HAH! Back in my day and now, I still play RIFTS and LOVE IT!
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Back in my day, you had to be very careful to track how long it had been since you drank a potion before you drank another, or risk having to roll on the Potion Miscibility Table.
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Back in my day, wild mages were awesome and weren't relegated into a underwhelming prestige class or obscurity.
Back in my day the Unearthed Arcana was deemed to avant-garde by my regular gaming group.
Back in my day our characters didn't have any puny Skills and we didn't need 'em.
Back in my day I wondered what the "A" stood for in that newfangled AD&D.
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Back in my day there were no "grognards", only fellow teenage gamers.
Back in my day, summoned creatures lasted 10 minutes per level, and you could summon humanoids.
They could help carry out that huge statue.
If they died, you could not summon that specific monster again, and we liked it!
Back in my day, the only way to cast magic was to learn it from books.
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Back in my day, thrednomancy required using actual thread.
Also, back in my day, no one whined about party balance or race points. If everyone wanted to play minotaur psions, we ran with it damn it!
Back in my day you came back from the dead having forgotten how to cast your most powerful spells.
Back in my day our most esteemed game master would announce "Our next session will be a 5% adventure !", meaning that we would have a 95% chance of ending dead... like, permanently dead.
And it was up to us players to play with our usual character, or to use a sissy "replacement" character*.
Man, those were the days !
* And we never used replacement characters, because we were tough hombres !
Back in my day, we needed a teacher to level up : an arch-priest for the cleric character, the Master of the Four Winds for the monk character, etc.
Back in my days we used random encounters when traveling, and if a dragon came up... a dragon it was ! And no whining allowed !
What ? We could run for our lives, you say ?
Oh, we did. But there was this time when we were in the middle of the desert, with our 8th level characters...
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In my day, the level one thief opening a chest might get stuck by a poison needle, fail his save, and DIE.
Back in my day, my one-level thief character opened a chest, got hit by a poison needle, made his saving throw, took 1d8 hit points [the master rolled a 8] divided by half (because I had succeeded in making the save)... and died.
The game was not afraid to kill your ass.
Indeed.
...we fought caterwaul after caterwaul because they were the weakest monster with treasure type U.
...we mixed our potions together before drinking them.
...we defeated Tiamat without breaking a sweat.
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Back in my day, Black Leaf was still alive.
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Back in my day if you pretended to be a spellcasting elf with your friends, your relatives were afraid you would get confused kill and lute them in real life.
... we had never heard of a PDF. Carrying your gaming materials required help from your friends, and in some cases professional moving tools.
...barbarians were just fighting men in loin cloths.
...thieves rolled hundred sided dice.
...there could only be one 15th level druid in all of a gaming world.
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Back in my day, the PCs regularly ran away from some encounters because they knew they'd die if they tried to fight.
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Back in my day, Rangers had to be good. There were no ECLs. There wasn't an Internet to get on and complain in forums about game balance. We suspended or disbelief and played the game. There were no character "builds". No one talked about DPS in the video games they were playing.You might see a new module twice a year.The game of dnd was designed to be DANGEROUS! You were scared of poison.You appreciated substance over form. (Sure, those old Erol Otus pics were somewhat crude, but they evoked a sense of the game that can't be replicated)
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Oh, forgot a good one. Back in my day....some of the first "porn" pics you ever saw were in the Monster Manual and Deities and Demigods!
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Indeed. In my day, Bast still had bare boobs.
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Back in my day, my best friend's mother forced him to give me his copy of Deities & Demigods after he colored in the all the illustrations of naked goddesses. True story.
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In my day you could randomly get several staffs of the magi in a dungeon. I had a character that broke two of them in a dungeon once, because I thought it was cool. Character did not live to brake the third staff.
...we had a bag of holding that held a pack of hunting dogs at 2nd level, because it was cool, and we did not care if it made any sense.
...elves lived in houses build inside of trees, because gnomes did not exist yet. In my red box set the elf home showed a tree with a door on the exterior. Apparently when gnomes appeared they forced elves to live on trees instead of inside of the trees. Elves now claim they do this to avoid harming trees, refusing to admit that gnomes forced them out of their homes.
I may be in trouble for sharing this information with newer generations, because no one talks about this.
In my day you could fight the deities of Hinduism and Shinto, whose stats were included alongside mythological deities of long dead religions.
Notably, there were no figures of Abrahamic spiritual figures in the book.
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Back in my day, my best friend's mother forced him to give me his copy of Deities & Demigods after he colored in the all the illustrations of naked goddesses. True story.
