Do You Remember Your First Game?

[Aaron L]

I remember my first character, a half elven fighter/thief. I remember having to be told I could use my thief abilities but had to say I was (I thought the DM took the percentages into account himself!) I killed a sleeping ogre with my morning star and found a suit of elven chainmail and was in heaven.

 

[James McMurray]

My first game was back in the early eighties. I'd just gotten the Basic set for Christmas, and me and my crayola-filled dice went through the solo adventure in the book several times.

I don't actually remember my first game with a group, although I know it was in Rosemont Middle School, in the library's atrium, and involved White Plume Mountain.

 

[the Jester]

My first game was played with a dm who didn't actually own any of the books but had a lot of house rules written up. I remember a Japanese longbow that did 2d20 points of damage, but my strength wasn't high enough to use it.

I recall rolling my race, class, hp, and AC... the AC I rolled determined the armor I could wear.

Later, he got the PH. But I didn't play with him again for years. I hooked up with another kid I went to school with and played all the pregenerated pcs from the Ghost Tower of Inverness... I remember getting to the ixitxachitl...

Ah, that first game! I remember fighting some kind of genie, encountering a rust monster that I killed with wooden arrows, and the dragons. Oh yes, the dragonS....

First there was the beauteous elf maiden in all silver, with silver hair. She was out to slay a dragon. Then we encountered the gold dragon, she (naturally) shapechanged into a silver dragon and they started fighting. I shot the gold with an arrow, the silver killed it then turned on me cuz I attacked another good creature.

For the record, that dm later turned out to be a lot of fun to play with, though I don't think we ever played straight dnd... there was always a lot of Arduin and the like involved. What was that old-school module in Dragon magazine with the preppie monks? Where you were after some magic stone and there was a suit of armor that looked like Darth Vader at the end (or was that the dm's own invention?)

Steve Corbett, if you're out there anywhere, this is James from Anderson; email me or something, thanks for introducing me to my favorite thing to do!

 

[Agamon]

My very first game was at 9 years old. My neighbour got the basic set, and I rolled up a fighter, I believe. We didn;t really know what we were doing, and it wasn.t that great, because I didn't play again until I was 11.

The only thing I clearly remember is opening a chest and 3 medusa popping out. To this day, I still wonder what they were doing in there, and how they managed to fit...

Now, the first time I really played, at 11 (as noted above), an older friend of mine asked me if I had ever played D&D. Remember my brief encounter with the game a couple years prior, I said yes, I have. Then he asked if I'd ever DMed a game. Further explanation came after my quizzical look; have I ever run a game? Wanting to sound knowledgable, I lied, saying, yes, of course I have. He grinned and told that that was great, because he was supposed to DM his friends in a game the next day, but now he could play if only I DMed...um...okay...it's been a while, though, so I need to borrow your books. He let me have them, the same basic set books my neighbour had, plus the module, the ever-popular Keep on the Borderlands.

Things actually went not too bad, considering the players were all 12-13 year-olds (an intimidatingly huge gap at that age), many of whom had actually played before. Thus began my lifelong affair with being the Dungeon Master...

 

[Templetroll]

My first game was in '79, I was 23, just out of the Navy. I had been on a ship being decommisioned and duty was making sure workmen didn't set fires with the acetylene torches. It was incredibly boring so we usually had a book or something. I found this small white box with three tan booklets in a toy store, found them fascinating but confusing. When I got out of the Navy I found an ad in a magazine published by some college students. One article was about D&D and the author included his phone number and an invite to try the game with his group. He was shocked that he actually got a call.

The first game, as they are explaining how to roll up a character, the DM tells me, "I hope you won't mind but you must roll up a dwarf because that is what we have penciled into the marching order." I still don't understand why I "must" have done that but I liked dwarves so had no problem with it.

We used the Princton variant rules for D&D so I ended up with a 19 Strength and a 3 Charisma. Being such a newbie then I gave the character the name Gimli. His first adventure they went digging in barrows and we fought a wight! Nice scary fight and the DM was good at describing things. Ended up with splitting treasure and they had a mace (+2!) that none of the other party members used so I asked if I could have it. I've noticed that if I ask for stuff that no one else really wants my characters tend to end up with a lot of neat toys... but that may be a different thread.

