I also have a link to the Basic and Expert rules . . . somewhere.  And I have downloaded copies of both, so in a pinch I could email copies.

I had the '74 boxed set and then got the other about the same time as I got adnd.  I might still have it somewhere, but probably boxed away in the attic, lord knows what's up there!

Never played B10,  I had a steady DM in those days that loved doing the modules, (the giants, tomb of horror)  but apparently, he cherry picked them.  I've actually bought a few recently at goodwill and the like just for nostalgia purposes and found out they are nothing like he played them.

In reply to Galadel (msg # 147):

I started out with a disdain for modules, when I was young and full of energy to make my own adventures. That faded quickly, and I found some of the early ones to be quite fun. I was always willing to modify on the fly as needed though.

Good! Played as-is they're not very good. Speaking generally.

I don't know the B10 module at all.

I have the Basic Rules Cyclopedia. I have no idea how close or far that ruleset is from the other basic rules versions I've heard mentioned here.

My experience with TSR-era published modules is as follows:

B3 - Palace of Silver Princess (played)
X2 - Isle of Dread (ran)
A1 - Slave Pits of the Undercity (ran)

I have a few TSR era modules I have never ran or played, but own, and I have to say, for the most part, they don't really appeal to me very much. Without the cloud of nostalgia, I honestly don't see why everyone likes them so much. Perhaps it would be different if I had experienced them first hand and didn't have anything else to compare them against. But having not seen most of them until I had 20+ years of playing experience, yeah, they're not that exciting.

In reply to DM Storm (msg # 150):

I think a lot of what makes any role-playing experience memorable is the people you play with. I have really fond memories of the Giant series, but no real memory of what the modules were like, it was all about the fun of playing with that group of players.
That said, the modules I feel stood up the best over time on their own were Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (which is ironic because I really disliked the two sequels) and the tournament module The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan which was designed to be played in one hour, real time. (Set the egg timer!). Those were both well enough put together that I used them over and over with new groups.
Ravenloft (the original 1st ed. version) looked awesome, but never played quite right somehow.

In reply to Ben Scristos (msg # 151):

Very true. The people you play makes or breaks a campaign, module or not.

From a DM's perspective, I need a good story to sink my teeth into, at least as a starting point. It's not enough for me to just say, "let's just make some stuff up along the way and see what happens and keep playing until it's not fun anymore". I can't do that kind of gaming anymore. I don't have time for it.

These days I am very much goal-oriented and a strong hook/story/situation gives me a defined end point--especially with PBP--with marks/scenes/etc. to hit along the way. Without a strong story as the background (and finish line) for a PbP, I find it very hard for me to maintain excitment, motivation, pace, etc.

B10 has a strong story. It reminds me a lot of another PbP adventure I am currently running, Red Hand of Doom, in that it has a strong villain, pits the characters in a race against time, lots of cool locales, etc. For those of you who play in Realms of High Adventure, the campaign set-up I am looking at will be quite similar.

***
Re: ravenloft, I played the first half of the 3e version of it, was enjoying it, and then the DM got bored and had the campaign jump the shark when he polymorphed all of our characters into dragons and teleported us to another plane to play out some weird homebrew dragon world campaign.

I split off from that group and never saw what became of Dragon World campaign. LOL

That sucks. I probably told you this story before, but I have had too many DM's whose worlds morph to meet the current interest of whatever girl he was dating, or hoping to date. I've had fun worlds morph in Pern, for example, and a few other sci-fi/fantasy books along the way.

Not to give away any secrets, but I have had issues with trying to run stories, the players rarely want to follow the path it seems. I have honed the skill of running a seat-of-my-pants campaign, while allowing the players to think there is a plot, the game simply follows along with whatever they find most interesting though. When things are often, I often get compliments for having created such a rich campaign, I never tell them that their ideas crafted the story as much, if not more than my own plan.

I have lost the energy to DM though, and I suspect it is health issues, though how much is just age is hard to tell. I get the urge, I start things up, then I hit mental-quicksand and things grind to a halt. As such, I refuse (for now) to start anything.

I have had fun with starting one-on-one games here on RPoL, but they always die when the player gets upset over something that happens in the game. To heart breaking to try that again.

I might try running another game of Diplomacy on here though someday. That is always fun.

Ben brings up a good point...

I talked quite a bit about what I look for when running a game...

What do you guys, as players, look for? More specifically, if we're to "get the band" back together, what would you be looking for out of a game?

Gosh, that's a tough question, I'll have to think on that... :-)

I agree that pure sandbox seems to be a bad idea but at the same time you want some level of flexibility and scope. (Also I have to admit I'd love to play a dragon!)

