| Great Gaming - Old School |
[Jun. 29th, 2007|10:25 am] |
Thursday night is “Guy’s night” for some friends and me. We do a fairly standard rotation of who picks the activity. Normally it’s a board game or “just hang out”.
Last night, as somewhat of a surprise, we played OD&D. It was a 1979 copyright version from a boxed set that seemed to be somewhere between White box and Moldvay Basic. Our friend picked it up for $1.99 at a thrift store. (OK, in researching this I see that it’s Basic Set, “D&D/Original 2” according to the rpg.net index.) This is atypical in that most of us usually play the current versions of D&D and other RPGs.
We used hardcore ability generation: 3d6, no rerolls, straight down the line. (Technically, 2 players got full rerolls due to having no stats above 10.) No automatic max hp at first level were given either. Character generation took all of 20-30 minutes for 6 players and that was slowed down mostly by there being only one book to use for equipment purchase and class ability review. We were “auto-leveled” to 3rd which merely meant more hit points and a couple extra spells for the spell casters.
From there it was on to The Caves of Chaos; the fun part of B2 “The Keep on the Borderlands” module. We raided the goblin cave* in a good old fashioned hacky way, as well as taking on exaggerated stereotypes for the roleplaying interaction. I played a somewhat noble Human Fighting-man motivated to protect our Con 5, 3 hp Cleric. One of the first things we did was split the party, of course. We killed Goblins and an Ogre, with only one casualty. We were given modern day leeway with that where he was placed in the “unconscious and bleeding” mode.
We started off really silly, but as the game continued some of us began feeling attachment to the characters so we played more conscientiously. We had developed some sort of personality for the characters as well as party dynamics. The party was low on hp and exhausted of spells, so we made a “tactical withdrawal” in order to rest and recuperate. So what started off as a last minute potential one-shot now has a chance at continuing.
I haven’t had this much pure unadulterated fun in an RPG in a long time. It was awesome.
*Technically we went for the “closest cave on the left” which happened to be the Goblins’ cave. |
|
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bobmungovan's journal