Quote from: Cole;410104Sounds good to me. I scarcely met a Chaosium game I didn't like.

Same thing here.

I've never stopped playing D&D.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;410157I've never stopped playing D&D.

RPGPundit

Yeah, the OP is kind of unclear on that point to me. I never really stopped playing D&D either, as a matter of fact. I just started playing a lot of different games, up to the point D&D became just one game amongst many. I was one of these Frenchmen who didn't get onboard with the program that it was somehow cool to bash AD&D as a stupid game at the time.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410157I've never stopped playing D&D.

RPGPundit

Was D&D your first RPG? If so, how did you find and start playing your second?

I never stopped playing AD&D and played RQ3 concurrently.  What made RQ such an eye-opening experience was that it exposed me to new concepts in RPG design, such as:

• No character classes and levels
• Character development was variable and not the same across all the character's skills and abilities
• Static hit points
• Hit locations, and hit points for each location
• Attributes had more than one functionality
• Skill-based system

Quote from: Benoist;410159Yeah, the OP is kind of unclear on that point to me. I never really stopped playing D&D either...

I did not expect so many people to be still playing D&D. My bad. LOL!

More seriously, I thought a lot of people who would be on a forum that is neither ENWorld nor a WotC forum would consist of a majority of non-D&D players. Clearly, I made an assumption, with all that such entails.

That having been said, I also did not consider that so many people would not have started out by playing D&D in the first place. That threw me a curveball.

On the other hand, what I most suspected really has been born out by the answers to my question, Mainly, that people who many different RPGs get something different out of every different RPG that they play.

Quote from: Walking Paradox;410180On the other hand, what I most suspected really has been born out by the answers to my question, Mainly, that people who [play] many different RPGs get something different out of every different RPG that they play.

Oh absolutely. Completely my case here. Though D&D is a sort of middle ground between RPG experiences to me (which makes it into its own thing also), where you can have some horror ambiance during a game, then an epic battle, then god slaying end of the world scenarios, then exploration, say, each different RPG has the advantage to refine some of these experiences to make them into their own games.

Call of Cthulhu does Lovecraftian horror, WoD does supernatural conspiracies where you play the monster, and so on, so forth.

RPGs will also provide different dressings, if you want variations from D&D's trappings, or don't care for them at all, for that matter. Epic space fantasy, Star Wars. Transhumanism, Eclipse Phase. Cartoons, Toons. And so on, so forth.

My first RPG was the leader advancement rules we cobbled together for Squad Leader.  So when I started with D&D in '77-78 it completely replaced my first RPG.  Traveller was my third RPG, it didn't replace D&D but was another game we played.  What sold me on Traveller was the box and the distress call.

I've posted my story several times, so sorry for repeating myself.

I got some version or other of D&D in November of 1977, as a birthday gift from my mom. It came with green soft dice made from recycled yogurt. I read it through the next couple of days, and ripped out the rules I didn't like and replaced them with rules I did like. SOP for wargamers at the time. It was cool, but I loved the concept far more than the execution.

Within a week I went to my FLGS - I was a wargamer, and went to my usual shop - I bought the Traveller LBB box set. I fell in love.

I found someone who was running a game of D&D - a friend of my then GF. I played once, realized I had understood the game fine from reading the rules, and left. I started my own group, but they wanted to play D&D, not Traveller.

I ran that group for 20 years, modding the ruleset we used whenever a new edition came out. My group had no interest in anything but D&D, and gradually I burned out on it - on the medieval fantasy genre altogether actually. I waited for D&D 3 to come out in the desperate hope that it would save me, but when I bought the PHB, I realized that they had taken out everything I liked, and replaced it with stuff I hated. It was a brilliantly designed game crafted to do nothing I wanted to do. I broke up the old group.

Somewhere in there I wrote the first version of what eventually became StarCluster. I just put it away when my group showed no interest.

I started a new group in about 2000, with my kid (13) and his buddy, the son of one of my old players. We started in playing, along with other games, that first version of StarCluster by their request - and my happiness exploded. Today that group is still together, we still play all kinds of games.

I will never run D&D again, though I have played it. I'm just totally burned out. I can't even *think* in the fantasy mode any more, and I read hardly any fantasy novels. They just don't make sense to me. I used to love that stuff!

-clash