I played me some AD&D

So last weekend I played in regular player Ben’s game. I won’t lie to you, I was severely hung over. My older bro and I stayed up till almost 5am drinking whiskey and Jager. Ugh. Getting too old for this.

But with a little Sam Adams for “hair of the dog” I was able to participate. We all car pooled from Santa Monica to Dan’s Mulholland abode, a really nice house with a view of various multi-million dollar properties. I got renewed respect for Dan after seeing where he lived and after meeting his girlfriend. The big South African dude (white) is really chasing the American Dream.

So here are my player observations and feelings after sitting down as a D&D player for the first time in almost 20 years. Firstly, it was almost 3 hours into the game before we had any combat or physical stuff of any kind. We were elves and half-elves from Elfland, and a human knight and some troops came to ask for help for their land. It seems some kind of enchantress was charming away soldiers to her dungeons, and they wanted us for our natural charm resistance. So there was meeting humans, parties with humans, then travelling to human land with humans. In a nutshell, with a spattering of role-play, that was almost a full three hours. I went into the game really wanting the release of action, but it took a long time to get to any. I understand Ben wants to set-up his world and so forth, but really I gave up running the previous Wednesday evening game of Mutant Future so we could spend that three hours on character creation and not have to do it Saturday. We should have been treated to some kind of action sooner (travelling with a large company of humans, so there were no wandering monster attacks).

We had maybe an hour and a half left to play, and so Ben hit us with some encounters on the way to the dungeon. There was a Warg attack, a Stirge attack at our camp, and then outside the dungeon we fought a group of ogres. Between Andy’s Cavalier and retainer, and Paul’s fighter and two retainers, the monsters were mopped up pretty easily. So here was my next gripe. Between Andy and Paul there are three retainer-types, so effectively they get to do attacks and rolls for a total of 5 individuals. And for some reason, me and Dan’s cleric/thief went last despite being pretty good in the Dex department (Ben is going by the book, which I guess means go around the table for turns. How this is superior to going by Dex order I will never know).

Me and Dan were both pretty annoyed that not only did it take forever to get a turn, but that two characters and their retainers were mopping up the place with their turns. My fighter/MU did get to shine a bit when he got great rolls and bowshot stirges off a couple of characters backs, but that was about it.

I understand that in D&D there are retainers and henchmen and all that, and it is a part of by the book gaming. And in my current game I let Terry run two characters for a few games (so there would be a cleric) and have an NPC in the party, but still my turns seem to just fly by, and Dex order seems to work out pretty good in my game. I don’t normally work a lot of henchmen and hireling stuff into my games. I like players to mostly focus on their characters, and things seem more heroic to me when it is pretty much just the player characters taking the chances.

All in all, I’d say Ben does a bit better than average DM’ing a game. But just as I recall from the late 80’s and early 90’s when I switched to GM’ing only, I am mostly unsatisfied with the player experience. I just kept wishing that Wednesday night last week and then on Saturday night, that I was running one of my games. It’s just what I prefer. Oh well, I did go into this wanting the player experience to help me be a better DM, and so I can do more of that we’ll let Ben run his game again.

I also went into this because I wanted to experience by the book AD&D again just to have a second look at my own house rules and such. I have to admit, nothing made me want to give up my rules and go by the book. Quite the contrary, with Andy’s cavalier and other fighters with double specializations doing over 20 points of damage at a pop, some characters just seemed too powerful for low level games.

I think that for my future games I’m going to leave the Unearthed Arcana out of it except for the extra spells.