Related true story: In the early '90s, I picked up a first-printing Deities & Demigods at a used book sale: The edition with the Cthulhu and Elric sections. The previous owner had also colored in all of the line drawings of naked goddesses. (And also the god of the lizard men. Whatever.)
A few years later, I was GMing a 3.5 game at my house, and one of the players was a friend-of-a-friend who I didn't know very well. He was looking at my gaming bookshelf and pulled out my copy of Deities & Demigods. After thumbing through it for a minute, he looked at me and said, "Dude! You need better porn!"
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Back in my day, when that one guy who rolled high enough to get psionics said to the GM, "I engage in psionic combat," all of the other players would get up and walk over to the neighborhood pizza joint to play Missile Command and Galaxian for the next hour.
Back in my day DMs thought "game balance" meant you did not kill the whole party if they were smart enough to run away.
...character background meant you knew of a location your character considered home.
...we didn't have feats to make cooler characters, we had magic items for that.
...they did not call it a prestige class, but you could not become a bard until you had 5 levels in fighter and 5 levels in thief, and then druids had to teach you how to be a bard. Somehow this made sense.
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Back in my day, ranged attacks went three times farther when outdoors.
In my day, each monster had listed Treasure Types that indicated how many of what kinds of treasure could be found on them/in their lairs, no matter how improbable.
In my day, Treasure Type P meant a silver shower as opposed to a golden one.
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In my day, you could find artifacts in random loot.
...women in RPG art were either athletic, busty and wore jewelry with massive, round-cut gems, or they were lithe, with less boobage and had curly dark hair.
...orcs still had pig snouts.
...a perfectly serviceable NPC could be written using only eight characters, spaces included.
...storm giants used darts.
...every dungeon was blue.
...dealing 1 hp damage to an enemy was a huge deal, if it was a wizard.
...if someone used cold spells, they were serious business.
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Back in my day we didn't have any of this pretend fighting people with swords. If you wanted to fight people with a sword you went and joined the crusades dammit. There were none of these fancy casting classes either... Well except for this one guy who could walk on water and create food. He was a cool guy... but dammit we liked it that way
... our dice were little squares that you placed in Dixie cups.
...women in RPG art were either athletic, busty and wore jewelry with massive, round-cut gems, or they were lithe, with less boobage and had curly dark hair.
I don't think this one has really changed all that much. :(
Sure it has. Neither Clyde Caldwell nor Larry Elmore are very active nowadays.
Wait, why was I searching this?
https://www.google.com/search?q=RPG+Women&espv=2&source=lnms&tb m=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiF5ragkMjSAhWLKsAKHepUC8oQ_AUIBigB&biw=1 360&bih=638
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Back in my day, rather than having three sensible saves, we had five: Gonhorrea, Hiccups, Chafing, Too Much Cheese and Pebble.
Back in my day we didn't have any of this pretend fighting people with swords. If you wanted to fight people with a sword you went and joined the crusades dammit. There were none of these fancy casting classes either... Well except for this one guy who could walk on water and create food. He was a cool guy... but dammit we liked it that way
Oh! I remember that guy! What happened to him?
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Back in my day, green slime was a monster.
Back in my day we didn't have any of this pretend fighting people with swords. If you wanted to fight people with a sword you went and joined the crusades dammit. There were none of these fancy casting classes either... Well except for this one guy who could walk on water and create food. He was a cool guy... but dammit we liked it that wayOh! I remember that guy! What happened to him?
I heard he tried walking on water again.
I heard he tried walking on water again.Back in my day we didn't have any of this pretend fighting people with swords. If you wanted to fight people with a sword you went and joined the crusades dammit. There were none of these fancy casting classes either... Well except for this one guy who could walk on water and create food. He was a cool guy... but dammit we liked it that wayOh! I remember that guy! What happened to him?
But he had run out of spell slots that last time
Back in my day, nobody owned "D&D". It's 3 characters. What next? Are you going to copyright the letter "I"?
Back in my day, D&D didn't influence fantasy fiction: fantasy fiction influenced D&D.
Back in my day, we didn't have house rules. We had cave rules.
...because we lived in caves...back then...
I'll just show myself out the door cave entrance
Back in my day, we had game worlds where they had you generate three characters at the outset of play to streamline the process when your first character inevitably died.
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Back in my day, "fun" was a given; obviously it was why we played the game. Nobody acted like they owned the concept or accused others of being "against fun" .
Then came World of Warcraft; oh, it started reasonably enough, with the developers realizing no computer game should result in players spending more time reloading after TPKs than actually playing...but somewhere along the way, the term "fun" somehow came to be effectively defined as "remove all impediments to and distractions from mindless DPS optimization."