OD&D begin for me in the Fall of 1975

Bitd in the fall of 1975 a guy from Columbus brought OD&D with him to college. He had gotten the game in the spring of 1974 and played with a group of high school friends and he was the referee. That first week he told me about D&D (OD&D) and I was immediately all in. Our first game was a group of 12 players and the ref and when we started we had two elves, two dwarves, one hobbit and seven humans. That was pretty much the ratio even when the group go bigger.

In the beginning both dwarves and the hobbit were fighters, but later on there would be two hobbits thieves, one dwarven and one elven thief. In the beginning both elves were magic users, we only had one guy who ever played an elven fighter/magic user. Of the seven humans we had two magic-users, one cleric and four fighters.

So the initial 12 were one cleric, four magic users and seven fighters. When we had a party of 20 later on, we would have one cleric (we only had one guy who ever played a cleric, and he is one in real life for lo these many years), so one cleric, four thieves, six magic-users and nine fighters. So we were always light on healing magic, and magic items for the cleric were a priority and he always go first dibs on the magic armor. Later on in the games that I played in, instead of reffing, I had a paladin and I had a ranger(not at the same time) no one else ever played either of those. One guy alternated between magic-users and thieves and never once played a human, except for later on when he played druids. The guy who played the elven fighter/magic-user (the other ref) also played human fighters, an Illusionist and a Bard.

I never used my own dice to roll up my characters, I used the other refs table d6s. I rolled at least 16-18 for Strength 3d6 in order no adjustments for my fighter or subclass for every character I had over the four years. My other numbers might be very good all the way down to very low (several 3's), but they always had a good Strength. The other players rarely ever rolled an 18 for a character or a 20 on a d20. The other ref and I rolled them frequently, often when it was my or his NPC versus my or his PC and in that situation we both rolled double 20's on the same combat round (we always ran combat as simultaneous) for a double auto kill often enough that the other players came to expect them. The other ref once rolled 7-20's in a row, and IIRC I rolled 4-20s in a row on at least three occasions. The same d20's that the two of us rolled 20's on the other players would roll 1's, 2's and 3's on. I haven’t rolled that well in a long time.

I have vivid memories of the first game and going through six characters that first evening. :D When death is not permanent because you can roll up another character and be back in the game in a few minutes, how cool is that!

Out of that whole group I was the only one that got to read the rulebooks and the only one that my friend ever offered to let ref. A couple of months in I started reffing and he moved over to playing and I did most of the reffing after that. IIRC no one else had any interest in reffing so it worked out great because I loved it.