1986 Character Sheets

[geneweigel]

Who has had experience with these?

The only good thing was the spell sheets but no one used them after a few years of it because it wore down player's real world "knowledge of spells" after a while so it was easier to look it up in the book after just jotting it down on attached looseleaf.

The "History" section was the beginning of the end though. That was the shot heard round the world for our games. The blandness of those sheets set a new tone. Less orgamization and lets keep it stupid and about family. DOn't ge tme wrong there were some feeb players back in 1981 with dragon families and shit but this was like a gravitation to that officially.

[geneweigel]

Mar 14, 2018 13:12:02 GMT -5 geneweigel said:

Who has had experience with these?

The only good thing was the spell sheets but no one used them after a few years of it because it wore down player's real world "knowledge of spells" after a while so it was easier to look it up in the book after just jotting it down on attached looseleaf.

The "History" section was the beginning of the end though. That was the shot heard round the world for our games. The blandness of those sheets set a new tone. Less orgamization and lets keep it stupid and about family. DOn't ge tme wrong there were some feeb players back in 1981 with dragon families and shit but this was like a gravitation to that officially.

I sometimes knee jerk think that bad players come from the present but thats not true. D&D was officially rocking in 1982 but some people were just not getting it. Its hard to put a pin on what exactly but the 86 character sheets had a freak session that brought out the shittiness in these type players who had been kicked aside that I'll never forget. It was as if the people who would mock it were just dumbfounded by having to contemplate who there D &D relatives are. Heh, they were all trying to come up with ten related fantasy names and then a history that goes with the alignment and the religion and the patron and every single one of them expecting some of pay off as theyre entering all this garbage into play.

[Scott]

I recently found my old Dungeon Master Adventure Log from 1984. I was surprised by the fact that none of the players were good. I don't remember them all being neutral. They were playing more in character than I thought.

[geneweigel]

Goodly characters were the people who had plenty of characters from my experience. Although a lot of glib first time chaotic goods.

I chucked a mass of sheets of people who werent hardcore 25 years ago but there are plenty of records

[geneweigel]

I have this mass of comics downstairs that has been the same size since that time so you can see why I've wanted to cut down thats when I was living in an apartment. So it was tight. I had a whole bedroom for my shit and it was always an issue. So thats why I had purged so much rpg shit straight to the trash. I had a wall of 2nd Edition shit, no joke, so I purged a stack of old character sheets which included relatives who were one offs or got on the "it's Satan's game now" wagon. It was a pretty big stack. Most were the old blue photocopies or looseleaf but some were goldenrod AD&D but they had marker all over them.
I remember throwing out my parents' characters. What joy! Its weird that before the internet was big in 1995 and you couldn't meet people on the internet spontaneously at all unless you were this total buttmunch personality. So there was this D&D-scape of new age D&D as far as the eye could see. Thats when I was [e-mail] and every D&D website I would be writing the webmasters about the inaccuracies of their webpage information on D&D origins. It was cave "E-Gene" at that point where I hadn't yet flipped out about Greyhawk on Wizards of the Coast TSR forum where my name was "the human torch". The consensus at that early time felt like everyone was still living in that 1986 character sheet. Games that I was going to that I found on book/gamestore pushpin on the wall bulletin boards they were wanting voluminous histories for new PCs. I have one of these downstairs and I was cringing looking at what I had made then I remember it was a required at least 2 pages. Can you believe that shit? Bizarre times.

My brother, who honestly is my estranged brother in every sense of the word, just does not talk to me anymore and their is this continuous lag of unfinished D&D business. I kept his kingdom in the Swordlands map but its been 25 years since guy has played a D&D game and it was pretty sketchy. I'd say he hasn't thought about his characters in over 30 years and the majority of his stuff that I handed over to him in 2004 "he left it in an apartment". Seriously? What does that even mean? All that aside he would fill out every sheet and dotted every "i" and all his characters you could picture in a Robert E. Howard or Decamp/Carter story. So his charactes written on the 1986 sheets were pretty good but other people just shut the fuck up. Too much information.

Some girls in 1982-83 really "girled out" the goldenrod sheets and these were horrifying to look at. Loopy script writing, hearts and TIGER BEAT cover headliners. The character portraits having heavy makeup with crayon/markers.

I recall for the 86 sheets there was this girl, that I knew for years, she was 18 like me but never played D&D. She wanted to force her boyfriend into playing so she made him a married couple with a whole family. What a sad introduction to D&D for him. I can't even remember the cringy names but it was bad. Something Quasi-Egyptian and something Quasi-Irish sounding for him. At one point, she wanted me to draw her as an Egyptian princess and she taped the picture over the "honor" part of the sheet. At least, she did't want to be an elf princess who was slumming it! Had way too many of those.

I think the worst for this was I had gotten someone from a bad game who wanted to jump ship when I said I had enough putzing around Shadowdale for 9 months so he phones me (it was 94 and modems were scarce) and he asks if he can import a character and I'm like typical auto-Gene response,"You can do anything you want, we'll figure it out together." So I say I can sketch his character. He shows up and wants his character who looks like him but after he put on a Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity. "Lets put that off for now..." You can't make this shit up! Unblinking. I'm very open-minded but I kind of let that slide away because he was a low energy guy. Almost non-existent. Well, in comparison to the pack of wild dogs that were showing up to the game.

[Scott]

I don't have any of my old characters. There are a bunch of the goldenrod and some Games Workshop sheets of my players from the same time period as the DM Log, but none of my PCs, only a couple of illustrations of one of my M-U PCs.

[GRWelsh]

Try this for original AD&D character sheets:

www.mad-irishman.net/pub_dnd_1e.html#1e_adnd2

[geneweigel]

I remember burning through a set of these in a month in 81:

www.mad-irishman.net/pub_dnd_basic.html

[geneweigel]

I only have one character who was turned into a kobold left on one of those sheets.

[foster1941]

Mar 18, 2018 8:55:25 GMT -5 GRWelsh said:

Try this for original AD&D character sheets:

www.mad-irishman.net/pub_dnd_1e.html#1e_adnd2

I like how he did a modified version to add the acrobat abilities to the thief sheet. I wish he’d gone a step further and made the sheets totally UA compliant - adding Comeliness, adding AC 1 and 0 on the weapon chart, removing the unarmed combat adjustments (since they no longer apply in the UA system), and separating cavalier/paladin into a separate sheet with spaces for weapons of choice, info about retainers, etc. (and then adding spaces for specialized weapon and some of the barbarian abilities - climbing, detect magic & illusion, etc. - to the fighter/barbarian/ranger sheet). If he did that, those would become my go-to character sheets.