My dwarf got turned to stone, after using my mirror shield to stone a basilisk... the DM asked me three times (!) if I "..really want to do that?" I've since learned that if the DM asks you that say, "uhm...no." They put the dwarf statue on the back of one of the PCs that got turned into giant cockroaches (Cursed scroll - Robert West Curse System; should be familiar to anyone who has played at PrinCon). We got chewed out by our Ducal patron for showing up in town with loot laden cockroaches since our mission was supposed to covert, but hey...

Gimli also once got the killing blow in on a baby white dragon by flying invisibly and smashing it with his mace as he flew by. Great fun. Ended up as Fighter 6/Thief 6; very powerful for the campaign we were in.

 

[Songwind]

I definitely remember

I definitely remember. I was 10 years old, it was 1984. I had bugged my parents about D&D until they got me the basic set when I was nine. I never found anyone willing to play that could learn the rules.

We moved back to the States and one day my father said, "Do you still want to play D&D?" I jumped at the chance, of course. He told me that two of the younger guys that worked for him played D&D, and that they'd be happy to come over and show us how to play and run a game.

I made a fighter, Wulfgar or something like that. My father made an elf, Leinad Yndis (remember, Basic D&D). We had a blast. To this day I don't know if it was a module, or a homebrewed adventure. I remember that there were two thieves lost in the dungeon that posed as fighters so they could join our party and try to roll us. There was an intimidating guy in black armor that we kowtowed to, but were supposed to fight I never looked back.

 

[Zappo]

Both my first game as a player and my first game as a DM were OD&D. I can't remember how old I was when I first DMed, but it must have been 12-13. We played the dungeon in the red boxed set and had a blast.

The first time I played as a PC, I was 14-15 ( ), and I played a 10th level elf. It was an ultra-high powered campaign, also because the rules stated that you got 1 XP for each GP found and the players occasionally gave GP to each other to raise their XP .

So I'm the only 10th level character in the middle of a bunch of 17th through 24th level ones, who waged war against each other as often as against the enemies.

The best bit was when I was fleeing on a magic carpet from the very angry 17th level Wizard PC who for some reason I can't remember wanted us all dead. I was carrying the bodies of a couple other PCs and wanted to have them raised, but I had to shook away the wizard first.

I did it by hiding in a tower and casting an illusion of myself on the carpet flying away... and thus the 10th level elf saved the butt of the three 18-24th level other characters.

 

[Eternalknight]

His name was Pike, he was a halfling and the game was Basic D&D. We tackled the Keep on the Borderlands. This was memorable because Pike was the only one to survive our first battle (I think it was with hobgoblins). I think there were four players... I remember one of them being a magic-user, can't remeber the others though. Because the rest of the party died, the DM decided that in the next room was a solitary hobgoblin guarding some prisoners... the party's new characters. Pike had to kill the hobgoblin to get the other characters free. He succeeded. Yay for Pike!

 

[alsih2o]

we didn't understand the rules very well....

i had begged for the game after seeing the cool picture on the box, and my whole family got together and got me thebox, extra dice and some minis for xmas.

we barely glanced at the rules(so much to toy with) and assumed that 1st lvl spellcasters got all the first lvl spells they could cast and so on..so we ended up lining up all the minis in formationa and taking them on, with a cleric who could keep casting heals as long as he was awake, and much d.m. fudging we killed a troupe of skeletons, an ettin, some kind of evil dog and all the other minis every afternoon for weeks.

my godfather owns a company that prints billboard graphics and he made us a huge cave, on 1 inch squares that was something like 4x 8 feet, he just randomly made a huge rambly cave complex and we explored it endlessly.

we played poorly, but creatively forever, till i found out cousins of mine played and i went to play with them. i was in for a very rude shock when discovered what all the rules were!

 

[Moe Ronalds]

My first Character- CG half-orc Barbarian with 20 strength. His best friend was an elven wizard (that's pretty much his entire personality. sigh)

My first game- I played with my sister and my friend who had none of the books but had played 2e when he was six, so threw some twisted logic he was more knowledgable of 3e without actually having read a book. The dungeon was filled with gnomes, purple worms (he made all the stats up himslef) and I even killed a troll. His character got a flaming sword, and the monster in the dungeon with the highest stats was a hobgoblin. That's what happens when you don't have an MM, or a good dm.