It was in the late 70’s that I found the hobby, but it wasn’t till the
mid 80’s that I actually got to be a player rather than a GM, I lived for making
characters and maps, populating them with impossible odds and beasts that could
never be overcome by the obstacles that I’d put in there (one dungeon had every
demon and devil lord in the monster manual, all neatly stacked in rooms, just
waiting to put the hurt on players...).
But I digress, the first game I got to play in was around ’86, I’d been
running games for some years, oldest lad in the group and as such the one that
everyone else expected would run games for everyone else, but finally I found a
few people my age and got chance to play the game for once.
As I recall, fighter with longsword and AC5, no idea what other
equipment he had, didn’t seem important at the time, what was important was
that we were off to slay a dragon underneath a mountain with a hoard of
treasure.
The GM may have read the Hobbit more than once...
So off we went, Paladin, Monk, Magic User, and Cleric, up the mountain,
down the tunnels, into the dragons lair, there to confront the dragon, which
was a classic dragon of the Huge, Ancient Red variety, and so (obviously) loved
to talk and riddle. So we riddled against it for most of the session, winning
most of its treasure off it and then convincing it to leave for a while as we
arranged the recovery of all the gold in question...
Herein lies the problems with beginning GM’s up against players that
have already seen all the riddles they’ve got and know the answers... The problem here was not that the Dragon has
given up all its gold, but that we’d read the rules and found that gold pieces
are to be counted as experienced points to be gained, swift calculation later
and the mythic status of 18th level was all ours. The Dragon came back, we beat it down, put a
collar on it (Don’t ask, I was twelve, the idea of walking around town with a
dragon on a leash was very appealing), and then proceeded to have it drag all
the gold down to the town (which we bought) and then had it fly us to the king
(which we bought), and then we sat down at the tavern (which we only bought
beer from, what’s the point of buying a tavern, you’d only be drinking your own
profits), and sat back to contemplate the good work that we’d done.
These were the good times, My god suddenly became the most well
financed in all the realms, Andy’s monk bought tranquillity with gold, the
Cleric decided that a life of piously giving was overrated, and the magic user
went off to see how many ioun stones he could balance around his head, but then
there was the problem...
What were we going to do tomorrow?
