D&D General How Did You Learn to Play?

Truthfully, 5E. Even though I really started getting into the ideas of AC,DC, Ability Scores, and all that during 3.5. My prob was that I never had a group to play with growing up and the one person I knew that played lived outta state. a majority of my circle don't play or aren't geek enough to enjoy tabletop rpgs.

Now I have a group and I know a few more people who do play.

We bought 3.0 starter set. I remember i played Regdar.

Then we sold our Magic cards and bought 3.0 starting books(all 3 of them).

When I was 10 years old (1986) somebody bought my friend the red Mentzer Basic Rules boxed set. We passed the Player's Manual around over the course of a week or so among a circle of I think four friends, and each of us played through the starting solo adventure. I thought it was amazing.

Within a week we had a basic understanding of how to play. We started running the starter adventure but found it too deadly and could never get very far. We had more success running our own (very simple) adventures. About a year later we moved on to AD&D, and then a year after that 2E was published and we switched over to that. The adventures became gradually more sophisticated as we got older. We almost always homebrewed the adventures because anytime we tried an officially published one we found it pretty horrible (I think the 5E ones are much better than any 80s adventures).

Looking back, what surprised me is that we (more or less) played the game "correctly" despite being self-taught and having never seen the game played or had anyone's older sibling to teach us.

It was years before I met anybody outside my circle of friends who played.

Our last major campaign was in 2E, starting in 8th grade (on April 2, 1990) and continued through our graduation from high school in spring 1994. I then didn't play again until 2017, barring a couple of abortive attempts to play 3E in my early 20s.

In 6th (5th?) grade in 1981 the game was talked about by acquaintances who played and friends who didn't. I got the Moldvay set and tried to figure it out. A sitter one of the rare nights my folks went out knew how to play and she ran an adventure for me (one of the two characters lost a hand to a cursed sword; I played that halflings and dwarf for years). With that basis me and my friends humbled through it rotating DMs (and after awhile throwing some 1e Gamma World in to). I want to say for a few weeks we reversed how you were supposed to do saving throws. Owner of the comic/record/book/game shop a block from the grade school ran a big OD&D-B/X-AD&D hodgepodge that we played in for years (over a dozen people some nights) and that's where we made sure we were doing it right.

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.

I think I learnt the basics of AD&D more through video games than through the books (e.g. I played Eye of the Beholder before I picked up the AD&D2e books). For Shadowrun 2e, which was the first TTRPG I played extensively (much more than D&D, which would become my main game only with D&D3e), we, i.e. my best friend at school and me, tried to put the pieces together from what we understood while reading the core rulebook. I think it's fair to say that our game might have varied a bit from official Shadowrun

These days I'm the one introducing most new systems to the group, so players old and new get a short intro and I typically help them build their characters and assist with rules until everybody has some practice.

My cousin had a copy of the three O-D&D books and we played over Thanksgiving at my grandparents' house in '75. I got the books for Christmas and played with my brother and Mom. I don't think I really understood the game until the 1st basic box came out in '77. For me, the module In Search of the Unknown was a great way to learn how to DM.

I was in a Comic Store and saw this really nifty box with a dragon on it sitting on an end-cap. I bought it, instead of comics that day back in 1989. I read the rules, took it to my cousin's house, and we began to play it. It eventually turned into this whole 'social hangout' thing, but mostly, it was just a nifty box with a dragon on it.

I was at a friends house when I was 11-12 and found a beat up copy of KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS. I was enthralled by it. It belonged to his big brother. His Big Brother saw how much I liked it and told me I could have it. I took it home and read it from cover to cover more than once and tried to reverse engineer the ruleset. A month or two later I scraped up the change to pick up a used copy of the 1981Basic set rules. I learned from reading those rules and playing with older kids.

I read, yes. But I learned by playing and doing and being mentored.

When I was younger my brother gave my a set of the 3.5 players guide and DM guide. I read through them and fell in love but never got to play. Eventually in highschool I made friends with a guy who played and we ended up playing a couple of, in retrospect, not great games. I didn't really get into the hobby until college where I ended up just offering to DM for a group of my friends so I'd have a game and we've been meeting weekly ever since. We even started having fun after I learned how to not murder them so frequently.