I started playing D&D back in 1978 when I was in Junior High School. One day, during lunch, I walked into the library and saw some guys sitting around a table rolling some weird looking dice. One of them, Dave, was a kid on my soccer team so I went over and asked what they were doing. The answer, of course, was Dungeons & Dragons. Someone handed me the Monster Manual and I spent the next few lunch hours reading it. I proceeded to then spend many a weekend night playing D&D with my friends (Jim, Pat, Rich, Russ, and Wayne) all through junior high and high school with Jim being our main DM.
Today I picked up the newest edition of D&D from Secret Headquarters, one of Tallahassee’s gaming stores.
As you can probably tell from the pictures, certain editions have had a lot more wear and tear than others. 1st and 2nd Editions are probably the editions that I have played the most and, yes, that is my original Players Handbook from 1978 that has survived countless moves, bike crashes (which destroyed my original DMG), and even a little brother who had a brief period of wanting to flush lots of my things down the toilet (something my Basic D&D fell victim to).
When I went off to college, I ended up running games. College was a lot of 1st Edition AD&D and early Forgotten Realms. We had a good core group for a few years of gaming, the Drunks, Thieves, and Idiots (which really was an apt description), before graduation and moves took their toll. During grad school, 2nd Edition came out and I ran a lot of it for a few different groups. In time though, games other than D&D caught my interest…Ars Magica and Shadowrun in particular.
So when 3rd edition first came out, I wasn’t playing D&D but eventually started playing it again. It had probably been a couple of years since I had had a group to game with when one day, and I don’t quite remember how the conversation took the turn it did, some soccer chums started talking about gaming and, before I knew it, I had a gaming group again. We eventually ended up playing 3rd edition and had a couple of very memorable campaigns playing it, our Company H and Ptolus campaigns. We also had a good consistent core of players for both of them.
We gave 4th edition a go for about a year when it came out but it just didn’t really work for me. And, although it isn’t in the pics above, we did the same with Pathfinder with much the same result. Both games, along with 3.5, turned out to be just too heavy on rules, system mastery, and long combats. So we looked elsewhere and ended up playing a good amount of Savage Worlds and had a very memorable Hellfrost campaign.
Player departures took their toll on our group and we’ve bumped around between games and short campaigns for the last couple of years…Savage Worlds, some D&D Retro-clones, Pathfinder Beginner Box, Dungeon World, a bit of a retro-clone of my own concoction. But now we’ve got a couple more players (both new and old), possibly another one joining us in a couple of weeks, and a brand-spankin’ new edition to play with.
I had not been paying all that much attention to all the D&D Next stuff nor really had anyone else in our group…Savage Worlds was going just fine for us. But I started to pay a bit more attention around the time the Starter Set came out. As the most recent blog posts show, we’ve been playing it for the past few weeks. I also downloaded the free Basic D&D pdf and read through it. I was quite pleased and impressed with the approach being taken. In a lot of ways, it looked to me like what 3rd Edition probably should have been.
I’ve actually been quite excited to get a look at this new Players Handbook. With Secret Headquarters being one of the stores getting the early release, I’m now sitting with it in my little paws, skimming through it, enjoying the look and feel of the book, and avoiding doing some household cleaning I need to do before I dive in to read it. I hope I am not disappointed (and that I get the chores done soon).
I do have one question though. What’s up with a staggered release where the Player’s Handbook comes out first? Doesn’t Wizards know that the Monster Manual is supposed come out first and then the Players Handbook and then the DMG? Tradition guys…tradition…
Oh…free Inspiration to whoever can work out how I came up with the title of this post. It really does have a string of “logic” to it that isn’t just because I’ve played all these editions of D&D.
And the winner, no surprise, was our resident pop culture savant, Rachel. The “logic” was essentially that this was a new edition of D&D and wasn’t there some band called New Edition from back in the 80s. Wiki showed not only that but that the band was formed in 1978, the same year I started playing D&D. They had a song whose title was used as the title of this blog post which seemed apropos (if not completely accurate given that I started playing four years after D&D started). Taadaa! The logic for the post title. 😉
The look of near utter shock on Rachel’s face as she realized that I had, indeed, made a reference to the band New Edition was priceless!