D&D General What got you to try D&D?

cbwjm said:

I remember having some books similar to lone wolf where things carried over, but you were a ninja. It was pretty cool.

There were also a series (maybe only 4 or so books) that I believe were set on the lone wolf world but you played as a wizard.

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I have sone of them as well. Greystar the Wizard.

I was at my cousin's house when I was probably 7. My older cousin ran a BECMI game for a couple of us. I can't remember much about the game, beyond me being more intent on using a lit torch as a weapon to fight off a skeleton instead of my sword. I don't remember playing BECMI much, because my cousin had a few other games he tried out with us and we ended up liking the Palladium TMNT game more.

Fast forward to 6th grade. On the first day of school, the kid behind me in class had a copy of the Dragonlance book Legend of Huma, which got my attention because the cover art was the same as the NES game I had just wasted my last summer weekend game rental on, Heroes of the Lance. He ended up letting me read the book when he finished, so that was my first exposure to Dragonlance. A couple years later while at another friend's house, he showed me the recently released Tales of the Lance boxed set for 2e his mom had bought him as a gift since she knew he liked the Dragonlance books. It looked really cool, but no one had any of the 2e game material to actually play it so I ended up buying a 2e PHB to figure out how the game worked. That was the start of my teenage gaming circle that lasted until we went our separate ways in life after graduation, but we had some glorious summer campaign games that featured many marathon 12 hour days of gaming. 43 year old me questions how I DMed for that long given how much prep work I do now for my weekly 3 hour game and the obvious answer is lots of Mountain Dew and making stuff up as I went along.

Back in the early '80's when I was eight, one of my younger brother's friends from school was coming over to the house to hang out. Since the kid needed a ride, his older brother who had just gotten his license got tapped to drive him. Stuck at our house for a few hours with younger kids, he brought his blue-box Basic set and some other stuff with him to work on a campaign or something.
Since I happened to be a fairly precocious kid and was asking all sorts of intelligent questions, he decided to run me and our younger brothers through a basic adventure.
As soon as I found out that I could set things on fire in the game, I immediately spent half my gold on oil and torches, lol. Any time we killed some monsters we'd pile up the corpses and light them up.

When I was ten, I got the magenta-box Basic set for myself and have been playing ever since.

When I was fifteen, a new family moved into the neighborhood, and the older of the two kids (he was seventeen) painted minis. He sold me two miniatures he'd painted for $5 and told me I could paint minis with my Testors enamels I had for painting plastic models.
I still have those two miniatures...

It was the early 90s and my parents both worked. So they'd drop me off with my mother's mother (Meemaw) and my Uncle Jerry (Both on Social Security and Pensions) on some days during summer vacation. Uncle Jerry wanted to hit a local Bookshop and took me along with him 'cause nerd. The bookstore was also an early gaming shop. Tons of paperbacks, decent amount of comics, two TTRPG tables in the back, some Magic/Card Game tables in the front, etc.

Being a magic the gathering nerd, along with my brother, we convinced my parents to just drop us off in this store where we could hang out all day, spend our allowance, and play games. We didn't cause much trouble for the owner/operator so he never told my parents to stop doing it.

Then one day I got invited to sit in on a D&D game. That's all it took.

(I say 'early gaming shop' in the sense of 'the guy had just bought the place from the former owner, along with all his stock, and was in the process of turning it into a gaming shop' not 'it was one of the first gaming shops')

Steampunkette said:

(I say 'early gaming shop' in the sense of 'the guy had just bought the place from the former owner, along with all his stock, and was in the process of turning it into a gaming shop' not 'it was one of the first gaming shops')

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I remember when I was getting into RPGs there were two places in town you could get them: the book store across the street from the university (which made sense) and the sporting equipment store downtown (which didn't).

Back in the day, my eldest brother (who is 8 years my senior) taught us how to play Tunnels and Trolls, I think partly as a way to babysit us kids without losing his freakin' mind

When we were about 12, he brought AD&D books home from college for X-mas.

Fall 1972, Rob Kuntz said "Gary's got this cool new game called Greyhawk. You're a bunch of guys exploring an old abandoned wizard's castle full of mosters and treasure and stuff."

For me it was a gradual exposure to the game over several years.

I think that I first became aware of D&D when he got the first AD&D game cartridge for our Intellivision. Either that or from seeing the Saturday morning cartoon.

When I was about 10, I got really into the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which my mom would find at garage sales for me. One time, she picked up a handful of similar books, called Endless Quest. I really enjoyed those ones. Around that same time, I was also reading a lot of Star Wars and G.I. Joe comics, which frequently included ads for D&D.

By the time I was 12, I started looking at the D&D books and boxed sets in book stores, as it looked really cool to me. Later that year I was at a scout camp and one of the older boys had brought his D&D books and ran a game for a bunch of us. I was immediately hooked.

Right after that camp, I went and bought the (Mentzer) Basic Set with that iconic red dragon on the cover. A few weeks later, I bought the Expert Set, and I think by that Christmas I had the core AD&D 1e books.

An older cousin (female) and her friend (female) ran B1 for two female cousins, my brother and I. I came home, bought the Basic Set and began DM'ing. One store in town started selling TSR stuff, and a couple dozen of us began playing. I was ten years old.

I was surprised that none of the girls I knew were interested in playing. I mean, wasn't this a "girls' game"?