Head Long Into the Ghosts of Gaming

Head Long Into the Ghosts of Gaming

I told a friend of mine several times over the course of several months that I was wanting to play AD&D and we had discussed which version. I had played 1st, 2E, 3.0, and 3.5. He was stuck in the past of playing 2E so that is what we agreed on.

Now I have little recent experience as a DM so I was needing to come into this game with this understanding from the players.

We finally started a group of myself my friend, and one of his friends. Three total at the beginning. I already had a dungeon from a previous Dungeons and Dragons Basic game I had ran about a year before with a friend and his son.

My friend was playing a thief, and the other player a fighter.

I had time to get the basic campaign setting setup, the players would have just arrived in a port city called Fisher's Bay and with the help of a printed sheet of NPC names and a sheet with Urban encounters on it.

Over the course of at least four sessions everything was going good.  I had to go back and bring the dungeon I had created up to 2E for the monsters.

Players were having fun and I was feeling good about my DMing. 

And then on the fourth session a friend had stopped buy. He stepped in to RP a priest, who had a Scottish accent and his name was Marc Otter, but Thor changed his name to Father Angus and hilarity ensued.

We invited him to create a PC and play with us so he started a Wizard and then left.

The next session my friend had brought in another person to play a priest which the PC's desperately needed. 

After we had helped him to create his PC (and the wizard) we started playing. I had bought the D&D5E starter set and I read the beginning of the Phandelver module and adjusted it for the campaign.

After I got the new players into the game, Father Angus needed the player characters to escort a cart of provisions to a poor town. Well after encountering a goblin ambush a few miles down the road the thief gave thee priest 600GP to go buy the best armor he could where, even though they had just met.

So the priest left and the fighter, the thief, and the wizard followed a trail back to a cave where the goblins had their base. The three players decided to go inside, though the wizard relunctly, he suggested starting a fire and smoke out the goblins but instead they all three went into the cave (without the priest mind you).

At one point there was a wooden bridge that had a goblin on it and the thief got up there and they both exchanged arrows from their short bows which have a ROF of 2/1 (2 arrows per round).

The goblin not only rolled high like four times in a row, his damage also rolled high.

The thief died and the player got pissed. He said that this module is imbalanced and that is why he doesn't like modules (though he owned a whole box of them that he used to run his players through *rolls eyes*).

The wizard had said that 2E was broken and we had a lot of house rules. He was disappointed. After my friend did some more grumbling I packed up and left (I had to go anyway).

I was disappointed in my friend for his reaction to his series of bad decisions and sad for the wizard player that his PC had died (he had also been taken out during the goblin ambush earlier but healed by the priest before he left to go back to town).

So what have I learned?

• The main thing is that I see where 3.0 had derived from. Its focus was to help insure the player character survival even at early levels. This has been a continuing focus with other d20 games that have germinated since 3.0.
• Player Character death is an ugly business.
• Players who are stuck on 2E and can't move on shouldn't get pissy when their characters die because look at the system you are using to play a RPG!
• 2E is very antiquated and this is even more apparent after reading and playing 3.0, 3.5, and reading 13th Age (which is even more modern and streamlined than previous d20 games).

In the end, if we continue, I already have a plan in place to bring back the dead characters. If they decide to play new characters then I am not going to dumb down the encounters for their sakes.

If you want to play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2E then you, as a player, must be ready to take on the consequences of your actions and the results it brings.