This Is How We Used To Roll

Roll up a ton of characters for our dungeons, that is.

Back in the day (circa 1981) I mostly only played Dungeons & Dragons (Moldvay Basic) in head-to-head ("solo"?) games with my nephew. In those days, I played and acted as Dungeon Master at the same time. We each played a primary character that we put more thought and care into, and a few secondary characters that more or less acted as fodder. (Although, occasionally, a secondary character would - via particularly memorable dice rolls and such - distinguish him- or herself and get promoted to a primary position. Mostly, though, they just ended up dead.) Although I had the same primary player character from Day One, my nephew took a while to find his.

As a result of our style of play and my nephew's seeming inability to find a character worthy of becoming his primary PC, we usually needed a lot of characters for our games. To fill this need, I began creating characters on multi-columned sheets (the same ones I generally used at that time for my dungeon maps). This way, we had at any given time a large pool of characters from which to choose.

I found these sheets while digging through my folders looking for items to scan and post. Since posting my minions' sheet yesterday had me thinking about such things, I thought I'd share with you a few samples of this bit of my gaming history:



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Comments

  1. I love seeing all these documents sharing personal gaming history. Keep 'em coming.

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  2. Yeah, it is fun to see how others used to do it.

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  3. Wow. That is eerily similar to some old NPC sheets I just came across. I will have to post them.

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  4. Who are you?

    "I am Gandalf, Magician of the First Level"

    Also I notice not one of them has a magic item or any extra money. I assume the main PC picked clean any henchman who died (which was evidently all of them?)

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  5. @Telecanter: I'll do my best. :)

    @Tim: Shouldn't you be hounding Eden Studios about getting the hardcopy of Ghosts of Albion on the streets? (;D Just kidding!)

    @Lord Kilgore: While I could say that's probably to be expected as part of the nature of the game, I think I'll instead go with great minds thinking alike. :D

    @Tacoma: Let's see: Gandalf the Grey, Gandalf the White, Gandalf the Poseur... Clever NPC's will weasel in on a recognizable brand name whenever possible. :P

    As for picking the henchmen clean, we were actually (mostly) fair and (generally) honest about the NPCs' gear, money, and treasure. We didn't see them as henchmen, hirelings, or retainers; they were full-fledged party members. Treasure was split evenly; magic items may have been picked over first by the "primary" characters, but secondary characters were not overlooked. I believe we tracked this sort of thing on separate sheets of paper, that's why you don't see it here. (I think I have some of these sheets floating around somewhere - I'll have to see if I can locate them.)

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