D&D Gamer

Just wanted to collect some tidbits of historical information about the website here. Feel free to reply with corrections/updates as my memory isn't the greatest.

The original site was dndgamer.com, and was run by our good friend Richard Young (aka WorkSlave). I think it was around late 2012 or early 2013 that Richard had to scuttle the site due to a job change, as he had been running the site on a company server. I attempted to get him to transfer the domain to me and get it hosted someplace, but it didn't happen. I think the domain name is still owned by a cyber-squatter company that hasn't given it up yet. I had been an Admin at the time, having earned the role after a few years of play and some demonstrable technical knowledge.

We (meaning site members) all floundered around and either stopped playing, or tried any one of several other PbP sites with various degrees of success. Then I think it was Baron that started dndgamer.net in late 2013. Ricochet was also a driving force in the new site. Baron subsequently transferred control to Niilo. Someplace in there a hosting change also took place. Things started off pretty good, but over the years slowed to a crawl. It would have been comatose if it wasn't for Charon running a game in Area 2 with the few remaining active members.

The move to dndgamer.nl was to facilitate a code upgrade of the forum software. Niilo wanted to start clean, and here we are.

Technically the roots go back further than that.

Back in the early noughties when 3e came out, I was unable to find a group and eager to get into the hobby. This was the early days of the internet and everything was still very chaotic. Even Youtube didn't exist back then and finding out ways to engage with people was tricky. WOTC had a forum but it was a huge mess and didn't have any games running in a back and forth message format. I figured such a thing was possible but with only some basic html and css knowledge, setting up a forum was a daunting task. Back then there was an easy free option for making a website in the form of Geocities but MSN also had something they called MSN groups which was essentially a constructable forum with html frontpage. I made a group and called it "Online 3rd ed Dungeons and Dragons". Catchy, huh? I figured I could use this to play dnd with people but needed people. So I went back to the Wizards forums and made a thread explaining what I'd done and asking if anyone was interested in playing via forum.

I can't remember exactly who was first, but it might have been Rogue Angel using the name "Lyle" who responded to me and turned up. A chat ensued and he brought other dutch friends with him in the form of Glim and Gimble. A few other early faces turned up in the form of Richard Young and Savanno Whitefire, and two brothers (Revenant and Ironshadow?). I grabbed Tayron from the rpgn website I used to hang around on. If anyone else I missed was part of the early crew, sorry but it was a long time ago and there were so many names. Was Niilo called Blind Guardian back then or was that someone else? Megayugi was there in those days too I think? Maybe Atarihero tho I feel he came later.

Basically, the site exploded. Msn introduced a chat room along with it and our numbers grew massively as we had more and more games running and more and more people joining. Pretty much all those mentioned above were eventually given admin access to try and keep up with the rapid expansion. Soon we were the second biggest msn gaming group. The only group bigger than ours was "Lejendary Adventures" which, I believe I'm right in saying, was run by Gary Gygax? It had thousands of members in contrast to the few hundred we were rocking.
(sadly, while the internet archive does have a couple of snapshots of the Lejendary Adventures group I couldn't find any snaps of ours at all)

It eventually became obvious that MSN groups were an insufficient medium. The group was buggy, buckled under load and MSN were slow to push updates. I did manage to campaign for them to introduce chat moderation powers which they eventually did with much reluctance.

By now I'd gotten talking with many of the other members and Richard Young basically came forward to say he worked in computing and could hook us up with an actual forum. This would give us more control over how things worked and would take us forward into a more modern, functional design. Together with the admins he set up DnDgamer.net which was the first iteration of the site as we now know it. We basically had a html frontpage that led through the forums, mostly as they appear now. The numbered game format we carried over from the MSN group. The work area thing was new. The Lucky Golem chat room was reborn as an irc chatroom. We had this weird battle arena thing that was basically moderated gladiatorial pvp which stuck around.

I think that covers most of the basics. The rest is fairly straight forwards. A steady decline as the userbase dropped off, myself included. Efforts to revamp came and went. At some point the site as it existed in Richard's hands went down or ceased being hosted? Someone (Baron/Niilo?) basically rebuilt it and reregistered the dndgamer.net domain. A few faces drifted back, I returned having had my interest in the hobby rekindled. And now the site has moved once more to dndgamer.nl in its current incarnation you see before you.

