Monday 1 June 2009

Increase Your Hoard Size

7 comments:

sumptos devil s advocate said...
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Battybattybats said...

Having run a weekly (and for a long time daily) Dungeons and Dragons Council of Wyrms campain (where the players all play dragons as their characters) some years back, my most popular and memorable campain in fact as it ran for many years, this cracks me up and yet makes me nostalgic at the same time.

:)

Anonymous Woman said...

i miss D&D.

Not enough to move on beyond 3.5 though. i used to make fun of edition hold-outs. Now i've become one.

Zoe Brain said...

I used the original 3 books plus Greyhawk. Some parts of Blackmoore.
Not Eldritch Wizardry though.

Some bits from "The Strategic Review", which later became "The Dragon".

That was when TSR was still Tactical Studies Rules.

Those were the rules that were used in the "Starship Brillo" incident. I refuse to elaborate. You can Google it.

Then along came "Basic D&D", and "Advanced D&D". I ran a "Basic D&D" competition a long time ago, since not everyone was familiar with AD&D. But I added additions from "Greyhawk".

If you can get a copy of the original "Empire of the Petal Throne", do so.

Later, I used TFT - "The Fantasy Trip", which evolved eventually into GURPS. Hobbits with poison blowguns and lassos were particularly nasty.

Battybattybats said...

Actually regarding gender and roleplaying games, I noticed some interesting things.

In the 80's and 90's every girl or woman I knew on their first attempt at roleplaying created a male character. As i introduced quite a few people to the game i found it astonishing that my saying 'you can play a female charater if you want' was always knocked back. Once with 'maybe for my second chacter perhaps once i've got the hang of it'. In fact one was utterly astonished that you could play female characters or that anyone would want to!

During that same time a small number of male players tried female characters, but not as their first characters. Often with a jokey-ness to it at first but often they swiftly became characters important to the players. Yet as I've kept in touch with some of them most of these people haven't turned out thus far to be transgender. I usually ran games rather than played characters, but when i did they were about 3/4 male.. partly because even with the example of others it took me a while to work up the courage and was still very much in denial about myself with myself.

But Council of Wyrms where all the players were a whole different non-humanoid species? One a few tried it and got over intial reluctance it was massively popular with my gaming circle. The female players had no issues playing female characters and one male player even created a sexless dragon with my permission just cause he thought it'd be cool to explore a genderless dragon character.

Since the turn of the century though I've noticed far more female players happy to play female characters, but there's still more females playing males than males playing females, just not more females playing males than females playing females anymore.

I find that really interesting. A measure of the effect of the increase in strong female lead characters in fantasy fiction perhaps? But why then was it that back in the early 90's that in a mixed group of male and female gamers the only ones playing female characters were males? Cismales at that afaik.

Of course my experiences may be a poor sample, but i introduced more than 20 people to roleplaying so it wasn't tiny.

Anonymous Woman said...

i got started as a child with the original three books, tutored underneath an edition hold-out. During my teens it was 2nd Edition, and then i walked away several years before TSR collapsed.

3rd brought me back, and i played with a pretty aggressive playing schedule (weekly or more) right up to a little over a year and a half ago.

The loss of the printed forms of Dragon and Dungeon were a rough blow. Gygax's death flattened my spirit. 4th killed my desire. Like 2nd Ed. hold-outs, i just have too much money wrapped up in 3/3.5 books (like, literally everything).

i have always been obsessed with Greyhawk. i own a lot of old edition stuff for it that i would up-convert for new players.

i contacted the creator of the Tomb of Horrors map, talked him into sending me the original un-keyed file for it, and then spent an embarrassing amount of money having it blown up full-color, 4' by 8' size for my group.

Half the party died.

Good times.

Laserlight said...

I ued whatever was around in 1978-82, but with enough stuff cut, bolted, welded and sanded that it was probably more patch than original. Then I got into Champions, and then I got out of college, and that was pretty much the end of my roleplaying until MMORPGs (if you feel those count as roleplaying). We had M and F players in our college group but I don't recall anyone playing the opposite gender. In my MMO, about half my characters are female.