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

[bloodtide]

A Long Time Ago in the Time Before Time:

A read a lot as a kid. Lucky for me paperback books were a common find at yard sales and flea markets. And the books often cost only ten cents. Even then, though, I read through the books quickly.

Then discovered Choose You Own Adventure Books....and wow, you could read them a couple times and get different stories. I read through them, and the spin off Time Machine ones.....and then some "D&D" fantasy ones.

Then way in the back of those "D&D" Choose You Own Adventure Books, was an add or a game: "If you liked this book, you will love this game". So I went to the book store and bought it......

 

[Incenjucar]

The 2E Monstrous Manual, specifically the image of the tarrasque, got me interested in RPGs. I ended up picking up the Cyberpunk 2020 book before any D&D, and then I saw ads for Planescape and got sucked in.

 

[Blue]

Went to summer camp, and two fellow campers in my year played.

 

[Arnie_Wan_Kenobi]

A Boy Scout overnight lock-in at a (now decommissioned) Air Force Base, and a poster here (as DM) frenetically introducing us new 5th graders to the idea. Don't remember a damn thing about PLAYING that night.

ETA: This would have been around 89, I don't think he had 2nd Edition AD&D yet.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Went to summer camp, and two fellow campers in my year played.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

My story with the d4 is unpleasant!

 

[TheHand]

It was the beginning of the Satanic Panic, ironically.
One or more of the alarmed parents was warning other parents and the school about this Devilish game. Well, nothing made it more appealing to us nerdy 9-year olds, so we pooled our allowanced together and bought a copy of the forbidden 1981 Moldvay Basic D&D set, and the rest is history.

 

[Charlaquin]

This is exactly how I got started - my friend Erin's older brother and his friends would play and we would watch. I was 10 I think at the time, he wathced a lot more than I did since they were at his house a lot.

After watching them one time I told my friend Erin I wish we could play and he said; "we can I know how to play, I'll be the Dungeon Master". So we started our first game with me, my brother as players and my friend Erin as DM, playing red box and KOTB in the back of our station wagon on the way to the beach.

Well it turns out that Erin had no idea at all how to play and had not read any of the books or the adventure (but he did use the map) and he was good at fooling us with big words like "Elf", "Orc" and "hit points". I still remember the adventure, we made characters, went around the keep shopping and getting outfitted then ran across some orcs (not in the actual adventure). Killed the Orcs using some combat rules he apparently up on the fly, then 3 more came in through a "secret passage" and they kept coming until they killed us.

After that session, which ended in a TPK, I started reading the books since he left them at my house. Then I realized Erin really had no idea what he was doing. I did the next adventure as DM and the rest is history.

Haha that sounds very much like something a group of 10-year-olds would do.

I at one point came across an AD&D (1e) DMG at a used book sale and immediately bought it, excited to finally learn how to play this awesome-seeming game my friend’s brother and co. played, and… I was so confused! I had no idea that it was only one of three books you needed to play, and Gygax’s writing was just hard enough for me to parse that I wasn’t sure if the book was actually incomplete or I just wasn’t smart enough to understand it

 

[Azzy]

Some friends I made in my gifted classes introduced me to the game. We started with BECMI, but eventually moved on to (1e) AD&D.

 

[Richards]

My two cousins, the same ages as my younger brother and me, showed up one visit (we got to see them 2-3 times a year) with the AD&D 1E books and some pre-generated PCs for us to try out. I picked one with the least sucky scores, a human druid named Jon, my brother was a gnome thief, and the cousins took turns running the same PC (they had each made one half of a dungeon that met in the middle and decided who DMed based on which side of the dungeon we were on). We had a great time and got our own copies of the three core AD&D 1E books that year for Christmas. This would have been around 1979.

Johnathan