D&D General How Did You Learn to Play?

[Gilladian]

I was 11 when my older brother came home from boy scouts raving about this great game. He wrote down the rules from memory and we started playing. I remember a few weeks later when my mom drove us 30 minutes to a game shop where we bought the brand-new boxed basic set. And geomorphs! With random dungeon level tables! Wow! And you could GO UP LEVELS! I was hooked for life. This was in 1976. My mom and older brother and I still play together when we can.

 

[Retreater]

I was 11 when my older brother came home from boy scouts raving about this great game. He wrote down the rules from memory and we started playing.

That's an awesome story. My mom was never supportive of it. (Satanic panic and all that.)
I'm wondering how close the "brother's from memory" ruleset was to the original game?

 

[Gilladian]

That's an awesome story. My mom was never supportive of it. (Satanic panic and all that.)
I'm wondering how close the "brother's from memory" ruleset was to the original game?

Reasonably close, I think. He has a pretty good memory, and had access to the rules most weekends. But. He did invent some house rules, and now we ca’t remember what some of them were...
Its amazing how mud this game has meant, my whole life. I met my husband playing it, and played with my dad right up until his last few months, when he was too sick and too vague. Now, we still play weekly, me and my big brother. Mom will play again, if we ever get back to in person gaming. And my little brother will play sometimes. Most of my closest friends play, or would play if life permitted.

 

[Marandahir]

A friend from my social skills after-school group got us to assemble outside of group for Friday night D&D 3.5e. He taught us the ropes.

I had played a single game of 2e before, hosted by a friend at a 6th grade bday party, and it was a fun if chaotic and ultimately unsuccessful experience.

The 3.5e group went on to become a 4e group eventually, and and members of it continued on when we were in college, too.

 

[TwoSix]

When I was growing up I was interested in playing D&D and first got the AD&D 2E Players Handbook when I was around 12. Those early games mostly felt like old Nintendo RPGs like Final Fantasy: random encounters in the wilderness, fighting until death, NPCs with one scripted line of dialog, a dungeon of mazes with random encounters. I didn't even know books outside of the core rulebooks existed or where to start if I did. (So there were no modules to guide me in adventure creation that I knew of.)
I had been running for a group of friends, and we all went to an older kid's house (he was probably in early high school). I started running for him, and he said "you're doing this all wrong. Let me run and show you how."
So that was my first real D&D game. A couple years later I would read my first book on how to DM ("The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacombs Guide" by Jenell Jacquays, which I still keep on my active games bookshelf).
So I learned by watching another DM do it and by reading books. Now there livestreams, copious starter sets, blogs and online communities.
How did you learn the craft of DMing and how has that changed how you run games compared to other DMs? Are you still honing your DM skills, and how are you going about that?

Are you me? Getting the 2E PHB at age 12 and running Final Fantasy type games was pretty much me.

I actually picked up the basics of D&D from the SSI Gold Box games (Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds), and a friend of mine introduced me to roleplaying by pretty much doing diceless roleplaying. We would make up crazy characters (with "stats" on a piece of paper) and just run them through imaginary adventures.

 

[bloodtide]

Back in the Time Before Time as a kid a read a lot. Lucky for me it was easy to find sci fi and fantasy books for 10 cents at yard sales and such. Though I quickly ran into the problem of reading the books too quickly. Right about then the Chose Your Own Adventure books came out...and each book told...er, well three stories (maybe) and you got to pick what happens (not really). I read through them quickly too.......and then found AD&D Chose your Own Adventure books. And in the very back of them books was an add that said "if you likedthis book you will love this game: AD&D."

So I went to my local Waldenbooks in the tiny strip mall.....but all that had was a Red D&D box. Well, "D&D" was close enough so I bought it. I struggled for a bit to understand everything...and kill Bargle. Slowly I taught myself the game. Then mentioned it to my best friend, and he made a character....and then the rest of my social group joined in too.

 

[Mad_Jack]

I was eight when my younger brother's school friend came over to hang out. The kid's older brother had just gotten his license and had gotten roped into driving his brother to our place.
He brought his D&D stuff (blue box Basic) with him to work on an adventure, and I was fascinated. He ran us kids through an adventure. When I found out that I could set things on fire if I wanted, I spent all my extra gold on oil and torches, and burned the corpses of every last monster we killed, lol.
Two years later, I got the magenta Basic set and began running for a friend and my brother, and eventually for some of the neighborhood kids.

 

[Dioltach]

Sounds like I was somewhat at a disservice by starting with AD&D instead of a Basic boxed set. It was definitely a labor to learn the whole of AD&D when I was 11-12 years old.

And you missed out on the opportunity to fall in love with Aleena ...

My parents bought the first edition of The Dark Eye (Dutch translation), back in 1985 I think. It led you through an introduction and the basic rules very smoothly, which made it easy to start playing. A bit later I visited my grandparents in England, and picked up the Mentzer Basic and Expert sets.

 

[Maxperson]

I got the 1e books when I was 13 and read through them. Then I talked the kid upstairs who was the same age as me into playing. Together we bungled it, but over time corrected our mistakes and it took off. After about a year we stumbled into two other people in our Jr. High who played and suddenly we had a group. 36 years later I still game with one of those guys on a regular basis and two others very infrequently.

 

[ccs]

I got the Basic set for Christmas 1980.
Prior to this the only xp I'd had with the game was leafing through a few of the 1e books in the book stores at the mall that summer.
I'd gathered that it was a game of some sort. But I couldn't really digest it in the brief time in the stores. And they never seemed to have all/the same books. So it was a bit like that story of the blind men & their elephant descriptions. But, like I said, I'd gathered that it was a game of some sort & it seemed pretty interesting - dragons, Norse Gods, Elves, a book of monsters....

So come Christmas list making time I put "Dungeons & Dragons - game" on my list.
Grandma got it for me. Well, what she ordered (presumably from the Sears or JCPenny catolog) was the Basic Set. She had no idea that there was a whole series of books. And I had no idea that there was a boxed set. Neither of us realized there was any such thing as a difference between D&D and AD&D.

Christmas day I ripped the wrapper off the Basic set.
And after dinner my brother & I went to play it & realized that there was way more to this thing than any other game we'd ever played (well except for some of our Dads Avalon Hill games - we'd played a few of the simpler ones with him).
This was going to take a day or two to figure out. Oh well, there was plenty of other stuff to play with for the moment.

Once we got home from Grandmas I spent the next day or two reading the Basic book, reading B2, & fiddling around making characters.
A day after that myself, my brother & our cousin started to play. I was the DM by default as it was my book & I'd read it all.
Not one drop of D&D experience between us.

That's right, 3 average 10 & 11 year old kids figured out how to play all by themselves.
We knew no one else who played. The other two had never heard of the game. And my only exposure had been flipping through pages at the book store that previous summer.
A short time later we'd add our one friend to the game.

Starting from complete scratch was not hard.
It was just like playing with our Star Wars figures - minus the figures, but plus dice rolling to see if attacks hit/miss etc.
The only thing we weren't quite sure about initially was if we needed some sort of board or not. You know, since it was some sort of game. But we'd figure that out soon enough.
Of course, being 10 & 11, our story telling skills were pretty awful. But we had fun & easily figured out the rules.