Do You Remember Your First Game?

[rackabello]

Fun thread! Here are some of my earliest gaming memories (copied from an earlier thread, so bear with me if you've read this before).

this is my story, pathetic but true,
or, "those are some expensive coloring books, son"

So, a bookish and somewhat introverted grade schooler falls in love with 1e D&D. Let's call him Rackabello. Sadly, he doesn't have anyone his own age to game with. He plays with his dad every now and then, but Pops is just too smart for the fledgeling DM...

RACK [poring over map through spectacles apparently two sizes too large for his face]: You open the door. You see an orc.
DAD [absentmindedly playing a character who is his son's first attempt at a variant class, a spellcaster with telekinesis at first level]: Well, I guess I'll just fire all the arrows in the elf's quiver at him.
RACK: Dad!!

Rackabello goes to the gaming club at the rec center a few times, but the older kids are mean to him.

GRIZZLED 13 YEAR OLD GAMER [poring over character sheet through spectacles apparently two sizes too large for his face]: You can join our party, but first you have draw from my Deck of Many Things....
[RACK rolls]
GRIZZLED: You draw...Flames. Now there's a Devil in Hell who hates your character.
RACK [scared]: Oh no!!

Even his priest is no help to him. When Rackabello and his dad go to the rectory to play D&D with the cool, sneaker-wearing priest, the boy takes his halfling archer, a character Rackabello has equipped only with leather armor because he reasons platemail will slow him down.

PRIEST [poring over character sheet through a sneer apparently two sizes too large for his face]: Leather, a bow and a dagger? This is the kind of slack-jawed idiot walking around just hoping to get killed.
RACK [slack-jawed] Father?

What could melancholy Rackabello do? He'd already played Keep on the Borderlands as a solo adventure. Twice. How could he explore in the weird and wonderful new world he'd discovered? Well, for one thing, he could color in his Monster Manual. With magic marker.

It wasn't much, but it was a start.

 

[Cedric]

Well...it was about 12 years ago, I was in the Navy.

I had no experience with any roleplaying games and coming from Rural Texas, didn't even know they existed, but I was intrigued as soon as I did.

I rolled up a set of stats that would make a munchkin feint from bliss, like 3 18's and nothing less then a 15. And, I kid you not, I was rolling 3d6 in order. It was sick...I had no idea.

My friends were telling me I should be an elven fighter/mage...or all these other things. I went for a human monk.

They told me to roll d100, I rolled 99. They told me to roll several more times, I rolled nothing under 96. I had more psionic potential then Asmodeus...I had no idea.

Later, when I reached 7th level, I decided I didn't want to be a monk, they told me I could dual class as one of several classes, I chose magic-user...I had no idea.

I made it to 8th level as a magic-user (7th as a Monk) and I was able to use the abilities of both classes plus my gross psionics...I finally had an idea just what I had created.

GM made me retire my character...it was a good call. I made a Cavalier then, Sir Clay.

Cedric

p.s. I was hooked

 

[NewbyDM]

It is 14 years ago.
I remeber a lot of that campain... a copied translated set of players rules (i was 9, plz don't kill me, later i made up for it )
made characters, throw 4d6 (i had a bard with str 24), we didn't own any other dice yet... so threw 4d6 for thac0... or, it was called different (i don't remember anymore)
Play my bard with a strength of 24, that ability seeemed at that time the only usefull anyway... who needs brains?
Spend whole days wondering what would be beyond 4th level, cause the set only went to 4th level characters...
EVERY spell effect caught me... wondering what it did, even classes (paladin wtf, what is it? my primary language is not english, so at that age i didn't know)... yeah paladin was something like a rangers... also with animals (horse) but with MOOOOOORE power!..
Ninja's were tumbling around! DROOL!
Druids, mages....

owell, some of the magic is gone... i grow up
still glad im playing...

 

[Plane Sailing]

I remember some of the key things about my first character, created, blimey, about 21 years ago.

I rolled some dice and got a 14 in Dex, everything else average. I became a thief. I had 1 hit point, so I was very, very, very careful. I was one of a party of 12 adventurers giong into a dungeon, and there were a couple of specific memories. We fought against a chap who had a dancing sword ("what, the sword starts fighting us by itself!?!"). We eventually finished him off at the loss of about four lives, and as the party went on I whispered to the DM "Did anyone take his flying sword when the fight finished? No? Can I take it then?"

I attacked an Iron Golem with my slingstone.

I stood at the end of a queue where we had to answer life or death questions - and by the time it got to me (I kept ducking back in the queue) the DM was bored enough to ask me that "speed of a swallow" question - I gave the Monte Python answer and the questioner killed himself!

Out of twelve of us, there were only two survivors from the adventure. And I still had my 1 hp

This character retired when he reached 2nd level, and lived happily ever after on his ill-gotten gains

 

[Gospog]

It was 1982, and I was seven years old. My brother was 11, and he and his friends had apparently played a few times before.

