D&D: You never forget your first..

[Dakkareth]

Not DnD, but my first encounter with gaming ...

I was about 7 years old and together with two friends was at my grandmother's house. They had gotten some strange books with a guy bearing an axe on the cover fpr christmas.

(It was the DSA basic ruleset. DSA is one of the most played PnP RPGs in Germany)

We had nothing better to do and so we started reading them. It all sounded somewhat weird to us, but once we'd read, what could happen in a game (it was like the rules clarification textes in the PHB) we were hooked. After reading the books we decided, that we'd play the next morning.

The next day we secluded ourselves in a room (away from my mother, who didn't like anything associated with fantasy) and started making up characters. As I was the youngest and had read the books the least I had not much choice. One of my friends build a fighter of some sort and the other an elven wizard. I wanted a wizard, too, but he told me, that striders (rogues) could do magic, too, only later on. So I build a strider.

Then there was the question of who would lead the game. After a short discussion I agreed to do it, if I could play my character at the same time. I read the stuff about how an adventure was run and then started right into the sample that came with the books.

Looking back I did an incredible poor job of it fudging die rolls in both directions, making enemies fall over dead, when it became apparent, that the party wouldn't last against them, putting random extra treasure into the room, etc, etc.

Well, at least I had an excuse for the enemies falling over dead, as the wizard had used his alchemy skill to poison some ingredients for food earlier. That was about the only positive thing, one could say about my style, though. Ah yes, and I separated ooc and ic, because I didn't want to be unfair. That something at least, eh?

But the bad part was still to come. Under the thieves tower they had cleared out there was some door, which could only be opened by removing the pentagram on the floor with oil. So we sat there for half an hour, with my friends trying things like bashing the door, burning the door, kicking it, digging around it, etc with my only answer ever being 'It doesn't work'. Sigh. Finally I told them what to do and they entered the dungeon only to be chased out by some demon. They then used some barter skill to sell the goods they found and we went for lunch.

My first and only DM experience ever and my first encounter with roleplaying

 

[Silver Moon]

Summer of '81. I was working at a local amusement park, and one of the ride operators I was with had been playing with a group for a year. The game sounded interesting, and they had a session scheduled for the following Saturday. My coworker had that night off, which meant that I was scheduled to work. About mid-afternoon another player in that group wandered by and commented how I looked sick. Took me a while to figure out what he was saying.....

.....and before you know it I was an elf cleric named Skywise who was sailing off with a group of adventurers to the Isle of Dread.

 

[Rasmus]

Its so great to be among fellow gamers, who understand the feeling of discovering roleplaying!!!

I saw a small feature on roleplaying on the news, when I was about 8 or 9 (in 86-87 or so). I immediatley went to my LEGO and built a dungeon, but it wasn't really satisfying, especially since I "played" by myself.

At least a year later, I learned that one of my classmates played the swedish game Draker och Demoner, which means Dragons and Demons. They didn't want me in, but then the red basic set was published in danish.

We bought it and convinced on of the players older brother, an experience DM, to host a game a couple of times. I played a thief named Falvin, who went into Bargels dungeon, and emerged alive (as level 5!!). The DM has been my friend ever since, and I shall never forget the experience....oh my, I almost got tears in my eyes...

 

[Numion]

1989. Red box D&D. We used the keep adventure that came with it. Had a blast. Thief could hang on to ceiling and could punish monsters from above with little impunity. Mostly I was amazed at the other players' skill when they knew where all the treasure was, like "I take the dagger from the fireplace!".

They had played the same keep before. Several times

 

[Gerald]

Sherman, set the WABAC machine for 1979.

I was 13 and in military school. A few of the upperclassmen were talking about Tolkien and playing this game with strange dice and little metal figures, and looking in hardback books with two columns of dense type.

I was weened on AD&D, and discovered the boxed sets slightly later (even the original original "three little books in a box"...) I've been a gamer and a gaming pack rat ever since. I even still have dice from those days!

 

[zoroaster100]

The first time I played, I was only about 12, and I played with my two younger brothers who were 10 and 7. The youngest was really too young to play, and when we started the game, he was really upset and disappointed when he found out he wasn't going to get a real sword to use for the game, only one in his imagination.

The first time I ever got to actually play rather than DM was my first year of college. My first character was a first level wizard, who died in his very first encounter, which was with a harpy who charmed him and devoured him while the other character he was adventuring with ran away (it was a paladin, no less).

 

[Kichwas]

The first time I played was at a step cousin's house. He ran me through module S1 with a first level fighter, but gave me 400 hit points. I made it all the way to the end with only the loss of a few hit points, and at the demi lich room he just closed the books and said my character was dead and it was over.

So I thought -well this game sucks- and didn't give it further thought until my 11th birthday about a year or so later in 82 - I wanted the DnD Electronic boardgame with the $20 an uncle had given me, but my mother said it would just break and made me get the basic D&D set instead - a coworker had told her it was good for a kid's imagination. My first game with that and only a few minutes in my character named 'Herpes' on the suggestion of my older brother ('cause that's a good elf name') got killed on the way to the dungeon (B2) when he either fell off his horse in a rock slide or was shot by a single arrow from an orc (can't remember for sure).

For some reason I stuck with it this time, and not long after I had my own copy of S1 and learned there were much better ways of running it than what I'd seen...

 

[Imperialus]

Ok, my introduction to gameing is a little odd. I had always wanted to play D&D since I saw my cousins D20 one year when we were camping. I was big into Fantasy stuff and once he told me about the game the D20 was for. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and kept badgering my mom to let me start playing. She never did, up untill I eventually just broke her rules and started playing anyhow, she was convinced that it made kids go crazy and all that. Wasn't entiarly her fault, my cousin got a little over involved in it himself so she would most often point at him and go on about grades dropping and such.

