It was kinda cool to start playing D & D again. Most of the group is around 40ish (two are in their 30s). We had all played RPGs in the past and were being nostalgic and decided to play. We have been having a blast. Our party name is the SBR Gang. (Not trying to offend anyone)!! SBR is the abbreviation for "Short Bus Riders." Our rolling (as a group) was so pathetic, and still is.
Huh. Sounds, errrmm, vaguely familiar.
My local gaming group, which started out as die-hard ASLers and then slowly got tired of "All ASL, all the time!", decided to try role-playing again sometime after D&D 3rd came out. We'd all been RPGers at some point in our pasts, but I was the only one who still did it regularly, and I'd mostly switched to LARPs.
Personally, I like D&D 3rd better than 1st or 2nd because it's a relatively tactical, "wargamey" system. They absolutely hated it. Combat was too complex, which took out the drama for them. And there were too many things that were different... for example, the fact that some spells changed their names was a big issue to some.
And as a group, we were just completely incompetent. Almost every fight was won with half the party unconscious and making stabilization rolls. One time in a dungeon the party wandered in something like three different directions, ended up opening about five different doors in the space of a game-minute, and had to fight off half the dungeon's monsters in one battle. Putting out a big red button with a sign saying, "Danger! DO NOT PUSH!" was absolutely guaranteed to have one result...
Eventually they all declined to play 3rd Ed any more, and we moved on to Hackmaster. Don't get me started about Hackmaster...
But they're my friends, so I play anyway.
Given that Hackmaster actively encourages incompetence (one of our characters has Short Term Memory Loss, another is practically blind...), you can safely assume that the competency level of our group did not go up with this change of systems!
So when our group of adventurers needed to come up with an official group name in order to register with the authorities of the Little Keep on the Borderlands, we ruled out name after name as sounding too... well... competent. Then somebody suggested, "We should call ourselves the Short Cart Society!" Agreement was unanimous, except for me who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
And once they explained it to me, I had to agree. It may be offensive (though that has never stopped us before...), but it's certainly appropriate!
John Brock