RPGs day two: AD&D 2e
May. 21st, 2020 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishVia James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them.
I met my best friend for 7th and 8th grades when we bonded over the Forgotten Realms novel I was reading. Michael had the base AD&D second edition books. He also had the D&D computer game Pool of Radiance, so I got to see how the mechanics worked in practice. But with only the two of us, we didn't actually get to play as such. I then spent the next few years RPG-adjacent: near-misses with Mechwarrior and Rifts, friends who had D&D groups that didn't need another member, etc.
I didn't have my first actual tabletop RPG experience until the summer after ... tenth? grade, when I ended up at a week-long Boy Scout Science & Energy camp. It turns out that the necessary ingredients were a bunch of geeks in close proximity with not much else going on in their spare time, and an experienced and bored DM who'd brought his AD&D books with him.
I started out playing a fighter/mage who was a dead ringer for Elric of Melniboné. After a TPK on Wednesday night I got reincarnated as a kender, which was a heck of a lot more fun. I remember nothing about the mechanics, and very little about the game itself, except using a Flaming Sphere to free the rest of the party from a giant spiderweb, but the sheer exhilaration of the adventure and the storytelling stayed with me.
I met my best friend for 7th and 8th grades when we bonded over the Forgotten Realms novel I was reading. Michael had the base AD&D second edition books. He also had the D&D computer game Pool of Radiance, so I got to see how the mechanics worked in practice. But with only the two of us, we didn't actually get to play as such. I then spent the next few years RPG-adjacent: near-misses with Mechwarrior and Rifts, friends who had D&D groups that didn't need another member, etc.
I didn't have my first actual tabletop RPG experience until the summer after ... tenth? grade, when I ended up at a week-long Boy Scout Science & Energy camp. It turns out that the necessary ingredients were a bunch of geeks in close proximity with not much else going on in their spare time, and an experienced and bored DM who'd brought his AD&D books with him.
I started out playing a fighter/mage who was a dead ringer for Elric of Melniboné. After a TPK on Wednesday night I got reincarnated as a kender, which was a heck of a lot more fun. I remember nothing about the mechanics, and very little about the game itself, except using a Flaming Sphere to free the rest of the party from a giant spiderweb, but the sheer exhilaration of the adventure and the storytelling stayed with me.