"Roll For Initiative!"

Dungeons and Dragons was the game that introduced GamerDude to role-playing games, and to a group of like-minded gamers in college. He was an old-school Advanced Dungeons & Dragons player (AD&D); he and his group played First Edition rules. In this episode, he talks about how he got into AD&D, and what the game was all about.  He talks about the various books and manuals involved, and how you were supposed to create your characters for your fantasy adventures.  He talks about the various races (human, elf, dwarf and halfling) and classes (fighter, magic-user, cleric, thief, monk and the special bard class) and alignments, from Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil. He explains how AD&D used a variety of dice, from 4-sided all the way to 20-sided, and he talks about "dice prison" for dice that misbehaved during crucial game play. He also tells the story of the time he tried to get his mother to roll-up a character for a family session of D&D; not surprisingly, it did not go as planned.