theruleslawyer
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Dying & Dumbfounded: How was old-school D&D FUN!?
🕑 Added 2025-06-23 04:18:32 +0000 UTC
Comments
ronaldsf aka The Rules Lawyer
oh that's awesome. definitely comment on the YT vid!
ronaldsf aka The Rules Lawyer
Little kid me always included an Elf because they could cast a spell AND wear plate mail! And I didn't expect to reach Level 2 anyway so who cared that they needed more XP to level up. They were gonna die anyway LOL
Jon Winter-Holt
Loving the casual era! I played red box D&D briefly as a 9 year old but I don’t remember it being quite *this* deadly. Perhaps my dad pulled punches! I do remember “elf” or “dwarf” being an entire character class concept though :) My next experience was playing as a teen in the AD&D era. I played 1e and then DMed 2e when it came out. We definitely had some character death but yeah, I fudged some rolls to prevent TPKs! Nobody wanted to be the healer but they were an absolutely essential member of the party.
An interested party
Your experience is exactly why I run a Red Box D&D game at conventions. I bring 20 pre-made characters and hand out 4 or 5 to each player. When one dies—and trust me, they will—their next character steps in like they were always there. I run the Red Box set because I love TTRPGs. It’s a chance to give people a sense of the hobby’s history—and to show them that THAC0 isn’t even the worst thing about early editions. While I gleefully send their characters to early graves, I explain THAC0, share how the Red Box arguably launched the entire TTRPG hobby, and remind them how this game went from “Save vs. poison or die” to a multi-million dollar industry.
