What was your first D&D session like?

[Lord Foul]

Also posted this on the "what age thread"

I started when I was about eight.

I was staying over at a friends house. My friend and I were spying on his older brother and his friends playing a game (D&D). We were fascinated. The next morning we asked his brother to teach us the game.He didn't seem too thrilled but said ok. We rolled up our characters, bought armor and weapons, and got ready to play. The first encounter we had was aginst two wolves. We killed them (this was a little over a day out of town). Then he told us to subtract one days worth of rations from our sheets. Since we didn't have any rations we decided to eat the wolves. To make a long story short, the wolves were diseased and we died.

That took a total of 30 mins. His brother laughed and left. As soon as I got home I made my father go out and buy me the box set (the red one IIRC).
I've been playing ever since and I'm now 35.

(After I buy my arms and armor I will not buy anything until I buy rations.)

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

My first time?

A friend of mine in school - oh, about year 11 or so - were computer gaming geeks for a long time. I didn't have the slightest as to what D+D was, but he was keen so we were both keen on setting up a game. It went on and on, and I eventually just bought The Adventure Begins Here, played Kerwyn the thief and Eberk the cleric and had both slaughtered by four goblins .

Ahh, memories.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Fall of 1979.

We gather in the bedroom to play--about 5 of us, I think. Right before we start rolling up characters, my brother say to me that I will be the DM.

Me: Huh?

Brother: You're the only one who has a dungeon.

A dungeon? Well, I had five pages of doodles, with random monsters in each room (whatever I thought was cool). At least the monsters got tougher the deeper the level, so that helped a bit.

 

[Ambrus]

Under Ilfarn

I was fifteen back in 1989 when some of my friends went and bought dice and PHBs to play with an acquaintance of ours who was home from college for the summer. I tagged along and bought a 2nd edition draconomicon rather than a player's handbook (because I loved dragons and that's what the store owner recommended to me). Anyways, we got together with our DM to be, Dan, and rolled our stats (Dan neglected to make clear that big numbers were desireable). I remember asking Dan what kind of characters we could make. He said "whatever you like; fighters, wizards, clerics or thieves." I didn't know what a cleric was but a wizard sounded cool.
So I said to Dan "I want to play a human wizard!"
"We already have magic users. You should play a fighter! Fighters are cool."
"Uh. Okay. Can I be a human fighter?"
"Human? Why would you want to be a human? You should play a dwarf fighter. Dwarves are the best fighters"
"Uh. Okay. Can I wield a big axe?"
"Sure! It's called a battle-axe. It does 1d8 damage."
I got to choose my own weapon! Yay me! The only dwarf I could remember ever seeing was Gilius Thunderhead from the Golden Axe video game. So that was who my new dwarf fighter was modeled on.

Our first adventure was in the Forgotten Realms, a module called "Under Ilfarn". We started off in town by investigating a lizardman attack. As I recall, our characters were supposed to be questioning witnesses when Dan asks us "Do you want to ask anyone any questions?" All the players looked at each other with uncertainty. Someone spoke up "Well, it was lizardmen right?"
"Right" answers Dan.
"And they took off into the swamp?"
"Yup."
"Well, is there any reason we can't just go into the swamp after them?"
"No."
"Then what do we need to ask questions for?"
Various nods of consent around the table. Dan, now curious flips through the module looking for this very information. "Heh." He says. "None of you are smart enough to ask the witnesses any of these questions." So after a bried pause, we took off into the swamp. I don't remember many details after that. There was a fight with the lizardmen. I shot some with my crossbow because they were out of reach of my nifty battle-axe. We clued in that there were in fact two tribes of lizardmen. I think there was a hostage to be rescued at some point. Later, in a dungeon somewhere, I discovered a magical axe and a ring of spell storing by searching through a mound of goblin crap. A feat of intuition and daring for which I was quite proud at the time. A good lesson to learn in your first adventure: Don't be squemish and remember to search *everywhere*.

 

[Xaov]

for me

For me it was early 2000 I had been going to gaming club at my school for a little under a year but had played magic up until that point. I was invited to play by the DM at the time. I started my first character who was a Paladin.

I had a Pegasus as a mount and we had a steal from the party member's rogue in the party. so the first night in my infinite wisdom decided to fly my pegasus up to the nearest tree and jump off onto the nearest branch and sleep there. The only thing I didn't consider was that I was trying to jump off onto a branch wearing full plate armor. Needless to say it didn't work out the way I planned. and my party never let me forget it.

 

[Chimera]

Late spring or early summer of 1977. I turned 15 at the end of June - it had to have been before then. I was spending what little money that came into my possession buying various boxed games, mostly Avalon Hill stuff.

Then I bought this little white box labeled

Dungeons & Dragons

Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames
Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil
and Miniature Figures

By some offbeat company named Tactical Studies Rules.


With some convincing, one of my friends sat down and looked it over with me. After a while, we were ready to play. I don't know how we decided such, but he was the referee (as they were called in that version) and I was the player. I drew up a Human Fighter and he drew up a couple of random rooms on a sheet of graph paper.

I get into the first room. There is a Giant. I attack. We spend the next hour trying to figure out how the heck attacks are worked out. I hit it. We spend even more time trying to figure out what damage I do, then how many hitpoints it had and what happens. You see, the original three books were not very well organized when it came to finding these things. There was no such thing as a chart of weapons and the damage they did.

But we were hooked. I purchased all of the supplement books as soon as I was able and moved on to AD&D as those books came out.

 

[Laman Stahros]

Early '79, at a Youth for Christ/Campus Life meeting (ya, weird, huh?), the blue and white cover basic book with the dragon on his hoard, and B1 Into the Unknown. The three of us who gave it a try all died when we met a strange shimmery cube (gelatinous cube). Oh, the horror! Been hooked ever since.

 

[Sado]

I was in the Navy in training to be a nuclear engineer, as was my whole group. The DM made us all the victim of a nuclear reactor explosion that blew us across time and space to his homebrew world. At least I think it was homebrew, didn't know anything about any of the settings back then.

 

[kerakus]

I was about 12 or so and my older soon-to-be stepbrother saw that I was reading the Dragonlance Chronicles and showed me this neat red box (D&D Basic - Mentzer). I read through the players manual and played that fighter in the cave with Bargle, then ran that character through the solo dungeon in that book, you know, the one with the rust monster. Then I did it again, and again, and again, until I knew that little dungeon like the back of my hand. My first time truly gaming was with my step-brother and his friends and I played that same fighter as we played through the adventure in the Basic set's DM booklet (the one with the carrion crawler at the very beginning).

Those were the days.

Q

 

[Galethorn]

So, I had just ended a rather long stint of playing Everquest--my first RPG of any kind--and I was trying a game called Baldur's Gate. I like it, and noticed it was using the D&D rules, which I had heard of. So, I went to the wizards site, and downloaded the crazy 'fast play rules' adventure they had back in '99 (Pregenerated characters, fighting skeletons, finding a dog in a bag), and had my mom DM for me, my dad, and a friend. We had a very good time, and later got the boxed set (the one with the little town with bugbears living under it, and the dragon who stole the holy symbol from the church).

Wow, it's been five years since then...I only started playing regularly about a year and a half ago, but still!