Roll 2d10 if you cast a “Resurrection” spell: I can’t blame Gary Gygax for what happened during my adolescence, but I can thank him for some of the fun bits.
I had so much fun playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, and I am convinced that fooling around with logic puzzles, tables full of statistics, and struggling with the concept of how to model human behaviour with a collection of strange shaped dice was far from the worst way my best friend, my brothers and I could have spent those forever summers when we were fifteen. Dude: tough roll, but that was one wicked character.
Me too, although D&D for us meant hanging out with the questionable future-goth crowd in the library.
STR: 10
WIS: 18/00
INT: 18/00
DEX: 6 (I mean, have you seen him?)
CHA: 15
I swear I taught myself mythology reading through Deities and Demigods, but my favorite bit of D&D literature were probably the modules, specifically S1: Tomb of Horrors — I remember some of those puzzles to this day, and marvel that anyone could have gotten out of there without cheating (some of the traps were just plain cruel).
Lucky dog, we craved the modules but couldn’t find them anywhere! In the pre-Internet world, if your local hobby store didn’t carry the extended product line, you were done for – and the town where I grew up was not exactly geek friendly.
One year the store ordered in a few copies of the World of Greyhawk and we snapped one up and started obsessively populating the world, and conquering it with our more advanced characters. We actually designed our own system for war gaming, simulating the clash between rival armies.
I remember one day, my best friend Todd and I going to a friend of a friend’s house to do a dungeon – there was a Pseudodragon involved in the adventure, but the guy and his buddies kept pronouncing it “Puh-sway-do”-dragon. For the first twenty or thirty minutes, we couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about until he pointed to the picture in the Monster Manual. I’m not sure if Todd and I were ever invited back because we laughed so much; sad, really, nerd-on-nerd mocking.
Oh geez, I’m not even going to tell you how we pronounced some of the demon lords’ names (does anyone know how to pronounce Yeenoghu — it took me ten minutes to find the article because I kept calling him “Yeeghonu” after how I thought I remembered it).
In case you wanted to check it out — wikipedia has a Tomb of Horrors article which links to a .pdf download at Wizards of the Coast …