My son Christopher really wants to learn to play D&D. A lot of his peers play D&D. They play D&D at groups he attends. I have been into D&D since about 1985. The problem? What do we mean by "D&D"?
Honestly, I loved D&D as I played it back in 1985. Back then, a lot of us played "Basic" D&D (as most of my friends called what is now generally referred to as BECMI) and/or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or AD&D. It was a glorious mess of a game - or games. D&D and AD&D were not technically the same game, but a lot of us didn't distinguish between them, back then.
Then came AD&D 2nd edition (hereafter 2E), which tightened up and cleaned up some mechanics. Slightly less messy, but a lot of people felt it was slightly less glorious. This was the era when I really came of age, though - 2E was what I ran through high school and college, and the nostalgia factor is strong for me.
When D&D 3rd edition came out (they dropped the "Advanced," and now all D&D was just "D&D"), I wanted to hate it. To resist. But it was so cool. They had revised the mechanics to make sense. A version of D&D that made sense all the time! No more glorious mess! But . . . less glorious altogether? Hard to say. My gaming group did make the switch, even upgrading to the "3.5" version a couple of years later. I was out of grad school and teaching in high schools by then, and had less time for gaming, but my friends and I made time when we could. And we had fun.
The best part of the 3E/3.5 era, for me, was when I discovered that there was a lot of AD&D nostalgia among publishers of 3E games. One company, Necromancer Games, actually published with the slogan, "Third Edition Rules, First Edition Feel" - and wow, did they deliver! But my favorite was a new series of modules under the Open Game License (OGL) published by Goodman Games called "Dungeon Crawl Classics." Let me tell ya - the nostalgia factor was off the charts with these bad boys! The DCC line was made up of modules that evoked the feel of the glory days of Basic D&D and AD&D, but used the new rulesets. It was the best of both worlds for me - the new rules that made sense, and the wild, glorious feeling of classic D&D games. Despite their brazen claim to be "dungeon crawls," there was plenty of roleplaying to be had - these were not just stupid slugfests! These felt like everything I had been missing since 2E and 3E began . . . a golden age!
Before the dark times. Before the Empire.
Then came 4th edition - 4E - and . . . I don't know what to say. It isn't D&D, as I understand the term. This is my sole concession to Edition Wars. I don't do Edition Wars. I don't believe in BadWrongFun. Play whatever makes you happy! But . . . please don't think if 4E as D&D. It's . . . just not . . . It's kind of like if someone tried to make a board game, inspired by video games, but then tried to pretend it was a TTRPG . . . yeah. Actually, 4E did result in some cool board games, like the Ravenloft-inspired one. It was a cool board game. But not D&D.
My group did try D&D 4E. We tried it. We just couldn't get into it. One of my best friends has a sister who started with 4E when she was in high school. She said they loved it and had a lot of fun. Good for them! But it was not for us . . . Alas, Goodman Games intially tried to make the leap from 3E/3.5 Dungeon Crawl Classics to 4E DCC, but . . . it just didn't sell well. No one I knew at the time wanted to play the thing. It just . . . flopped. And not just for us. Despite my friend's sister and her peers, sales were low, and it kind of flopped in the market.
At this point, some important developments happened. I moved from Rhode Island to Arizona. I found a new gaming group there. Our game? Pathfinder - a game designed to be "D&D 3.75" - the idead was to have a game that continued and expanded upon the D&D 3E/3.5 with a "3.75" - it was crunchy, in the way that 3E had become. Too crunchy, really. People called it "Mathfinder" (and that's when they were being polite!). But we had a heckuva lot of fun!
Around the same time as my gaming group in Arizona adopted Pathfinder as our system, Goodman Games decided to publish their own system, inspired by Appendix N and the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of modules. They called it the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. This is far and away my favorite TTRPG system, and I can't get into everything awesome about it right now. My original AZ group didn't want to try DCC RPG, so we stuck to Pathfinder for years, but I started other groups to play DCC RPG.
Eventually, Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of D&D in the modern era, got tired of losing money on 4E, and announced a 5th edition. I have to confess, I had minimal interest. When it came out, it looked good enough, I guess - definitely a step in the right direction, going back to traditional TTRPGs and away from something that felt like a messed-up hybrid of board game and video game. But . . . did we need 5E? Not really! DCC RPG was my go-to system, but I loved what I was seeing with OSE (Old School Essentials, a cleaned up version of B/X, or Basic and Expert D&D, before BECMI) and the Dolmenwood setting. And in recent years, ShadowDark has provided a really cool alternative to D&D, and I got my hands on it right around the time my family moved from Arizona back home to Rhode Island.
So when someone says, "Want to play some D&D?" . . . well, I usually think, "Sure! How about some DCC RPG? Or some OSE? Or ShadowDark? Heck, Dolmenwood (now its own system!) looked like it is going to be really cool!" But when a kid says, "Can we play D&D?", they mean D&D 5E. Actually, it's a bit of a mess, because now there's a 2024 revision to D&D 5E. But whatever. It's 5E.
So myyoungest kid, who turns 11 this week, wants to "learn to play D&D." That means 5E. Also, my 23-year-old son wants to try it, for much the same reason - their peers play 5E (although he plays DCC RPG with me already). So I'm going to learn to run 5E.
I've been looking forward to trying out the massive megadungeon called Barrowmaze. I even got the 5E version (it was originally published in a more generic "OSR" version that worked well with games like AD&D and retroclones of AD&D like OSRIC). So I'm prepping to run Barrowmaze for 5E. We had a "session 0" to create characters a week ago Sunday (7/20/25). We had no game this week (7/27/25) because my older son was visiting Arizona. So our first game is scheduled for Sunday, 8/3/25.
Prepping for Barrowmaze 5E has presented some challenges. For example, a lot of "old school" play is very adult in content - like, I'm modifying how I present the "town" setting of Helix, because there is a lot of reference to prostitution and such. I needed to present the "story hook" with some hard framing - e.g. "Your characters are in the town of Helix. You've been hired by the local wizard, Mazzahs the Magnificent, to explore the Barrowmaze." The characters have lodging at the local tavern - I don't mention that it is called The Brazen Strumpet - and have the mission already. I even have built-in recommendations from Mazzahs that they acquire some sledgehammers and digging equipment for excavating the barrows (rather than gp through the tedium of having the PCs go to the Barrowmaze, discover that they do not have the proper equipment, have to return to Helix to buy the equipment, then travel back to the Barrowmaze, etc.). So when we start, we can jump right to exploring the Barrowmaze! I look forward to seeing how it goes! I'm really hoping, to paraphrase the slogan of Necromancer Games, that our game is "Fifth Edition Rules, First Edition Feel!" Admittedly, part of the "old school" would be letting players go through the tedium I mentioned (and learn a valuable lesson or two from it), but I also want it to be accessible to my 11-year-old and jump to the fun part. There will be plenty of time to learn lessons facing the horrors of the Barrowmaze!
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