I've never gotten a chance to do much seafaring in roleplaying, so that could be fun as could at least a visit to non-European cultures - Oriental Adventures and Arabian Adventures always looked so interesting. Actually I have the Complete Ninja's Handbook for 2nd edition and one of the 'non-ninja' alternate campaigns suggested was a medieval/renaissance fantasy James Bond/Mission Impossible style campaign, which struck me as interesting.

The PCs as the dashing spies and top agents of a small kingdom or city state sent to exotic states to deal with evil masterminds...

I like a plot hook.  It's been a long time since I played around a table, and often at that.  We used to have weekends where we started Friday night and played till late Sunday night, with very little sleep.  Grand plots, and deep storylines were great then. But online, that is much harder.  We did in a weekend what takes a year online.  If you have a long complex story, even really good players forget the clues they've uncovered (not all, some remember everything!),  but you also have attrition, so whole adventures get forgotten.  I tend to play till I get killed off, and then some, but I really love a good storyline, good character players who can interact even outside the normal story, add some flavor outside of just the norm  (this group of players here are about the best at that I've encountered)  and a mix of something new with a touch of the familiar.  I don't ask for much :-).


BTW, Ben, I know what you mean.  In both real life and dnd, I'm amazed at how many times I get credit for some plot/plan that just seems to develop organically out of a bunch of creative players/coworkers doing what they do.  And I think, did I make that happen, or did they?  Long as everyone has fun, I'm good with it.

In no particular order:

I want the DM to convey essential environmental information with enough detail to allow some immersion without devolving into walls of text -- enough detail to get my teeth into and to facilitate interaction with the world and characters.

I want to avoid non-fantastical resource management like calculating if I have enough silver coins to buy a pair of boots or if I have enough capacity to carry those boots without dropping to half-speed. (I don't mind playing resource-poor characters. I just don't want to use spreadsheets to do it.) I will tolerate some of that for a good game, though.

I want players who want to play their characters without using those characters to make it difficult to play as a group. I want players who want to interact with one another and with NPCs, who have some conflicts but are still essentially a functional team.

Sand-boxes are overrated. Players might have very strong ideas of a desired course of action (or they might not), but GROUPS of players seldom come to consensus without some very clear hooks. I don't mind following a railroad or at least a sign-post. I'm good at rationalizing a character's interest in pursuing the adventure at hand.

Ideally, I want a game with PC downtime for the sake of verisimilitude. We don't have to play out the downtime on screen all the time, but it's fun to do that sometimes. I like time to pass for my characters. Months, seasons, years. (I'm running an in-person 5e campaign that's been going on for less than three months in-game time and the characters have risen from 1st to 11th level. Not ideal.)

I like shorter adventures (or at least shorted segments of an over-arching adventure), in part for the sense of closure and accomplishment but also to encourage that downtime that I enjoy. It also gives players and characters a chance to come and go without derailing an entire campaign.

I'm content with traditional D&D fantasy settings, or traditional settings with That One New Feature^tm, but I'm also open to new ones or gently mixed genre mash-ups.

One of the first campaigns I played here on RPoL was a Basic D&D seafaring campaign. The campaign was supposed to be like Pirates of the Caribbean, with an emphasis on sea trade and the like. It turned out to be much less focused on trade and way more focused on using our ship to island hop to new adventures.

I started with an orphaned 1st level character (who I believe was originally played by "Ben Scristos" first) and we played for several years and eventually concluded the campaign around level 9. It was a fun campaign for sure.

I played a game called Bushido and Oriental Adventurers a couple of times back in the 80s, but was never really big on samurais and ninjas. Arabian Adventures, via Al Qadim, always seemed interesting, but I know so little of the source material and have always been reluctant to run/play niche games like that. The potential player pool for those kind of games is really small, so if/when you end up having to recruit, it's slim pickings.

Good point on the timeline involved to pull off grand plots, especially where clues, etc. are involved. I mean, if we look at Realms of High Adventure (the Basic D&D game I am running right now that is in its final battle), that campaign has been going for 4 1/2 years. Two of the players are original. One came in a little later and two...well, they are hardly even players at this point and came in really at the end of the campaign.

Maybe replicating that sort of grand, sweeping sort of adventure might be a bit ambitious?

That campaign isn't over yet, but will be seeking feedback on that one as well. Will be interesting to see how the players viewed it, versus how I viewed it.

These are all great points and I really appreciate the feedback. It helps me focus in on what is important, rather than getting swept up with delusions of grandeur (to borrow a phrase) :)

Definitely more for me to think about.

All good points, but I find myself agreeing with Aldo a lot.

Of course having the opportunity to indulge in down-time activities was something Ben did a lot of, and I enjoyed it a lot.

I also like a world rich enough in detail that the players can pull from previous encounters, etc. to add to their actions.

I'm not big on a 'gimmick' campaign, where there is a lot of emphasis on some odd quirk that often gets forgotten, I am really fine with the more traditional fantasy background.

