I wasn't much of a D&D fan, more into T&T and Traveller for my role playing. Your description sounds pretty accurate, I remember those days of just a book or two, a few dice and pencils & paper. The miniatures were enjoyable to collect & paint, but my concentration was in WWII naval & armor with a later dabbling in British Colonial & ACW. Mostly just a boardgamer waiting not so patiently for the next issue of S&T to arrive for the next new game.

Getting ready for a WWII 1200 scale game in a couple of months, haven't run one of those in probably 10 years or more.

I still pick an issue of that up now and then. Not worth the subscription, but still a good value on an issue-by-issue basis.

I also remember the horrid resin dice that TSR included in later boxes. I still have some of them in all their crumbling pastel glory.

I don't remember the dice you're talking about though.

I have the majority of those old rulebooks that I found at a garage sale a couple of years ago. I started with third edition, but I love looking through the old books and even playing a game or two. I've got a Keep on the Borderlands play-by-post going on at another forum.

I was all d4's, d6's, d8's, d10's, d12's and d20's. I still have the whole collection at home languishing from disuse

forgive us, we were 8 years old when we started playing it. My friend Andre got the game from his older brother who was too cool to explain the game to us.

One thing we didn't understand was the 4-sided dice. We didn't know what to look for, we threw the die, then picked it up and looked at the underside, if we saw "1 2 4" then we surmised the result was 3. Years later we realized there was an easier way.

Regardless, it was a blast and we were hooked.

Those were some wild and wooly times. If you wanted a character to try something, you could interpolate from the existing rules, or you could spend hours flipping thru manuals trying to find a rule to cover that specific situation.

Every time I moved (which happened often in that period) I'd look for a gaming circle that acted like adults. At one tryout my character burst thru a door and then tumbled 20 feet down a corridor into a room full of monsters. I pointed out that that didn't make any sense. Instead of doing something (anything!) to make his narrative believable, the DM overruled me. That was his prerogative, so I didn't push it, but I didn't go back.

Similar situation, my character is a thief and finds a trap on a circular stairway. No problem. On our way back out, the DM gleefully tells us we triggered that same trap. Wouldn't you assume that a character has a modicum of common sense? Another one-session tryout.