Top 12 Clues You're a Role-Playing Old-Timer

[Alden Loveshade]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

Lewis Pulsipher (PhD) was the GM. (Name dropping, bad Michael.)

Thanks for your list! I'm glad you mentioned Pulsipher. Until I just looked him up, I thought he was British instead of an American who lived in England. I guess I thought he was British because of Britannia.

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

5. OUT OF CONTEXT ERROR. (One is British, you know.)

Believe it not, no. 5 came from an actual conversation with a couple Americans who had roleplayed back in the 1970s.

[lugaid]

Originally Posted by Alden Loveshade

But I think the first version of Dungeons & Dragons had no minimum attribute requirement for a character class.

That is correct. The idea was introduced to limit availability of certain subclasses, beginning with the Paladin, but the three (later, four) basic classes had no attribute requirements. If your character's attributes were low, you simply took a penalty to earned experience points.

[Alden Loveshade]

Originally Posted by lugaid

That is correct. The idea was introduced to limit availability of certain subclasses, beginning with the Paladin, but the three (later, four) basic classes had no attribute requirements.

Thanks. I've now seen general agreement on that point.

We did paladins somewhat differently than in the book. You had to start with a fighter, act like a paladin through three levels, then you got considered. I had a female paladin who ended up getting mentioned several times in the university newspaper--until someone decided to stop that.

But proving yourself before becoming paladinized helped keep out the "riff raff." (And no, by "riff raff" I'm not referring to either the Rocky Horror character or the rapper. Or the band. Or the magazine. Or....)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Alden Loveshade

We did paladins somewhat differently than in the book....)

Oddly familiar in my memory but we never played that way and I never read it in a book. It might have been a rule from before AD&D1e.

[lugaid]

Originally Posted by Alden Loveshade

We did paladins somewhat differently than in the book. You had to start with a fighter, act like a paladin through three levels, then you got considered.

That's similar to (but not the same as) the method in the BECMI line of boxed sets (and also in the Rules Cyclopedia that consolidated those rules and adjusted them slightly), but the time to change from run-of-the-mill Fighter to Paladin was 9th level. Basically, in that paradigm, at 9th level you'd choose whether to move to the domain rulership phase of the game as a Land-Owning Fighter or switch to a specialist, adventuring (or to use the specific terminology of the game, "Traveling") Fighter. The options for a Traveling Fighter depended on your alignment, and were Paladin, Knight, or Avenger. Other classes also had similar choices to make at 9th level to become a Land-Owning [class] or a Traveling [class].

[Alden Loveshade]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Oddly familiar in my memory but we never played that way and I never read it in a book. It might have been a rule from before AD&D1e.

Originally Posted by lugaid

That's similar to (but not the same as) the method in the BECMI line of boxed sets (and also in the Rules Cyclopedia that consolidated those rules and adjusted them slightly), but the time to change from run-of-the-mill Fighter to Paladin was 9th level.

Thanks for the memories!

I'm not actually sure where the "fighter can become a paladin if they prove themselves worthy by 3rd level" thing came from. When I started RPGing at college, the extended gaming group had been around for a long time and had a lot of house rules. And we could freely take our characters to a second college and play our characters there using the same rules. I often wasn't sure what was in the book and what was a house rule.