Thanks for that Charon. I don't think I found the site until the early 2000's. I found an old RTF character sheet from 2005 but it may have been earlier than that. I think I was in nearly 20 games at one time and managed to pull out a couple of "Gamer of the Year" titles, as well as having had some contributions to the site newsletter. I think that may have been the last newsletter to actually be published.

Wow, so. Stumbled into the archive of the early site.
https://dndgamer.net/archive/indexef89.html?f-745.html

Some of this stuff was ported over from the MSN group directly.

My character Vern in Savanno's game posted on the site in 2004 was definitely a carryover from the MSN group.
https://dndgamer.net/archive/index6369.html?t-2167.html
He might have been the second or third character I played. The first was Lolyssa but no sign of her in the archive so that might be a game that died before the move.

23rd Jan 2004 has a repost of one of Birdy's games that specifies it began at the MSN site.
https://dndgamer.net/archive/index1b8d.html?t-2066.html

So the move must have been around this time. Given that her game was marked as "Old Area #22", you can appreciate just how busy we were back then.

My archived area 3 campaign was definitely from the old area 3 on the previous site. Players included Cormyr, Tayron, SMJU, Savanno, Horro the Horrible and Steele Trueheart. I remember this being the longest running game at the time of the move as I was the first DM to hold area 3 and it never got relinquished in the lifetime of the msn group.

There's also an archive of some of the stuff from my chat based game which ran for two years I think in the irc chatroom. It was garbage but somehow it kept on going. XD

Given that time frame... I suspect the original msn group was made in late 2001 or early 2002. Hard to believe how we accrued so many members in two short years. It felt like forever.

If you look at the Introductions area in that archive (nice find, btw, I'd forgotten all about it), it seems things started up in January 2004. My intro thread is from 27th January 2005.

I remember joining the MSN group (thanks to Rogue Angel who I met on the Elf Fantasy Forum, a dutch fantasy forum tied to the Elf Fantasy fairs) in 2003, and I introduced Gimble to the site. Yeah, my name might've been Blind Guardian at that time.

Rich/Workslave hosted the site, but I think he disappeared. In time, the hosting stopped and the domain name DNDGamer.com was lost to us. Baron rebuilt the site at the DNDGamer.net domain, I took over some time ago.

- - -

As for recruiting new members, new blood for our forum... I don't visit sites like Reddit or MythWeavers anymore, so if anyone else is still familiar with them, feel free to advertise our forum.

Grodech wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 8:07 pm If you look at the Introductions area in that archive (nice find, btw, I'd forgotten all about it), it seems things started up in January 2004. My intro thread is from 27th January 2005.

Nice. Well, 5th of January 2004 I posted this.

"5th January 2004, 19:06
If you are joining under a different name to what you were previously known as for God sakes let someone know via PM who you are. I'd hate for you to arrive and not be able to access your game due to status lol."

I then posted this on the 14th...

"In the summer of 2002 I picked up a friends PHB and thumbed through while he played Knight Rider on the PS2. I was intrigued to say the least. A short time later I bought a PHB, DMG and MM only to realise where I live there were few players. Determined to play this fantastic game I created a website, choosing Microsoft's free groups section as it's home. It started with one game, DMed by Rogue Angel. From there it grew and grew until over 24 games were running. Discussions ran occaisonally about moving the site to somewhere that allowed us to rock more. Richard Young created this place and we moved. We are still by gamers, for gamers. A non profit gang of random people who share one common goal, to play lots and lots of DnD. Welcome

Charon is a 22 year old guy with a penchant for red hair and a severe God complex. He enjoys DnD, rock music, writing and just generally rocking like any evil overlord should. He likes pink text as it is ultimately the most evil colour. He is single and shares a house with 4 other people. He has an internet obsession and for some reason just used the third person for this text....

He be strange..."

Geez, what an asshole, amirite? Guess I finally toned down the God Complex. Still pretty strange tho. Always worth staying strange imo.

We also had a weird conversation about dribbling. Cos things were really wacky back then.
https://dndgamer.net/archive/indexf138.html?t-2560.html

But yeah, this dates it up quite nicely, summer 2002 our saga began. Well, probably after the summer holidays when I went back to uni. Which means.... dun dun dunnnnnn... our site birthday is most likely September 2002.

