Inspiration for a young Beck

Accurate!

Many thanks.

I think you meant, "The best thing about Professor Dungeon Master is this video!"

The best thing about Professor Dungeon Master is his cracking +1 Vest of Protection!

He channels Dwarf very well.

Exactly this. My wife and kids intentionally come into the room where I play in hopes of catching me doing some crazy voice. So far they haven't caught me on camera but I'm just waiting for that day.

The whole video had me trying to catch my breath from laughter… The dignity bit just started fresh fits of it. The best thing about Moldvay D&D is this video.

The crayon was to fill in the numbers on the dice.

What is a "caller?"

@@plaidpvcpipe3792 From the glossary "caller - The player who normally tells the DM what his or her party will do, based on what the other players tell him or her". The best thing about Moldvay D&D is...it had a glossary.

I would have mentioned the crayon dice if I still had them!

@@plaidpvcpipe3792 the caller was kind of like a party leader, and particularly helpful if you had a large group of players; groups of 8-10 were pretty common in early tournament play, and as many as 12-15 were sometimes used! When you have 8+ players and possibly some henchmen and hirelings, having a player whose designated job is to keep the players organized and relay quick group decisions to the DM (is the party going left or right at the intersection is usually not worth a lengthy debate) can be a useful time saver. I've been in groups within the last year that use one (the first time I played OD&D with Frank Mentzer at a Con, we had a dozen players divided between two tables, and each table had a caller. :) ). Often we rotate it, too, so people get to share the quasi-leader responsibilities.

Is she so regretful because it is HER basement? This is the burning question no one asked.

Is she so regretful because it is HER basement? This is the burning question no one asked.

@@nickhayley lol, no. It is my own place.

And he's right. Cracking Professorial Review! 💥

How cool!

We laid out the maps too!

That wasn't in Downingtown, PA was it,

@@ForeverYoungKickboxer Nope, WA

Pretty much the same. We literally played it like a board game for months before starting to expand our horizons. I was DM, and made my dungeon. The players would try to get as far as possible before everyone died, then they would either run the same character, or roll a new one and go through the exact same dungeon again, hopefully getting further each time, all monsters, traps etc would be reset each time. We ran that same dungeon over and over for months. It had little to no plot or story attached. Plenty of traps, monsters and a few puzzles... but no real sense of "Why are we doing this?" and the idea of "So... what happens when we get past level 3?" never entered anyone's head because no one got to level three. One day I moved and relocated a couple of pit traps that the players were well used to avoiding, and the notion that something in the dungeon could change was a mind blowing revalation to my players!!! 5 years later, when we'd been playing AD&D (properly I might add...) for a few years we went back to the Moldvay Basic/Expert boxes gathering dust on the shelf, and I wrote and ran one of the most entertaining campaigns we ever played. Mainly because so little time was spent with anyone's head in a Goddam rule book...

Not to mention, the older art portrayed most adventurers as people of normal physique! A far cry from the bodybuilder tropes that seem to have become the norm in later editions!

I'm going to have a video about this very subject.

What you say, Asthmatic Kobold, about the early art highlights the idea that "there is no courage without fear!" p.s. I'm glad I noticed the 'show more' option of your message as it allowed my to delete the sentence I'd typed that completely echoed what you say about length of time spent creating a character.

Modern D&D is a totally different genre compared to old school D&D. It’s Lord of the Rings, not Game of Thrones. When you watch Lord of the Rings you don’t expect, nor want, any of your main characters to die. You want to live to be a hero and save the world. Character creation is complicated because the game is built for people that want to dive into their character’s backstories and customize their characters to their hearts content. These features are crafted intentionally to be time-consuming, because you are only expected to do it once a campaign. And that’s fine. That’s just the genre of storytelling 5th edition chose to support, and it happens to be different from the originals. Personally I love the OSR because there are many game design elements from that scene that I am pulling out to my 5e games. Lowered hit points and unbalanced encounters were the best things that I adopted to make a more dramatic game.

This sounds like a fun idea! Could you point me in the right direction for learning how to do it?

​@@zac2314..and Cajabjthewhite just ghosted that request. So your answer is no, you can't.😂

You an amputee?

Thanks. Share it. I want it to go viral!

Coloring the dice!

@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 ah, the magic of crayons back then

@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 I still have one of those cruddy, olive-green d12s sitting on my bookshelf--and a worn-down, yellow (and red crayon) d20 from the Expert set.

I was a little older.. 11 or 12 when I got my used copy of Moldvay. A friend invited me to ride bikes over to his house after school and his older brother and friends were playing AD&D... against a beholder of all things. I was totally poleaxed watching them play.. and my school friend sold me the 'old useless' boxed copy they didn't use any more for like 10 bucks. I never pedaled so fast in my whole life back home and stayed up all night under the covers with a flashlight reading the rules. Ran my first game the very next day.. completely wrong and cackling in glee. You can't buy memories like those....

@@AllenFeatherlin those memories last a lifetime. I’ve played, or ran, many an adventure since those days, but those were some of the most memorable of them all.

YES!

Here are some guidelines, now go play.

Amen brother.

Still like 5E, but Moldvay is great.

Best comment.

Never went to 5e.

Jumped to 5e when it came out. Now its just the most generic everything. Spent the last year running in the direction of OSR products. It’s so much better imo.

They are still awesome!

The sourcebooks were called gazetteers and there were more than 8.

@@Loehengrin This is true, but they came a lot later and did not seem to be central to the business plan. I bought my first one over ten years after I started playing D&D (blue box) and AD&D, "the Orcs of Thar", the only one I ever got.

