"What Is Best In Life?"
As I mentioned above, the first time I got to experience Dungeons & Dragons was when my friend Dave brought his 3rd Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual into school over lunch. I heard that he was going to get us to play this new thing called a roleplaying game and I was hooked.
It turned out that my first time with Dungeons & Dragons was pretty much the same as it is for everyone. We made some characters which were probably entirely inaccurate and then sat down to kill some monsters and exercise our power fantasies, slaying everything that we could, overthrowing 'evil' warlords and piling up lots of treasure. It was almost as if the spirit of Conan was channelled through us.
Things then developed a little bit as we got to learn more about what Dungeons & Dragons was. We played through a short little campaign where we were told to go to a village and get rid of a corrupt warlord who had taken over and threatened to kill someone important (probably a princess...forgive us, we were kinda young). I distinctly remember the warlord taking the form of a Warhammer 40,000 Dark Eldar Archon (the one with the weird face) and we decided to beat him up and throw him down the well...mature right?
At this time I do remember a few more things like getting the Eberron book from a friend and becoming besotted with the Warforged during a transition between editions of D&D but apart from that, the books ended up mainly being there for us to ogle over until we finally got the time to dive into a proper campaign.
Paladins, Pirate Battles & Half-Dryads
That is where the 3.5 Editions books came in! Now owned by someone who actually cared about adventures (hey there Tom!) we actually sat down to play through a proper campaign.
I can't remember the exact path of the campaign and its stories but I can recall some of the key moments from it after that...
One time we were all sitting around to play D&D and got to a harbour somewhere and had to assault a pirate ship. We were all told to leave the room to go and buy some snacks and when we returned our Dungeon Master had built this awesome ship out of tiles and books so it was almost 3D (let's say 2.5D)! We had a really fun time battling on that. I remember our Wizard, Cassius, threw a big fireball at the mast and brought it down and I clambered up onto the deck and battled against the Dark Elf swashbuckler who was at the helm.
My brother was playing this brutal and deadly Barbarian too at the time. During this particular encounter, he was shot by a harpoon which went straight through him. Instead of howling in pain like we'd thought he'd do he decided to let the harpoon-shooter reel him in and then proceeded to kill him as the poor fellow panicked. He seemed to have a lot of the cinematic moments thinking back on it,
Another time we were fighting against some spellcaster who had turned him against us using a terrifying spell. We then had to fight the spellcaster and her minions whilst also having to deal with my brother who now had glowing red eyes! We did finally snap him out of it but I distinctly remember this also being the time we lost one of our characters for the first time. As the tunnels behind us collapsed, the Wizard was crushed as he was being carried out by my brother - it was pretty shocking!
There were so many other fun moments we had playing 3.5. I battled a Vampire atop a tower during a storm and used Turn Undead to send him flying off the top of it to his doom. My friend Jack played a Half-Dryad Druid who decided to turn an entire tavern into a writhing mass of roots to trap another adventuring party who were sent to kill us on the orders of our nemesis. It was genuinely awesome fun and I still remember both Uther Lightbringer (you can tell I was obsessed) and Durin Ironfoot (my Dwarf Ranger) fondly.
A Time Of Tiles & Tokens
Some time passed and we were soon introduced to a new edition of D&D. 4th Edition was sleeker, had cool artwork and featured those all-important power cards which every character had to print off and use!
My friends Tom and Matt were much more capable in the maths department then the rest of us were and so they took the Monster Manuals and turned them into a series of tables so that we could roll level-appropriate encounters to fight out.
This then spawned us creating characters which were pretty much pure mechanical killing machines but they developed personalities of their own as we powered through the levels, getting to Paragon level as it was known then, much sooner than we would have done if we'd just played it normally.
I played a Wizard called Balthasar whilst my friends played the likes of a Dwarf who zipped around the map like he was blinking in and out of reality, an angry Dwarf Fighter we called Exa (axe backwards, get it?) and a Warlord who was there to just make the Dwarf Fighter do whatever he could twice as hard and with more brutality!
We played through a lot of fun encounters with these characters and actually spent a lot of time investing in many of the supplemental books for 4th Edition. We owned most of the Monster Manuals, Player Handbooks, Dungeon Master's Guides and beyond that books focused on the different power archetypes. We even delved into the Essentials line when it came out.
Say what you will about 4th Edition, it really was the version of the game we played the most. I still have all the tiles, power cards and such that we sat and cut out/built for that edition sitting in a box somewhere. We basically made that version of D&D our hobby and absolutely loved it.
Looking back on it, I do miss the roleplaying element which was taken out of the experience for us back then but it was so much easier, with a fluctuating group of moody teenagers, to play something purely mechanical and more like a board/war game than it was to do anything long-running and story-based.
A core element of 4th Edition which still sticks with me is how they were able to make a coherent world now known as the Nentir Vale. It had gods, identifiable regions that we plotted out on a map and whilst other realms did exist, it was really easy to get our heads around this and find ourselves absorbed in the world. I still know the pantheon of Gods from that world better than I do any of the others! Avandra was my favourite, the Goddess of adventure and change. I loved the idea of such an inquisitive entity like that existing in the world.
Up until two years ago we still read through those books from time to time, thinking about the cool moments we'd had and even considered going back into it now and then to play it the way we'd done as teenagers.
But, Dungeons & Dragons had different plans for us.
I'll be back in Part Two to talk about time spent playtesting rules and what exactly brought me back into Dungeons & Dragons with its current edition.
If you enjoyed this article looking back at my time with D&D then maybe consider checking out and helping me design my Dragon Companion Rules for 5th Edition!
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