No, wait, that was the last time I tried this.
Here we are, well into the 20's.
I've played D&D since 1979, off and on. Traveller is my first true love, I'll admit, but D&D always kept bringing me back. GURPS filled a huge space of my gaming life from the late 80's to the late 90's and early 'aughts (fuck, is that really a thing?).
When 3e came out in 2001, my friends and I went to GenCon (our first and only trip to Mecca so far). We stayed up all night with the first 3E PHB, made characters, played it as best we could (Remember the CD in the back cover that you could use to make characters, sure, eventually? I 'member!)
3e dominated the next decade+ of our RPG experience. I even wrote and got paid for some stuff in 3e books during that time (3rd party stuff, you probably don't remember it). It was a gold-rush era for D&D and RPGs in general.
Eventually, the bloat of 1,000 supplements became too much to bear, and my friends and I ( who are still together to this day, almost 40 years on) began to revert to older games. Simpler games. The ones we grew up playing.
Then 4e came out, and I thought "Ah ha! A new thing(tm)!"
I bought the sleeve-bound set. I bought the dungeon tiles. I bought a few of the Adventure Paths. I even went so far as to order tons of cheap plastic minis off eBay. Bought dry erase mats. Used foam board to build terrain, like a Battletech game. Players loved it - to an extent.
But we felt it was... off, somehow. By this point we'd all become veterans of several MMO's (Star Wars Galaxies, and WoW I'm casting a baleful eye at you). And it soon became obvious - 4e was a Pen and Paper MMO. All the trappings and details were there. Everyone had something making them special, so in the end, nobody was special.
Bland. Uniform. Beige.
That was a decade or more ago, and now we're deep into the Mercerization of D&D, where everyone gets a spotlight, all the bards seduce inanimate objects and the Tiefling/Dragonborn/(insert unknown race here) Wizard/Enchanter/blahblahblah....
I get tired of trying to keep up with it. Point is, this isn't D&D.
SO - I'm going to try an experiment. I actually did this on my own, way before the Edition Wars and You Aren't Doing It Right schisms that we're seeing today. I actually *gasp* sat down and read, word for word, line by line, the entire AD&D1e Dungeon Master's Guide. And you know what I found?
If you take it all together, and adhere to the rules, rolls, and tables, you can create a very viable single-player RPG experience.
Admittedly, you have to supply the "fluff" in your own imagination. There's no "Roll to see if you get invited to the Duchesses' Coming-Out Ball" table. But if you squint a bit, you can make a story from any of the results you get. The secret is....
The adventure MAKES the story. You don't know what is around that corner, or behind that door. You don't know how those guards will react to you. You're not a group of Chosen Ones on a path to ( insert goal here), but a random group of folks thrown into a series of semi-random obstacles you have to face, overcome, and then - if you're lucky - write the story of your adventures.
So here's where we begin. I'll do my due diligence over the next few days, and it will be all above-board. I'll roll 3d6 in order and abide by the results. Roll random starting gold, and if I'm lucky have enough for a couple of henchmen with slings to watch my back.
This will start in a small village of Smallvillage - from there, it's random overland maps and random rolls. Maybe a cave or dungeon, maybe freeze to death in a blizzard.
So what's YOUR job?
Give our new hero a "goal". Money, fame, levels, power - something that would take Joe Adventurer and turn him into someone who would go out into the unknown with nothing more that a longword and a 10' pole.
And 2-5 henchmen to soak the damage and use slings to support him. Never forget the Henchmen rules.
I'll provide a random map of the World tomorrow-ish, with no specific details aside from distant Points of Interest (using freely available online sources) to provide some ideas. From there I'll use the Hexographer program http://www.hexographer.com/ to chart our progress.
See you on the road!
-WK
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