jeanie - 11 February 2018 11:06 AM
I played D&D back in the early 80s - first edition, before Advanced was even a thing. Recently got my mitts on some 4th edition books and am putting together a campaign. THe differences give me such a headache! I finally just said bad words and decided to cherry-pick what works for me as a DM. I suggest you do the same!
I’m a bit late to the punch on this one, but I did something similar. I played D&D beginning when I was in 6th grade in 1983 when I got the basic books for Christmas. Had trouble finding anyone to play with, but had a minor campaign with a few minor friends that didn’t really go anywhere because their grandma was nosy and had a friend who was one of those “Dungeons and Dragons is evil and promotes mind-control” people. Mostly I made dungeons and adventures for no one until much later a friend of mine (Marco! Hope you’re doing well in Austin… been at least 20 years) and I began an entire campaign and ran two characters each. Eventually we became better friends with two guys we’d been occasional friends with since kindergarten and we began an Advanced D&D campaign that we had for years. Marco moved to Austin after sophomore year of high school, but we kept the campaign going and added two other friends we’d known for awhile. Eventually we all graduated high school and still ran our campaign for about another year and half. Three of us went to college together, but one vanished (got back in touch with him recently) and another joined the military and moved to Hawaii. We kept it alive till about 1993 when the last two of my friends moved away when one joined the army and the other moved to try to get into law school (never happened, unfortunately).
Anyway… back to the point… one of our friends had bought the 2nd edition AD&D books and wanted to run the campaign that way. I tried, but it wasn’t working for my style and no one wanted to start over. Eventually what I did as DM was take bits and pieces of 2nd edition and adapt it to our campaign that still ran off 1st edition for the most part. From the beginning I was able to use basic D&D adventures as well, so our campaign was a mixture of different generations of the game. I have no idea how, but we made it work.