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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2510778" data-attributes="member: 18832">I voted "Other", because I got into D&D thus:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Read a novelisation of E. T. the Extraterrestrial when I was nine years old, or thereabouts. Remembered the name of the game the kids are playing in the first few chapters was "Dungeons & Dragons".</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Saw a British one-volume edition of the third edition of the D&D Basic Set a few months later on sale, and convinced my mother to buy it. I still have that on my shelves somewhere.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Never got the chance to play it, because I was a shy kid who'd just moved interstate and so had lost the friends I had, and my brother wasn't interested.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">My brother did, however, point out the first volume of the Elven Nations trilogy from the Dragonlance series at a bookstore once, and I bought it since I had been intrigued by the idea of elves with their warrior-mage powers in the Basic game.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Enjoyed those books and the rest of the series so much that I snapped up the Dragonlance Adventures hardback when I saw it on sale, then discovered that you needed the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide to actually play . . .</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">. . . sadly, this was 1990 or 1991 and Second Edition was already out, so that old DLA hardback never saw much use.</li> </ul>Thinking back on it now, I never read any fantasy growing up apart from the Chronicles of Narnia; my father instead introduced me to science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, which he read as an adolescent. I certainly never even read Tolkien, which goes some way to explaining why I didn't find D&D Basic Set elves trite at all: I'd literally never encountered them before.I doubt I would have enjoyed Tolkien, even The Hobbit, back then; as cruddy as some of those Dragonlance novels are, their worldview wouldn't have offended me like Tolkien's would have offended even my childhood self.Edit: The exception, as I am reminded by looking at the rest of the thread, is that I devoured Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology around the same age. That's the closest I came to reading fantasy as a child.</blockquote>

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