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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jaerdaph" data-source="post: 5048434" data-attributes="member: 3398">It was the fall of 1979 and I was in high school. I was in the cafeteria, minding my own business and reading The Two Towers when the person who would become my first DM approached me. "So do you like The Lord of the Rings?". "I do," I replied. I glanced around nervously. I was the shortstop on the JV baseball team and this guy was in AV Club after all."Did you see the animated version they showed at SUNY this summer?""I did.""It was so much better than that TV version of The Hobbit a few years ago.""I don't know," I shrugged. "I kind of liked that. It got me reading this.""How many times have you read it?""This is my third time through.""Do you play Dungeons & Dragons?""What's that?"I soon found out, and he offered to DM a game for me. He lent me the Basic Rulebook from his D&D Basic Set. I devoured it. The very concept, the very notion that this game existed, excited and overwhelmed me like never before. I spent hours thinking up the perfect character, his history, personality, his life story. I went for the first time to this amazing, magical place called "the game store" and bought a 1e AD&D PHB (my teenage ego could settle for nothing less than being "Advanced") and a complete set of those beautiful little jewels known as polyhedral dice. I also grabbed a stack of character sheets from The Armory, and went home to roll up my character.His name was Balin, and he was a dwarf fighter. I waited in anticipation for my first dungeon. I spent the days leading up to that fateful encounter reading and re-reading, rolling and re-rolling, preparing myself and Balin for years of adventure and glory.The fateful day arrived. We met again in the school cafeteria during study hall. This DM person sat on one side of the table with his books and notes behind some cheesy little cardboard thing he made himself and called a "screen", while I on the other side opposite with my dice and character sheet. I was nervous - butterflies in my stomach as if I was in my first school play. He described the dungeon entrance, I cleverly figured out how to get in, I descended the stairs, short sword and torch in hand, and entered the first chamber. He rolled one of those precious polyhedral dice..."A grey ooze drops from the ceiling on top of you."Balin the dwarf fighter fell that day, in a room marked "1" on a piece of loose leaf graph paper. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />My first experience playing D&D wasn't the greatest. Fortunately, I found another group of people to play with not too long after. But you never forget your first. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/glasses.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt="B-)" title="Glasses    B-)" data-shortname="B-)" /></blockquote>

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