Anyhow several years later when I was about 12 or so I moved to Argentina and my friends and I were sort of forced to make our own fun. I actually designed a pretty cool little RPG concidering I'd never actually played one before called "The Legend of Kayack". It was really quite simplistic and played more like Final Fantasy 1 or Hero Quest than any real RPG's. I acutally used the Hero Quest board for the trips into various dungons. It was still a helluva lot of fun and before long my friends and I were devlopeing more complicated games though none of them ever got seen to compleation.

At any rate my fiends and I played that quite a bit untill I picked up this bizzare parody of a Fighting Fantasy book. I can't remember the name and it was taken away by one of my friends mothers because it was "Satanic", and admitedly it did have some pretty wierd demononlogy stuff it and was most definatly a little "adult" for a group of 12 year olds to be playing. Anyhow what made it bizzare is you actually ran around with a party of up to 4 people (warrior, priest, magician and thief) and there was a "storyteller" who was supposed to read the book to you tell you what to roll and flip the pages. I've ripped apart several used book stores looking for it but seeing as how I can't remember the name or the author I've kinda given it up as a lost cause.

My first foray into D&D didn't come untill I was about 14. I'd moved back to Canada and one of my friends was telling me about how him and his friends were playing D&D. I jumped at the chance to play this game I'd been fantasizeing about for the past 5 years and was hooked after my first session which was about 3 weeks before my 15th birthday. If memory serves I was a minotaur (I'd read a lot of Dragonlance and loved Kaz) fighter who mostly just ran around and cracked skulls with a big ass battle axe. I joined the campaign at about 7th level and we were clearing out a city infested with were-rats. It ended in a TPK and we switched to Shadowrun shortly afterwards.

 

[Shadowdancer]

It was the summer of 1980. I was home from college, and I was working at a record store in the mall. It was a chain record store which also had a store in the city where I was attending college, so I just transfered between the two stores.

Anyway, a friend of mine I had known since elementary school also was home from college that summer. He asked me if I had ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons. I had heard about, from the news a few years before, but what I had heard hadn't been good. So he tells me he had started playing the game at college. He had heard about it from his older brother, who had graduated from college and gotten a job in New Jersey. His brother played with a bunch of his co-workers.

So my friend asks me if I would be interested in playing. I say yeah, I'll give it a try, there wasn't really that much else to do in the small town where we lived. He said that another friend, whom we had both gone to high school with, and that friend's cousin, who was our age, were also going to play.

I went over to my friend's house after I got off work one night, and we rolled up my character using the 1E AD&D rules: A human fighter named Dirk Stryker. He had good strength, dex, and constitution, and bad intelligence, wisdom and charisma.

A couple of nights later, we got together to play the game. The other guys were playing a cleric and an assassin. My friend who had played before was the DM, and was also playing a magic user since we didn't have one in the group, and he said we really needed one. There also were a couple of NPC fighters.

We ran an adventure my friend had made up. We were playing inside a camper trailer in my friend's driveway so we wouldn't disturb his parents. They lived out away from town and didn't have any neighbors close by, so we could laugh and yell and make as much noise as we wanted. There wasn't a clock in the camper, though. When we finished playing that night, we stepped outside and the sun was already coming up. We had played all night. And none of us were tired or sleepy -- we were ready to keep playing. And we did, all summer long, each session lasting until the sun was coming up.

Shortly after we started playing, I bought a Player's Handbook, DM Guide and Monster Manual of my own, and soon made my own dungeon and adventure for the group to play.

When I went back to college that fall, I transfered back to the record store where I had worked the year before. That company also had another store in town that also sold books, and they carried Dungeons and Dragons stuff. So once a week I would go over to that store and help organize the section where the D&D stuff was kept because I was the only employee at either store who had actually played the game. On the days I was working at the mall store -- the one without books -- the other store was always calling me up, asking me questions that customers had about D&D. I always wondered why they didn't just move me to that store full time.

 

[Hackenslash]

My first Time.....

Hi All,

My first time was behind the bike shed, sitting on the grass on a glorious sunny day in late May at our school during a lunch hour. My friend had come into school that morning with a big grin on his face and he claimed that he had played this really cool game the night before with his Dad and older brother. "What was the game" I remember asking and he replied "Dungeons and Dragons" I was a little skeptical at first and to be honest did not really think the game would be much fun at all. After the first introduction during that lunch break to the old Basic Edition Red Box set of Dungeons and Dragons my interest was peaked but I still did not see myself as a commited player and pursued other interests instead. I played in a couple of my friends adventures, though nothing on a regular basis and that was it really. Untill about 4 years later when 1st Editon Advanced Dungeons and Dragons came out and I when I played my first game of that then I was hooked and wanted to play as often as I could for as long as I could. I remember my first character was a Magic user who was persuaded to be Chaotic Evil by someone else in the party and this was a new group that I was being introduced to....Hmmm !!! Go figure !!! So as you can imagine I had a lot of laughs fireballing melee combatants, killing indescriminately and not caring if I decided to put up a Wall of Force in the middle of the High Street in our Local Town with out telling anyone and then laughing hysterically at everyone bumping into it. Very Juvenile indeed !!! But great fun. There was not much roleplaying back then but we still had a great time. My first foray into the challenging world of DM'ing was also equally enjoyable and as most fledgling DM's will admit if honest, I had great fun killing off the PC's in various nasty and unusual ways. So about 18 years later I am still playing the classic roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons and while it may be a lot more complicated and things have become much more important, it still is a great hobby and one that has brought a great deal of joy into peoples lives. Now time to get off my "Hallmark" Soap Box and get busy creating some nasty and highly dubious critters to slay....doh !! I mean challenge my PC's...hehehehehe !!!