I was just counting from when the earliest posts started on the dndgamer.com forum site, which is why I said Jan 2004.

And yes, you are strange, but aren't we all? It's kind of a requirement.

I remember the Lucky Golem had a long and varied history, too.

As Megayugi, I didn't get into too many games in the areas on the MSN Group (maybe just one), but I was attracted to the original Lucky Golem (which, as Charon says, turned into an IRC chatroom later). I do have my character from the MSN group around, Eldon. I've carried him around for as long as I've been around.

I can't remember the exact details of the chat room's history, but we had a few different IRC servers where it was hosted over time. One of them was Otherworlders, and another was Psionics. I think there was a third, very mainstream IRC server where it was hosted briefly, where other sites with huge names had their chatrooms set up, but for some reason or another we weren't all that fond of that one.

The chatroom's activity fluctuated on a daily basis but there were quite a few staples in there; Tayron and Glim especially were present all times of the day, and I think both were admins there. Most names would show up there once in awhile - I tried to be present 24/7 via mIRC but couldn't always. I've got scraps of chatroom logs all over the place, because I kept jumping clients - mIRC, Pidgin, Trillian.

The room is empty now (irc.otherworlders.org). As recently as 2016 I had a conversation with Tayron there, and Niilo was present only a couple months before. Grodech popped in around August of 2016, too. I even had a brief chat with Glim in there in late 2019, and Tayron was present then too. Trunks joined and switched his name over to the game that both Tayron and Trunks participated in weekly for years where they played mega-level deities, I think with Bynw the operator of the IRC server itself? Must've been at least a decade running.

I did lose almost the entirety of Area 15's work when the old site went down; I didn't have backups of much of it anywhere, and the scrapers / backups we tried to take of the site around then didn't reach any password-required areas such as workspaces so all of my years of homebrew and other material was lost and remains unrecoverable. Likely due to my age, and the fact I had worked on FMA d20 material on a daily basis from when I was 14 to about 17, I encountered a major crisis when DnDGamer v1 went down and we couldn't retrieve any of it from R1chard/WorkSlave. It was my first encounter with losing a tremendous amount of data all at once. An external harddrive of mine went down shortly after, too, compounding the issue. I learned my lesson the hard way that year about keeping backups. In fact, to this day, I've got some mild data hoarding issues, as I've been flung in the opposite direction...

The Gladiatorial PvP combat was the Circle of Death. I think there might have been an earlier iteration on the MSN Group at one point, but AtariHero brought it back on v1 of the site. Alongside it ran the Gauntlet, which were 1 room 'dungeons' where the gladiators (and one or two allies) could take on beasts with the promise of loot that could be carried into the Circle. The circle was okay but I loved the gauntlet, which took place in IRC. Mehr, my gladiator, would frequently team up with anyone I could rope into helping him in the chat at the time, usually Gryndel.

We had a few bans around v1. Of course, there was myself as Megayugi, who got temp banned a few times when I was 12-ish for being downright annoying. Harmless, but annoying. I think our first, non-spammer, legitimate permanent ban was InnocentEmo. While I didn't have any real problems with him, he was very politically charged and chafed some of our members the wrong way, and there were a few late-night, 10 - 15 hour long political 'discussions' cropping up in the Lucky Golem rather frequently that he would instigate. One night, Tayron snapped... Yes, Tayron, the man of infinite patience. He had enough of the bickering and banned InnocentEmo from the LG, and while he wasn't banned on the forums, he stopped coming around after that. Another was Kensou, I think his name was? I don't recall the details surrounding that one. I think he might have been a friend of Leahn's.

Yeah, you bunch of old farts.....

Pfft I'm not old, I'm just high level. ¬¬

Well, then I must be the 40 year old DnD virgin....

I joined the MSN group when I was ~11, and I'm 28 now. I guess that might be old to some, though my body is already reminding me of my mortality a bit early...

Toward the end of v1 we had some people joining that finally took the 'youngest member' title from me. I think akiir's brother Thy was younger?

Yeah, Thy was pretty young I think.
Well, now you're 28 you've peaked. :P Enjoy your bad knees, oh they're coming. :D
*shuffles off into the old people corner*

Well this was a fun read

Feel free to add anything I missed or misremembered. :)