D&D General Who was your first character, and do you still play them?

[Stormonu]

I don't count the unnamed Holmes Halfling I made back in '79 when I was trying to get my dad to teach me the rules (he ran away after being outnumbered and severely injured by skeletons in his first solo encounter).

I think my first long-played character was Savage Avenger, a half-orc fighter/assassin. He killed the orc leader in the Caves of Chaos and took over the orc tribe there. That was around 1984. I haven't played him since, but he's a notable NPC in my homebrew campaign (with a completely different life story).

 

[R_J_K75]

1982, a puny gnome made with the Holmes boxed set. He died a very uneventful death. Only thing I remember is that the person that helped me create the character drew on a sketch on the back and he had a Smurf hat. If you're lucky, it could be yours on your next adventure if you stumble upon his dead corpse in some dark & dank dungeon.

 

[Shiroiken]

My first character was a 1E Paladin, but I don't recall much about him. He didn't have much of a personality, and I only completed a few adventures before I died at the hands of my IRL brother.

My first experience with the game was watching the cartoon at 6 AM on Saturday morning. Drove my parents crazy that I'd get up early to watch it, then go back to sleep when it was over.

 

[Ogre Mage]

1986 in elementary school. I was playing a 1st level wizard in 1E. He died quickly.

 

[aco175]

40ish years ago my father invited some guys over from work to play D&D. I think I had a thief or halfling. I recall a set of bars coming down and splitting the party in a hall with gnolls or hobgoblins ganging up and killing one side before leaving and coming around to kill the other side. I think I was the last one standing and was going to run away, but was persuaded by the others to fight on and save them. Next week my dad had the red box.

 

[Meech17]

Back in '99-'00 I was a kid playing EverQuest on my older brother's account. I played a Woodelf Druid named Panzan. He made it to level 14 or so, because I was bad at the game, and as a kid venturing into higher level zones scared me.

Panzan existed in EQ2 as a WoodElf Ranger through much of the mid/late 2000's until I quit around 2011. He made it up around level 60.

The first D&D campaign I played in was 2e, where I made Panzan an Elf Ranger. A family friend ran the game for us to introduce us to the hobby, and once we finished it we went out and bought the current edition, which at the time was 3.5e. The same older brother who let me play on his EverQuest account ended up running those games, but I originally shelved Panzan to instead make a Human Monk who's name escapes me. I want to say it was something boring, generic, and Human, like Bob or Al. That was my main character for a long time, and I kind of consider him my first 'real' character, but I did eventually remake Panzan as an Elf Ranger in 3.5e and we played for years in the same campaign/world rotating between a small stable of characters. I mostly played those two.

That group fell apart around the same time I quit EQ2, and I haven't played the character since. I've never really had the desire to remake him. I like to imagine he's spending his days as the warden of some small forest somewhere, and he lives in peace with like an owl companion or something.

 

[Remathilis]

Logan, a dwarf[emoji769] loosely adapted from Wolverine of the X-Men, was my first. He retired in the 90s.

Remathilis, my namesake, was my 2nd serious character and was played off and on for two decades and retired at level 20. His timeline is a jigsaw of retcons, reboots and multiple DMs, so I like to think that he's retired somewhere with his wife.

Remathilis also lives on as one of my characters in Elder Scrolls Online.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Cleric in B/X, played Palace of the Silver Princess. Don't even think I had a name. Defeated a skeleton with 1 hp remaining. My brother the DM asked which direction I wanted to go (the map was on the ground between us). I said "left". Well, his left was the wall, not the door that was my left.

"you run into a wall and take 1 hp of damage." Dead.

So no, I didn't keep playing him...

 

[cranberry]

I made my first character in 1979 who was a Fighter.

He died at 7th level, so I don't play him anymore.

 

[TwoSix]

If we're counting video games, my first D&D characters were various parties I rolled up in Pools of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds back on my old Commodore 64; this would have been in 1988 or 1989, when I was about 11.

In high school I mostly DMed, so the majority of characters I rolled up were for one-shots, I really have little to no recollection of what I was playing back then. Mostly wizards and psionicists, from what I remember.

The first character I really remember was an Anuirean prince in Birthright, who got a 99 on the bloodline roll and ended up being a wizard who could summon earth elementals. He eventually got murdered when he got lippy with an awnshegh ("I judge people based on their appearances, and you're REAL ugly.").