In any case, on this particular day, I was allowed, for some reason, to accompany my brother to a friends house for the game. (D&D in the red box, of course)

I played a cleric. I got killed by a lizard man.

Hooked. For. Life.

 

[Rel]

It wasn't exactly my first game, but it was one of the most memorable...

So I had played once or twice with some guys in the Boy Scouts whose characters were all gods and were constantly threatening to kill or banish each other. It is a testament to how compelling roleplaying is that I still wanted to play given that first exposure.

I got the "Red Book" basic D&D game for my birthday a few months later. The only problem was that I didn't have anybody to play with. So I cajoled my sister (then, around 7 years old) into playing the adventure at the back of the basic book.

At one point we were playing in the back seat of the car on the ride home from my grandparents house. My dad was driving and my uncle was in the front seat next to him. The trick was that we didn't have any dice yet and the d6's that I had been using had to be left back with the Monopoly game back at my grandparents. No problem. Every time we needed a random roll, I just asked my uncle to pick a number between 1 and 20 or 1 and 6 or whatever. After interrupting my dad and uncle's conversation about 50 times like this, dad told me to shut up (he had a lot more patience than I do). So then we resorted to flipping the pages of the rule book, using the page numbers as our random number generator.

The other thing I recall about that game was that we used a "cut away" map I had drawn of the caves below the tower in the adventure. My sister was playing a dwarf and she kept digging new tunnels to escape the goblins that were after her. Me being a rather tough DM at the time, I only let her dig at half her normal walking speed. We kept erasing and drawing on the map as the tension mounted and she finally escaped the tunnels just ahead of her goblin pursuers. One of the funnest games ever.

For years after that, I kept that map and when I came across it in my pile of D&D stuff, I would smile at the memory of one of my earliest games. I would also torture my sister with it when she later developed her "D&D is geeky" attitude. It's been over 20 years since then, but I'm not so sure I don't still have that map somewhere in my gaming stuff.

Oh, and my parents bought me some dice at their earliest opportunity. I guess some people just don't enjoy generating random numbers at the behest of their ten year olds.

 

[The It's Man]

I think it was about 13 years ago or so. A couple of friends of mine from school thought I would like this game they had played a couple of times. A little later I was rolling up my first character.

I descided to play a mage, rolled 18, 17 (and some scores between 12 and 15 I think) using 4d6 drop lowest.

A while later we get to play, it was a rather large group (IIRC 12 players, most of whom had played before together, their PC where members of some kind of group).

Well, we get to the dungeon, I let loose my only spell Magic Missile, I think I hit the monster (which incarnated in another monster a couple of times when we defeated it) with my quarterstaff maybe once...

After the final incarnation and some characters, not belonging to the group, below 0 hitpoints they descide they don't want to share the XP with so many people and kill my character and those of my friends...

I was rather baffled, it was about 4 or 5 am when we stopped playing, but I still liked the game, although I must have done something wrong...

We have played with the same DM a couple of times after that, as a seperate group and we all rejoiced when we heard that the Paarse Schimmen were killed in a TPK, a couple of sessions later .

The 2nd part was killed also when we faced a horde of undead when we were 3rd level.

My 3rd character (DM'd by first two and now only one of the friends I started with) still roams the realms - probably because we play maybe 3 or 4 times a year on average, but has reached Rog9/Wiz8 (as a 2nd AD&D character). Now busy converting him for 3rd Ed, using the old guidelines but toning him down so he won't be 3 levels higher than the rest of the party, with a little bit of luck I get to play my Wiz7/Rog2 character Moreh Nebouchiem soon .

 

[National Acrobat]

It was 1980 and I was in the 6th grade. Some friends of mine got me to join what they called a hobby club that met after school and it ended up being 1E Adnd. I remember rolling up an elf fighter/magic user and we played the Keep on the Borderlands. It was pretty neat. I remember not knowing much about the rules but enjoying the suspense. It was like watching a movie in my mind. We ended up clearing out the Caves of Chaos after several forays and I remember that no one died, but it was probably because my friends had been playing longer than I had and they knew what they were doing to some extent. Those were the days.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

originally posted by Piratecat
For the first month that I played, my monk never hit a thing. Then I discovered the difference between a d12 and a d20....

Sigh.

Maybe that's why my monsters always have such crappy initiative...

 

[Alariel]

Ahhh, those were the days...

Yes, I remember my first D&D experience, back in '89, when a friend of mine taught me how to play with a 10th level dwarven fighter. He ran me through my all-time-favorite module: Castle Amber (well, most of it; it was mostly to get the jist of it for a campaign we were all going to start).

Soon after, we began the Under Illefarn adventure, and I played a cleric who got the surname 'Maceflinger' because of his penchant to roll 1s on his attack rolls...

... I deny any responsibility with having anything to do with those rolls. =)