Glad I left that bit in.

I just found out a out basic. Liking it so far? I've done every edition except 1e advanced, plus PF1 and PF2. Went back to 2e currently.

Frederick the Dwarf narrating!

I have my original copy of that, and am thinking of running the grandkids through it if we get snowed in anytime soon.

Glad you enjoyed it. Pleas share so this one goes to the moon.

Newer players need to be converted you mean?

@@shaunhall960 well if that’s how you want to say it…

Aye, no converting needed.

Lol! Bottom number! Thanks for sharing.

Yeah those old d4s were difficult at first, with number attached to the bottom edge vs the top point.

@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Hey! It took me a while to figure out out too.. especially since not all D4 have the numbers in the same orientation! First D4 that had the number in the apex corner blew my noodle. :)

"... and we called that mountain lion, "Meat Grinder"; and you can still hear his roars, and the screams of his victims echoing around Mount Teepeekay."

Same here. It was easily the most fun I ever had with DnD.

@@ImperialValues it was a magical time, discovering the game. My best experiences of D&D were with B/X, BECMI, AD&D 1e and 2e….all kind of the same game with a few tweaks….but wow, that Moldvay set was special…I loved it!

@@dungeondumbo Seeing the blue expert set cover that referenced the red basic set cover exploded my mind into Elysium.

1980 here, great times!

We didn't know you were suppose to divide XP by how many characters where there. So we went up fast!

I still have some of the original dice...they crayon is long gone but I still have the box, the 'books' and Keep on the Borderlands.

Thanks! Please share!

Me too - life is better

The rule might differ but the important thing is the gritty and lethal vibe!

Ascending AC is an improvement for sure.

@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Sarcasm coming...: HELL NO! -4 armor class. Just try to hit me. THACO all the way, baby. None of this "simple" crap. My THACO is 16 and I have a +1 bonus to hit, so it's 15, but he's got a protection from good spell on him, giving him a +2 bonus, which lowers his armor class by 2, so it's a 17, so... um... so I need a... what do I need again? DM, shaking his head: Just roll the dice and if it's close, we'll do some math. Rolls a 13... did that hit him. DM: His AC is 1 Ok, so... lets see... 😱 😛😎

@@Lightmane Five hours later.... DM: You hit! I think?

@@brettmajeske3525 Hah! I actually enjoyed THACO, along with 1st and 2nd edition D&D. Never played any other versions, other than the basic rules when we went through B2

@@Lightmane THAC0 was far simpler than most people think. My daughter is 17 and first played a few years ago with a group at school using 5E. (I still play AD&D with many... MANY... house rules...) She came to me after a few sessions and declared how THAC0 was stupid, and I asked her if she knew how it worked. Her reply... "NO ONE knows how it worked!" So I took five minutes out of my day, showed her, and she said... "Oh... So... your THAC0 is your target number, and the AC modifies your attack roll?" Yep... that's all. Any DM who made it any more complicated than that was a fool to themselves and their group. If your THAC0 is 16, you roll a d20. If the opponent has AC 3 you add 3 to the roll, if it has AC-3 you take 3 away from the roll. If the total is 16 or over... you hit. Your character sheet has a list of your weapons, and each weapon has its modified THAC0 written next to it. And there were FAR fewer situational modifiers than current versions throw into the mix. If that level of mathematics is too hard... I can't help with that. And back in Basic and 1E before THAC0 became a simplified version, you had a little bar on the character sheet that took up hardly any space at all listing all the ACs from 10 to -10 where you wrote in the target number for each AC below. All you had to do was look at the AC, and roll the number below it. The mental strain of this was too much for some, so over time it became simplified... (That's sarcasm... or maybe not...)

Thanks for watching it multiple times! It's one of my personal favorite 10 videos.

I had forgotten all the adventures that were Alpha numeric and how each Alpha numeric module tied together...ah fond memories of those days!

Glad I cheered you up. The Bard does not make many videos. Hopefully we'll touch base, though. Check him out on Questing Beast.

Thanks. This episode was a LOT of fun to make.And my dwarf will return soon in a video about orcs.

Thanks, Ernie. Please share. Trying hard to get this one to 100k.

@@DUNGEONCRAFT1you bet good sir. I will.

Am I remembering right or did B Dalton have a TSR cardboard display case that surrounded the D&D rule books, dice and modules for sale on the shelf in their stores? Loved it then...love it now.

@@lionelhutz3142 I don't remember that. Just the books on the shelf

Thanks. New episode Tuesday.

It's because it's owned by Hasbro, a soulless corporation. Original D&D was sold by people who cared about the game.

That's why it's cracking. I've used it so much!

I agree. Except B/X was in two books :D There are plenty of fan versions that combine to two into one cracking tome though.

I agree with the principal of this, but it also highlighted the problem with D&D as a business model. If your customer only needs to buy from you once, you soon run out of customers. I know there were modules etc, but the game also encouraged you to homebrew, which means there is no dependency on its supporting products. This issue is why we will, unfortunately, always have new editions of the game. It has to remain commercial.

Thanks for the comment. They help send the video out to more people.

I agree but they are basically the same ruleset. BECMI simply slowed down character progression, stretching it out over several books.

5e? GET OUT!!!!

@@shockerck4465 I know, I know. We played 2nd edition AD&D for a couple of adventures back in the day. I straight up asked the DM to implement strict PC deaths for 5e and some sort of more complicated table for death saves as PDM uses, where you can get injuries or die out.

I agree. I'm making a new video about my experience with D&D in high school now. It's called "My year without D&D." You'll dig it.

@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Looking forward to seeing it.

Thanks!