Nostalgia Trip: D&D B/X

I've been feeling extremely nostalgic lately about some of the games in my collection, both physical and digital.  In particular I've been paging through the cover-less copy of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia a very old friend gave me back in junior high school (circa 1994?).

Chargen Lab: D&D Rules Cyclopedia

I thought I'd do some articles on character generation in various editions of D&D  to lead up to Monday's official release of 5e.  I would like to say that it is the same character so that we can compare and contrast the various editions, but differences in the chargen methods across editions make that impossible.  We'll start with the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, because that's what's on my desk at the moment.

D&D Retrospective: Basic Dungeons & Dragons

Once upon a time, there were two Dungeons and Dragons; it was in a time before Pathfinder and D&D 4e were competing for supremacy.  One was called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the other was simply Dungeons & Dragons.  Sometimes it was called 'Basic' D&D because of the existence of 'Advanced', other times it was called BECMI D&D.  Or it was named after the people who edited the rules for a given edition.

It might surprise younger readers that Dungeons & Dragons had five editions between 1974 and 1994.  These were evolutionary changes rather than revolutionary, small fixes and clarifications to the game rules instead of vastly different versions of the rules.  Want to know more? See you after the jump.