Did your parents get you into gaming?

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

No.

My mother hates DnD (and other RPGs or related games) with a passion, believing to be satanic. However, her perceptions are remarkably skewed.

One time she saw a vampire playing card. It featured a topless vampire (her breasts were hidden by the skull she was leaning on but it was obvious she was topless), her fangs were clearly visible and she was holding a gun.

My mother noticed the gun, and told me to throw the card away. She also didn't like me using pennies as counters; she thought I was gambling. With pennies.

 

[jeffh]

I hooked my parents - well, at least my mother - into it, not the other way 'round.

 

[jdrakeh]

No. Some [other] crazy guy with a shaved head, Ming the Merciless moustache, and lots of tattoos got me into gaming. Best GM I ever had

 

[Decado]

I voted no. My parents never discouraged me from playing and my mom kicked ass when she bought me all the 1e books for Christmas. My cousin who lived with us during the summer to help on our farm was the one who introduced me to gaming.

Decado

 

[JRRNeiklot]

No. My mom was too busy picking cotton and my dad was off playing this live action game called World War II.

 

[Teflon Billy]

I wasn't introduced to the hobby by my folks, but they were always supportive (which was uncommon back when I started playing)

To quote my Dad, "If he bumps his Math and English grades another letter grade and he keeps reading in all his spare time I don't really care if he's a Satanist."

My old Man: the Devil's Own Pragmatist.

My Grandma was responsible for a large part of my early D&D gear, providing me with books, dice, adventures etc. in exchange for Yardwork.

She also got me Dieties and Demigods--the early copyright violater with Cthulu and Elric in it--for my birthday. I remmber her reading from it to my group of 11 year-olds and pronouncing Cthulu "Chill-thu-thu". When we corrected her we were told to "shaddap"

Good times.

 

[Father of Dragons]

My arc in RPGs has a little different than most. I started hanging around the MIT Strategic Games Society when I was in junior high school, and thus was exposed to OD&D when Kevin Slimak came back from a con at Lake Geneva with a playtest copy sometime in '73-'74. Anyway, I played and GM'ed the local blend of OD&D + Greyhawk + house rules (although with decreasing frequency over time) until my early 30's through college and grad school and employment, when I got married and moved to Arizona. My wife has many fine qualities (like putting up with my sense of humor!), but she's not much for gaming outside an occasional board game.

Then we had kids, and as they tend to do, they proceeded to grow up at an unlikely speed. Now, I introduced them to all sorts of board games, and when they got into various CCGs, I played with them and took them to tournaments and discussed the finer points of deck building with them (an unfortunate number of my brain cells are still tied up with how to build a "do the wave" deck in Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh rarities and the special ability for a Cloud Xyx). But it never occurred to me for some reason to introduce them to RPGs (although I did draw upon my DM'ing experience extensively when making up bedtime stories).

Then they found it. To be exact, at the 2004 Worldcon in Boston, they found demos of an obscure RPG called Wildside Gaming System. The system wasn't all the good (in my opinion, in any case), but they loved the idea and at least some of the demo'ing GMs were pretty good. When we got home, my daughter decided that we ought to turn one of the story cycles from their bedtime stories into a game. As I said, I didn't much like the Wildside system (for one thing, I didn't think it did a good job of separating system from setting), so we looked into GURPS 4th edition, which was just coming out around then. And bounced -- it was just to complex with what we wanted. In the meantime, my son discovered some of the kids he knew at school played D&D 3.5. So we dropped the other project (which we eventually returned to using True20 -- a write-up can be found here), and I started running a D&D 3.5 Spelljammer game for them and their friends, with help of material from Beyond the Moons. (Why Spelljammer? Well, I had missed out on all of AD&D having jumped straight from OD&D to D&D 3.5, and I had sort of noticed Spelljammer going by and was sort of sorry I missed it.) And since then I've added a True20 campaign.

So, I was out of RPGs, and my kids dragged me back!

 

[FalcWP]

Not really, since I didn't start playing until my last year of high school, though my mom certainly planted the seeds. She's always enjoyed fantasy books, so I got to grow up reading things like The Lord of the Rings. She's also always played board games, so the idea of sitting around the table with folks and rolling dice for a few hours isn't exactly alien to her, either. I'm convinced that if she'd ever just play D&D, she'd enjoy it; however, we've never gotten a chance to give that a shot. She's had me explain the basic concepts to her, and she understands some of the basic ideas (basically in the context of, "A ranger is sort of like Aragorn or Legolas, and a fighter is like Gimli. And you roll dice and add numbers to the roll to figure out if you hit things or not."). At some point, I do hope to run her through a game, just because she'd have fun.

My dad, on the other hand, doesn't get D&D at all, though he's never had a problem with me playing it. But he also wasn't a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings movies, nor board games (apparently, during college, he once got so sick of being backstabbed in a game of Risk with my mom and a couple friends, he threw the board across the room, and hasn't played since.) On the other hand, he's the one I get my love of sci-fi from, so he's not entirely devoid of geekiness.

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

Sort of. Not them gaming so much as that my dad, especially, was a big fan of Tolkien and a lot of the fantasy movies that were so big back in the '80s.

 

[Hypersmurf]

So, I'm curious how many here are second generation gamers and were exposed to gaming because of their parents gaming.

Me, absolutely.

My parents played since I was... maybe 3? They'd always take my sister and me along to their games; we'd sit up and listen, or read, or colour, or whatever, and then curl up behind a sofa when we got tired.

By the time I was 6, I'd practically memorised the 1E Core Rulebooks; my mother ran me through a solo version of Palace of the Silver Princess, and then I got to join their gaming group.

I've said many times - I have no idea what would possess a bunch of twenty- and thirty-somethings to let a 6-year-old into their game, but I'll be eternally grateful to all of them!

-Hyp.