Does Anyone Come Into D&D 'Cold'?

[demiurge1138]

I taught myself the basics of 2e using the Monstrous Manual and the Baldur's Gate instruction guide. Then I got the 3e Monster Manual and decided I'd better start playing, if only to use the cool book.

Demiurge out.

 

[GandhitheBFG]

CRPGs: I remember my original DM's very first attempt to convince me;

"It's sort of like Baldur's Gate, but you can do pretty much what you want! And fly!"

Yeah...I have a penchant for winged characters...

 

[shilsen]

I waited for 4 years to teach myself D&D. I first read about it in a book in 1994 and thought the idea of the game was amazingly cool. Since I was in India, where D&D and tabletop roleplaying games in general have never been marketed (AFAIK), I had to wait till I came to the US in 1998 to actually find out what the game was. Walked into a store within a month of getting here, bought the PHB, DMG and MM, taught myself to play, found a group a few months later and have been playing ever since.

 

[Arnwyn]

We started cold. Starting around Grade 7, some friends and I goofed around with drawing mazes in our spare time, trying to make them more complicated than each others'. As they grew and we became more proficient in navigating these mazes, we then thought that it would be cool if things in the maze tried to "stop" you (traps and monsters like in the book "The Hobbit" or that cartoon movie "Lord of the Rings", or even "Dragonslayer" - which were all cool to our young eyes). And, instead of avoiding these obstacles, what if you could fight them? Voila, a rudimentary game was born, that we struggle putting together for 5 years.

Then, in Grade 12, we happen upon a hardcover book called the "Player's Handbook". What? A set of actual rules that detail in one swoop what we've been working on for years? We simultaneously cheer and cry.

 

[Gez]

I first came to RPGs through the Gamebooks. So it's kinda old, now.

But I never played D&D before 3e. Because back then it was AD&D, aka the Game That Just Doesn't Make Sense At All. So, I was happy with Ars Magica, Rêve de Dragon, the WoD games, and a few others you've never heard of (unless you're French).

My actual first RPG was Dragon Warriors, because it was, in its French version at least, published in the same collection as the gamebooks.

Dragon Warriors was a lot like D&D3: It had a character class called Warlock that was super-duper munchkin.

More seriously, there's one thing I liked from that game, it was that each weapon had both a piercing die and a damage die. If the piercing die roll wasn't higher than the opponent's armor, you dealt no damage. I'd use that system for D&D before I would use the "armor as DR" rule variant.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

I saw it, read a bit, was interested, and bought it. Simple as that. Of course, this was during late 2e...but that isn't the point.

Interestingly enough, I've been in bookstores looking at some D&D books and had people pick up one and ask me about it. More of a "What is this Dungeons and Dragons thing?" Amazing how many of those people I've convinced to walk out of the store with a PHB

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I learned D&D from my parents who learned it from a cousin who learned it from people he hung out with at school, played in home campaigns and extensively played console RPGs (and computer RPGs back when they were any good ). After a hiatus of several years from pen-n-paper gaming, I bought the 3e core books specifically to write for Dragon out of purely commercial motives.

I'm about as far from coming into the hobby cold as you can get.

 

[MrFilthyIke]

I saw people playing D&D...read the Hobbit, had one of them run a one off solo adventure, he moved away, I bought the books and taught myself. :\

 

[T. Foster]

I was nine years old and had a friend who's older brother played D&D and so I had the idea from him that D&D was something "fun" and "cool" but until I got the D&D Basic Set as a gift from my grandma I'd never so much as seen the inside of a D&D rulebook and had no idea what the game or any of its rules or conventions were like -- I remember being really confused trying to figure out how to read a 4-sided die, or why the 10-sided die had a side marked "0" (and for that matter which dice were which -- d4 and d6 were easy enough to keep straight, but past that I had a bit of trouble...). I also didn't read any actual "fantasy" literature (i.e. the classics -- Tolkein, Leiber, Vance, etc.) or play any traditional-style wargames or miniatures until well after I started playing D&D (which an old thread on dragonsfoot.org showed is probably the #1 divide between people who started playing D&D in the 70s and those who started playing in the early 80s -- people in the 70s generally came to D&D because they were already fans of fantasy or wargaming; people in the 80s generally came to D&D because it was "cool" and their friends were playing it and only discovered fantasy and wargaming (if they discovered them at all) through D&D).

 

[sjmiller]

Well, I will have to choose "Other" because I came to OD&D from Traveller. A friend of mine showed me a copy of The Journal of the Traveller's Aide Society (#4 I think) and I found it fascinating. He said it went with a game called Traveller that let you pretend to be characters from a story. I thought this was pretty cool, so I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me this game. They got it for me for Christmas 1979. I never did play Traveller with the person who showed me the magazine, but we talked about the game once I got it. After I moved in 1980 I met some people who played Traveller and they also played this fantasy game called Dungeons & Dragons. So I got the book for that and went on from there.

What a long, strange trip it's been.