month when our group decide to meet, cause, as ended stated earlier, we are shattered around the country cause of our jobs. it's still real fun to us even we are all in our end-30's to mid-40's. i really like it to take out my 28th level sorcerer and throwing some meteor storms or words of power at the enemy

[Allister Fiend Profile Website]

Originally posted by cavalierlwt
Did any of you play Dungeons and Dragons at some point in your life? How recently?
I was just wondering if that kind of game survived in the advanced video game era of today.
If you did play it, did you play it openly, or did you play it in CIA-style secrecy?
Or were you the guy/gal who beat up D&D players and took their lunch money ---Bam! Pow! Heh, heh, roll a savings throw against that motherf---er! Should have worn your +4 cloak of bully protection!

I used to love that stuff.

I used to play with my friends but I have not played since high school.

We used to play D&D but would also play Battletech a good bit.

I then got into the computer games based off of D&D like Ultima and some others, I just don't have time for long games anymore, that's why I now play games like BF2, so I can get my quick fix and kill people without having to solve anything or remember who said what, when, and where.

Allister Fiend

[=ender= Profile]

Awesome, Allister... we used to play a LOT of Battletech/Citytech (back when the Macross/Robotech style mechs were still in the books... they've had to change what they look like since due to a lawsuit way back when). Really fun times with that game: we had a lot of alternate rules to use when games would go too long.

[PraiseA||ah Profile]

I played AD&D in college. I'm a late bloomer I guess. It was definitely fun and I didn't hide the fact that I played. We would buy beer, roll the dice and let our imaginations roam. Man! I really miss those years and the fun we had. Our DM was awesome! We would act out our parts for clarification which really added to the game. I even carved a face and some runes on a staff I found while camping in real life for a wizard I was playing to use as a prop. I bought a sword from a Faire as well, which I still have. The staff, alas, is long gone.
"You swing at the Ork how? Your potion of strength is where in your backpack, exactly? Because you are carrying 250 lbs. of loot right now and are you sure you put that potion in easy reach?"
The DM had a great way of interpreting the dice rolls into real terms. This all led to lots of great and memorable adventures that I treasure today. I played with several groups after that party dissolved and to this day every once in a while people will reminisce and comment on how much fun it was and how it would be great to roll another character up and do it again.
*sigh* Fantasy.... how much fun it can be...

[Jim0322 Profile]

I started playing D&D in the late 1970s and played it and other RPGs on and off for a good 15 years.

[gowhitesox99 Profile]

I played a couple times in junior high, just never caught on with the friends I hung out with. Mostly we played sports all the time after school.....

[cavalierlwt Profile]

I played in the mid 80s, in a little group of D&D players who treated it like a secret society. Really secret. We had 5-6 players at any given time, and when we lost one (moved away, got job where they worked every weekend, etc) we would *very* carefully replace him. We would scope out some friend or classmate, and then find a way to invite him without spilling the beans that we played D&D.
It's funny, most of the group would definitely not be considered nerds, in fact one was the captain of the football team. It's so different now, being a nerd or geek isn't the same stigma that it used to be.
It was a great time though, working with those stacks of book, dice, paper. I think being a D&D player was great training for all the legal documents that you are forced to deal with later in life. Playing D&D, you learned to read the sections of the books that involved your character very thoroughly, looking for things that help you, or avoiding things that could get your character killed. It was definitely a different era compared to today.

[cavalierlwt Profile]

Originally posted by SavageParrot
Was the game any better than the god awful film they made about it?

I sure hope so...

Nothing like that movie, really nothing to do with that movie. The weird thing about D&D is that it evolved and was changed by the players themselves in the 70s. There really wasn't much in the way of a commerical D&D game in the 70s, it was kind of a home brewed game, popular with college kids at first. There was a guy that started it all, but it took off on it's own after that.
Imagine if BF1942/BF2 were open source and each clan or group just made changes to reflect their style of gameplay. It was pretty unique.

ever see The Summoer Geeks? hilarious!
http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/6024/
This has to be the most accurate portrayal of D&D ever.