I guess what I loved about the original Stormhaven was that the city itself had become a character in it's own right, it was easier to immerse myself.

That said, I am not expecting the game to simply be a rehash of that one, the world can be memorable without having to be a city. Small towns have their own charm.

I am not a big fan of the sea travel game, done realistically sea travel is boring, and making it exciting pretty much takes away the realism. I don't need complete historical accuracy, but months at sea simply doesn't offer much chance for adventure.

Finally, I really like starting as basic, simply normal folks. If a huge overarching and world shaking plot is going to come along, that is fine, but only after we have gotten on our feet, and gained a few levels. That said, I am good with that never happening, I don't really love so-called 'high-fantasy'.

Rath stole most of my thoughts.  Get out of my head, Rath!


I can add:

To the extent possible, I like the opportunity to try new character concepts, or new spins on old concepts.  I like my characters to not be the same as some other character I once played in some other game.  For instance, I'm running low on ways to make/play a fighter in AD&D. (I think I have one left . . . )

I guess with a sea based campaign I was thinking the actual boring travel parts would be background: 'a stiff breeze carries you west and five days later you spot Stormhaven from the crows nest...' or 'three days out of port you spy a red sail on the horizon...'

The fun stuff would be the exotic and shady ports of call, unexplored islands, desperate battles in storm tossed seas.

Thanks again all for the excellent input. It really helped me sift through a bunch of competing ideas to hone in on a more feasible, realistic, and sustainable game concept. Probably the point that really stuck with me the most is not starting a character-dependent game, i.e., a game that assumes the same characters will be present throughout.

Player attrition is really high on RPoL and it causes issues when it's time to recruit replacement players to take on characters who can't be easily removed from the cast, for one reason or another. I have been dealing with this in one of my games for the past few months and it's been less than ideal.

With that in mind, the next game I run will be similar to Stormhaven--a series of episodic adventures, this time with more of a wilderness/overland focus. I will try to incorporate more downtime between adventures and not have the entire campaign be a race against time, as previously suggested. This should better address the player attrition issue.

For setting, I am going to use Elsir Vale (a fairly generic D&D setting, i.e., a sparsely settled frontier region, and the backdrop of the Red Hand of Doom adventure). Some of you already know this setting through my other game, Realms of High Adventure. For those who don't, this is what I have been using for the Basic D&D game that is close to completion.

I will advance the timeline by about 10 years, after the conclusion of the party's fight against the BBEG. The outcome of the battle in that Basic D&D game will help determine Elsir Vale's status at the outset of the next game and may provide some nice Easter eggs and homages for those familiar with the other game.

While I really like the simplicity of Basic D&D and am sorely tempted to use those rules, I can accomplish the same feel with 1st edition AD&D, while still providing players a bit more character building options through more race/class combinations and spells. Similar to Stormhaven, I can jettison the clunky AD&D rules I never liked anyway.

One thing I do want to hammer out from the outset is which rules to use. We ran into some issues in the Basic D&D game that kept coming up, over and over again (particularly with spells), because I didn't clearly establish which ruleset were being used. I'd like to avoid this in the next game.

My preference is for using 1st edition AD&D books as the definitive source, but this assumes everyone has the books. I love looking through those books and it brings me joy to use them for games. I don't get the same joy opening an OSRIC PDF. Aside from access issues, the downside to 1st edition books is looking up spells is a pain in the ass because of the way it does the "Same as Druid 3rd level spell of same name, except..." and then when you look up the Druid spell it says, "Same as Cleric 2nd level spell of same name, except..." etc.

Might be worth the annoyance, if only for the joy it brings me to use actual books. Open to thoughts on this.

At any rate, after more reflection, I think this is the pitch. Thoughts, comments, concerns?

First Edition is more than fine with me.  Will it be with or without UA (Not advocating it; when it came out we hated and shunned it and I still feel that way, but if it's there . . . ).

Here's a nice hyperlink-laden site with First Edition spells.  Makes that problem of similar spells a little easier to navigate.

http://pandaria.rpgworlds.info...ules/adnd_spells.htm

If someone wants/needs a link to the PHB, let me know.

No UA. I am not a fan of it either. :)

I now actually own a pdf of the 1st edition AD&D PHB, so I am able to use that rather than Osric. :)

Knowing in advance that it is a wilderness/overland focus very helpful, and such knowledge is greatly appreciated.

1ed is great and I have all the books.

Wilderness is wonderful, given my interest in playing a druid. 1st ed is my go to anyway, sot hat works as well. If I were to run a game, the only major thing I think I would really change is using 2nd ed. thieving rules, because it gives them some say on how to improve their skills, but as I am not a thief this time, it matters not. It all sound good to me...