Tabletop RPGs

[Paladox]

I haven't had much experience with tabletop rpg gaming, but I fell in love with the basic D&D stuff in the 90's.
I got the large box with the black & red design, with the large red dragon on the front. Love that design so much!

My brother later convinced me to destroy my D&D board game. You know, the whole "El Diablo!" scare of the time.
The only thing I kept from it was the little cardboard characters, and probably the little cloth pouch and dice.
I still remember telling him that the map wouldn't tear because it was like a vinyl material. He proved me wrong.. I was shocked that it tore and there was like paper stuff inside.

It was rather painful to see it go, but later on I replaced it (got 2 sets now) thanks to eBay.
I also have the Dragon's Den, Goblin's Lair, Haunted.. Keep? Castle? Well, anyway, the 3 large sets. I also have a complete set of all the basic 90's modules as well. Yay!
I might be missing a scant few that go with the Eye of Traldar series. Would love to have a new, sealed Eye of Traldar but that's OK. It's actually not part of the set.
The set I'm talking about all have those little cardboard characters. TSR did some really cool stuff at that time. I wish they had continued with that design.

I've also got the large hardbound D&D encyclopedia from the 90's. Wish I had a new one, but sadly this one is a little worn.

I love the design of the 90's basic D&D stuff so much! I have a couple other sets that are very much like the 90's box set. They have the cardboard cutouts and such. They basically cloned the set and put it in a different box. I wish I knew of a list of sets that had all the standup cardboard characters. I might have them all but I'm not sure.

I've also started collecting the Hollow World stuff. It's difficult to find them at a good price though. I might have to up my minimum to get em.

Oh, I still have yet to play any tabletop RPG. I just love collecting this stuff, having it, and looking it.

[Mortze]

That's really too bad what happened with the first box set. Ignorance is indeed a plague. I'm glad that you recovered it and made a colection.
But better than that it is to play it! D&D, you got to give it a try!

[Paladox]

Maybe someday if I ever have enough friends for it.

At least I've gotten to enjoy playing Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and several other PC AD&D games before WotC managed to fully destroy TSR.

I recently found out that a toy company purchased WotC. Is it wrong that I take satisfaction in knowing that?
What goes around comes around...

I really wish TSR could have stayed around. I miss the old D&D, art style, bulky rules system and all.

[Shift64]

When I was still in school and everybody had more time, I played different games or tried at least different systems. I too had a regular group that played Vampire. We also sometimes played a fun RPG in which you were a stuffed animal that had come to life. I also tried to get a regular group together for Feng Shui back in the 90s when the first edition was released, but I was the GM and not really able to come up with interesting adventures. Sadly I lack creativity in that department. But the interest has been rekindled with the kickstarter last year. I found Earthdawn very interesting but we only played it once.

After school the variety died down and we played a loooong TDE campaign for several years. For a German TDE is usually the first RPG you play and I played it through all these years and still play it. TDE is for Germany what D&D is to the rest of the world. D&D is a niche game here. TDE got pushed into the market back in the 80s with a lot of marketing before D&D arrived and it was very similar to D&D just with a more European feel.

After our TDE campaign ended a few years back I wanted something different for a while and we played other RPGs for one or two years: D&D 4e, Harnmaster, Warhammer FRPG 2e, Shadowrun and Cthulhu. With Cthulhu we even played the Horror in the Orient Express campaign. We tried to start a new TDE campaign after that but are struggling to gather on a regular basis.

After the Kickstarter to translate TDE into English this year I found a international group to play TDE online. Recently I backed the english version of Trudvang, a swedish RPG. We will see if I ever get a chance to play it.

[Jack_Smythe]

Oh man, where to start? RPG's were and always have been a major part of my life due to the creative aspect (I was one of the main GM's/DM's in our group) of building a campaign and for the camaraderie of our group of friends. My own personal RPG experience started with Steve Jackson's GURPS and D&D followed by the entire Palladium Games line-up (Palladium fantasy, Robotech, Rifts, Beyond the Supernatural, TMNT, Heroes Unlimited, etc.) and then into Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulu, Vampire series (Mage the Ascension, Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, etc.) and then later into the more "indie" games like Paranoia, Seven Seas, and a couple of other ones that escape me at the moment.

After that, my group kind of moved on from the system of standard RPG's and we began to devise our own. We realized that most of the time, the system was hindering more than helping our adventures and we began to streamline combat and focus more on narrative and experience (which was one our big attractions to Seven Seas). After 10 years of being in the same group, we pretty much knew who the rules lawyers were, who was going to try to exploit the system of character generation (Palladium was notorious for it's flawed system) and we decided as a group we'd rather spend hours immersed in an oral, interactive story than in being bogged down by a person's attempt to buck the game with technicalities and rule abuse. So, we ended up generating campaigns where we took on more role play and far less pen & paper.

As GM/DM, I really tried to incorporate props since they tended to enhance the experience. I'd make the scrolls the party found and in some cases would put in messages on invisible ink so the players themselves could interact with the props and get more from the experience. In more modern RPGs, I generated websites or integrated real materials from websites into my game so that if a player received information about a website in game, they could physically go to it in real life and often the website had hidden pages or secrets for them to follow that would take them on a ride around the net from one website to another, following the bread crumbs of a grand conspiracy.

Sadly, as we got older, we all moved to different towns and what not or personal feuds in the group took root and games were held with one or more members not receiving invitations (by this time, many of us had taken on the roll of GM/DM) and the group kind of collapsed from there. One of the group members got heavily into LARP'ing, but most of us still nostalgically talk about our adventures and times together. Now, we're all so busy with family, work, and physical distance from each other, we will probably never get together again as a group for more sessions, but they are still some of the best memories of my life.