D&D General What got you to try D&D?

[Charlaquin]

My older brothers played. Apparently I was nosy enough for them to let my try.

My friend’s older brother and his friends played, but they wouldn’t let us play with them. But it got me curious enough that years later when I met someone else who played, I was eager to try and see what it was like.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I was part of a gifted education program in grade school and our teacher used Holmes Basic D&D to teach teamwork.

I stab the fighter in the back and take his stuff!


I so would have failed that class......

 

[Professor Murder]

This cover. I really, really loved monsters and mythology as a kid. I saw it in a Barnes and Noble at 7-8 yrs old and begged my dad to buy it for me. The rest is history.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Initially? Computer games. Icewind Dale, IIRC.

After that, friends who played.

 

[Clint_L]

My friend Willem was hanging out after school - ostensibly we were studying for jazz band because he was new to playing guitar and I was new to playing bass. But he got bored and asked me if I'd ever heard of D&D, which I hadn't, and then ran a tiny little scenario just using a made-up character for me and a d6. I think my character had to explore a cave and defeat an orc. In retrospect, it is pretty impressive that he effortlessly created an ultra-basic version of the game for me to try.

Willem then invited me to play a game with his older brother, who was in college, that weekend. That was my first real game, early 1e, and it was just my brand new character, a level 1 ranger (18/94 strength! I had no idea what that meant but knew it was good because they were both excited), Willem's much higher level character, and his brother's character, played as an NPC, tracking down and defeating a young dragon. It was incredibly exciting, and I went up to level 3 immediately because of all the treasure (which I later realized was the point). I even got a flametongue 2-handed sword. After that, I was hooked, and joined a group that Willem knew at my junior high school. And we got to bring our characters and play with the college guys on occasion, which as you can imagine was the coolest thing possible.

 

[aco175]

I was 8 or so and my brother 10ish. My father heard about it at his work from some of the younger workers about college aged. One night two of them came over and DMed an adventure for my father, brother, me and a couple neighborhood kids we hung around with. We all died and never got the help from one of the DMs who had a PC that was a statue and if we touched it, he would come alive to help us. I still recall the older editions play with the DM asking one to describe how you check the statue and "Are you sure you want to touch it?" Makes a young kid paranoid.

 

[Duo Maxwell]

When I was 12, this ad kept appearing in almost every issue of the early 90s Spider-man I bought.

It wasn't until I visited the library and found a hardcover book by a certain, J. Eric Holmes M.D. called "Fantasy Role-Playing Games," where I turned to the first page of the first chapter:

I went onto the next page was like, "A game where you can do just about anything?!" I begged my mom for the Black Box D&D set from Waldenbooks and the rest was history.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A kid at summer camp pulled out the players handbook, asked a bunch of us if we'd ever seen or heard of it and, without dice or even a clear understanding of the rules, ran us through the "adventure" depicted on the front cover of the 1E AD&D PHB, fighting lizardmen and trying to loot the room, which the DM fleshed out with a ton of traps. I was the only survivor.

I came home from summer camp, discovered my dad had photocopied a coworker's OD&D booklets (all except Blackmoor, which I've never seen, to this day). Hearing that I'd played AD&D, he bought me and my brother the three core books within weeks (we were in the middle of moving at the time).

I've been playing ever since, minus a quiet period in college where I was buying books on vacation but not playing.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Freshman year of college, a friend saw me playing Arcanum: of Steamworks and Majiks Obscura and asked if I'd played Pool of Radiance.

This came around eventually into talking me into a train wreck of a first game that inspired me and the other new player in it to learn to DM out of spite.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I was 13 and the SysOp of the BBS I frequented ran us through a quick 1e dungeon. I'm pretty sure I died. A couple of years later, 2e arrived at the Comic Store that I hung out at, and I bought it, day one. The rest is history.

(If you know what the first part of my first sentence means, you're probably OLD).