🎲🐉What Your First D&D Adventure Was Really Teaching You

Comments · 357

• JL

  @JLMcFarlin · 4 months ago

  TSR knew their business, and they knew their audience, that's for sure.

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• AL

  @alumroot · 4 months ago

  U1 is the “we would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids” module

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• LU

  @lugaruclone · 4 months ago

  Holmes is the biggest inspiration for what I do... making the game accessible to kids and non gamers.

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• MI

  @michaelkraemer5846 · 4 months ago

  Another Tuesday, another absolute banger of a deep dive! Thank you for the content and inspiration!

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• RO

  @robjones3818 · 4 months ago

  22 seconds under the limit, you say?  Lookin forward to every moment of it.   Thanks as always, Martin.  Let's go!

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• JO

  @jonson1338 · 4 months ago (edited)

  Started playing before modules. &nbsp;We had the three location set up from the beginning. &nbsp;There was the dungeon/cave complex, a town in which we were based and the route we traveled from one to the other. &nbsp;Primary focus of the DM was on the dungeon in the beginning. As time passed and the DM mastered that, more attention got paid to the town and the route. This was a natural and understandable progression.<br><br>Initially, the DM had to stock the dungeon, learn the mechanics and manage play. &nbsp; That was a lot of work since ours had to do it all from the manuals. &nbsp;He hadn&apos;t played it before; he had no easy direct access to people who played it before to ask questions; he had no video to watch. &nbsp;As he figured that out, he realized the need to expand the town. &nbsp; We started with a store for supplies and a tavern. &nbsp;This expanded as we began to want and need different types of stuff. &nbsp;We &nbsp;needed a stable for horses. &nbsp;Repair places for wagons. We needed places to assess, sell and buy magical items, books, gems, etc. &nbsp;We needed a bank. &nbsp;We needed a place to live in. &nbsp;And so on. Game play in the dungeon itself &nbsp;determined what was added to our town and how much time we spent in the town.<br><br>That happened gradually. &nbsp;Not all at once. &nbsp;Our DM had a job. &nbsp;He loved gaming, but he wasn&apos;t putting in 4 hours a day on this stuff. And almost all of it came from his imagination. &nbsp;There were no templates. He couldn&apos;t look to see what others had done and modify that. It was pretty much ground up for him.<br><br>To be clear, there was no map of the town. &nbsp;There were places in the town we could go to and interact, but there was no layout. &nbsp;The DM knew that the town needed to become a detailed encounter space at some point, but there were other more interesting encounter spaces that needed to be created first.<br><br>Focus on overland travel didn&apos;t happen until we moved on to the Temple of the Frog. &nbsp;We had to travel from the town to the temple. We used the board from Outdoor Survival (and survival was the focus.) Encounters were randomly generated. &nbsp;Our DM saw that you could do set pieces in overland, but most of his time was needed to learn how to manage the temple encounters. &nbsp;This was an organized community with lots of NPCs. &nbsp;Getting the game to flow in overland travel didn&apos;t happen here for us because our DM needed to prioritize game play at the temple. And it was clear that while overland travel should be part of the game it was never going to be a primary focus.<br><br>Finishing the temple, the DM put together a wizard&apos;s tower. &nbsp; This was a series of set pieces as we progressed up the tower. &nbsp;The DM spent all his time designing and thinking how to manage this. &nbsp;Having no time to figure out how to do overland travels, he built in a portal to get us to the tower.<br><br>My point is that two things were clear to us &nbsp;playing the game early on. &nbsp;First, a base, campaigning and overland travel were all part of the game. &nbsp;Second, the amount of prep work needed to get to the point where you had a proper balance of the three &nbsp;was huge. &nbsp;Providing a module such as B2 that got beginners &nbsp;to that balance quicker was obvious to anyone who thought about it in a serious way.

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• ET

  @ethan1142028 · 4 months ago

  I&apos;m a late millennial. I learned of TTRPGs mostly through 90s cRPGs first, then D&amp;D in Highschool. Two of my teachers ran games for the students after school. One was from the classic era, running some mix of OD&amp;D, B/X, and AD&amp;D (I think, they were all photocopies of photocopies re-stapled and bound many times over). The younger teacher ran 4e because it was new at the time. For us kids, we gravitated towards 4e because it was flashy and video game like. I lost the hobby after college for about 5-6 years, then got back into D&amp;D with a new group that was playing 5e. Played a few campaigns and ran my own with them for around 3 years. I new something was wrong but just couldn&apos;t put my finger on it. I discovered the OSR a few years ago and have never looked back. I even wrote my own B/X compatible game that I use to run my games now, and I run lots of these older modules through that system. The late 70s / early 80s really was the peak of the hobby in my mind, and I don&apos;t think I&apos;ll ever play or run a &apos;modern&apos; ttrpg game again.

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• GE

  @gerrylake · 4 months ago

  B2 is chaotic fun, but U1 is a brilliant module and perhaps my favorite of all time.

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• JO

  @JohahnDiechter · 4 months ago

  Versimilitude was the word you were looking for.

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• BR

  @bryanstephens3792 · 4 months ago

  when fighting Monsters you need to Know when to hold them, when to fold from them, &amp; RUN!

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• TO

  @toddapplegate3988 · 4 months ago

  Exploration was the key element to the early game. Not only the physical but also the psychological. We wrote our own modules very early because we had a lack of access. The B1 and B2 modules initially were our templates. The example is looking through a room and searching for traps but we developed early a humanoid interaction issue with NPC that had bad motives and monsters that could fool the group as a human.

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• DU

  @Dunker79 · 4 months ago

  Yea!!!! New video from DRa1!!!🎉

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