My Story with Role Playing Games by Kirby Flake
I have been playing D&D since the early 1980's. I started with the “Basic Set”, but my friends were playing AD&D, so I moved to that. Our group had a really good DM and we enjoyed his campaign for a good while. But he and his family moved. The others left DM'ing skills were not up to his level. We also were not very organized. Years later I met a group of players at a convention. I really enjoyed their style of play, so I started playing with them.
This group was made up of older and more organized players. Many of them collected Dragon Magazines. In fact, one had all of the Dragon's back to Issue #1. Many had other magazines and gaming books, such as White Dwarf, Arcanum and others. This group also had rules and allowed playing of other races besides the ones in the standard books. They also did not allow, just anyone to DM games. Everyone had to “apprentice” as a DM. I went through this process and one my first game as a DM apprentice, I had 17 people in the game; trial by fire for sure.
Because this access to other sources, I was introduced to other classes and game features. One of these features was psionics. Psionics has always been one of those optional parts of D&D that many didn't (and still don't) use because of lack of understanding. The group really understood psionics and in fact introduced me the 1st Edition psionicist class. Psionicists came out in Dragon #78. Because of this many people (like my old group), had never seen it. In fact, today I have seen campaigns (online) that are using the 2nd Edition psionics and psionicist. There was one person in our group that actually took the disciplines from 1st Edition AD&D Player's Handbook and the Dragon #78 article and made psionicist specific versions.
I will publish many articles about classes and races for 1st Edition on this website for people to use in their games. Another good source for AD&D 1st Edition information is http://www.dragonsfoot.org/ .