Pencil and Paper

might i suggest a play by irc game? all we need is a few people who could commit to be online at a certain time for a certain length of time. beats the pbem thing. there are bots out there that let you do dice rolls too, so that would be cool. anyone up for it? i'd be willing to be the guinea pig dm. i think weekends might be best overall. we could stay up later or get up earlier (**shudders at the thought**) to accomodate the most people.

joe

 

Weekends are for drinking and, to quote 40 year old virgin "tackle drunk bitches."

 

burst out laughing at that one! :aaaa: :aaaa: :aaaa:

spot on!

As for me, my best friend introduced me to AD&D in the mid 80's when I was 13-14... we were like privileged ufos in France, almost nobody knew such games even existed! Last time I played as a player was an easy 12 years ago. In 1988 I spent a year in Mexico and introduced the game to new friends who got hooked immediately, was DM of course, making up my own scenarios which they loved (most of the time but not always, lol) and DMd once a year in the summer after that, including Star Wars RPG (1st version).
In France with my friends, we'd all play AD & D as players or DM, within no specific setting, but besides Dungeons each one of us would be the sole DM for another game - so I was the one for Star Wars, my best friend DMd Rolemaster, another friend DMd James bond and later Shadowrun...

Too many stories, but what pops up to mind right now is the one time we broke our record for number of players at the table. We were almost a dozen players! A dozen PCs thus, plus half a dozen followers...

so we're on this boat to get to this evil island...
and a dragon turtle comes out from nowhere...

breathes...

half of the guys had to put their coats on and went home. What remains of the party has to camp on the shore, spending several days casting cure spells - and the only healers are my 7th level Cleric and my best friend's 7th level Druid. BTW those classes were way underpowered back then, my drive was really roleplaying...
As we progressed through the dungeon, we'd leave corpses behind us.... including our own, lost to nasties and traps. I remember my cleric's wife, a half elven fighter thief, trying to pick a door on a greased plank above a spiked pit, with less than 10 hp left, failing her dexterity roll and dying on the poisoned spikes...
Well, my cleric was the only survivor. He took out the final Type IV demon with his mace of disruption and 18/00 ogre strenght gloves, and crawled out the dungeon with one leg missing with the help of a war dog figurine... and as he sailed away the island collapsed and sunk into the sea.

We played much, but not enough to our taste, and with those rules after one million experience points your character was still mid-level. When I last played my cleric he was level 12, could finally cast Blade barrier OR Heal at last. And that was pretty much it, apart from "whack with your mace and be the party medic, if you feel like it half-heartedly attempt dispel magic".

Later I played his wife again, on her own. The DM decided that she was raised and taken to safety in a far away land by a mysterious stranger who vanished, but had no memories of her life. It was very cool, however stupid rules limited a half-elf to fighter level 6 under arcana rules, and to 7 under 2nd edition. You still had to split the xp as a thief, could not weapon finesse or sunder or cleave or anything... the rules are so much better now, make up for much more than "you hit... you miss"! :bored:

Meanwhile my cleric, laden with rising responsibilities in the service of the god Ukko, would be haunted by the memory of his beloved wife... and never ever thought that she was alive somewhere! A mere commune spell would have told him that, but he thought she was buried under a million tons of stone and sand in a faraway sea... I was really looking forward to see that plot unfurl, to dual class him to paladin some day, or to wizard, but then it became too difficult to have everyone together to play, and people started to have different agendas due to - and thanks to, depending on the case - real life.

I also remember a wizard I spent hours making. (well I always spent hours on my character sheets, which I still have, and being a good drawer, I would always draw everybody's characters, swords, ships, whatever...). I was so lucky on the rolls that he had psionics. Could turn invisible and mind blast. Promising! Well, he ended up eaten by wolves, with his eyes pierced, because another PC decided it was ok to almost murder him in his sleep for the ring of invisibility he thought my wizard was carrying ... I didn't think that kind of playing was funny but this friend had the giggles... :evil: oke: :tombstone

Funny to end up writing this all on the net!

 

I'm normally not an evil DM, but the moment that consistantly sticks out in my players' minds from my 17+ years of DMing and still fills me with a bit of cruel glee is the time the party was trying to get a specific magic item that was rumored to be in the nearby lair of a red dragon. The dragon had laired up inside a volcano. So the party is wandering through the lair--a maze of carverns with pools of lava and that sometimes intersect with huge lava flows--fighting the dragon's fire giant and hellhound servants and finally need to rest for the night in what seems to be a fairly defensible cavern. There's a huge lava pool in the room, but only one entrance, so the party figures they can keep a watch on the entrance and let the spellcaster get their spells back.

I roll Spot and Listen for those on watch, but no one notices the red dragon slowly popping its head out of the lava. It breathes, catching the whole party in the blast. Half the party wakes up on fire, the other half not at all. There's a mad scramble to gather the corpses and unconscious party members together while the cleric casts Plane Shift (the sorcerer was dead so Teleport wasn't an option) to get them out of there.

They eventually got healed up and ressurected and went back to kick the dragon's butt, but those players will never again remotely consider actually trying to sleep in a dragon's lair.

 

damn, in my days red dragons were fairly resistant to fire but not to the point of bathing in lava (only their bowels, perhaps)! Did that change with 3rd edition? :scratchhe

Hey, did you have players that failed their saves have to roll saves vs fire for each and every magic item? heh heh :flamed:

 

In 3.x red dragons are completely immune to fire. I'm pretty sure it was the same in 2nd Ed.

Nope, didn't roll for their items. I figured half of them getting burned to death in their sleep was punishment enough.

 

hmm, only have 1st edition monster manuals. It's true they had released a Monster Compendium under 2nd ed... and that's great cause dragons were wimps in 1st edition!