How did RPGs grab you?

[Insight]

I blame it on a pair of older friends who had the orange boxed set (I think it was the Expert Set - correct me if I'm wrong) and introduced the game to me that way. This would have been just prior to AD&D's release. When I moved away, I was fortunate enough to run into a crowd of kids who had just started to embrace AD&D, and since they were my only friends in a new town, what else could I do but get hooked?

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Rules for fighting stuff in between the stories I'd always told and been told with my family, and becoming involved in something the grown-ups of the household did.

After I got out of tabletop RPGs for many years, having switched almost exclusively to console and freeform, the deep and fairly balanced tactical engine of D&D 3.5 brought me back. Ironically, I quickly became fed up with D&D 3.5 itself, both rules and implied setting, but I still mostly play games that I would class as Tactics-RPGs... same as on consoles.

 

[Davelozzi]

I was always interested, at first my older brothers and their friends played briefly but wouldn't let me. I remember the covers of Pharoah and the the Moldovay Basic & Expert sets attracting me, though by the time I got my own stuff and started playing, is with the Elmore-covered Mentzer red box Basic.

 

[tzor]

How did RPGs grab me? Well it was a long time ago, (27 years to be precise) and it was first edition (although no one said that at the time) AD&D, so I believe it used an odd percentile system and wrestled me to thr ground.

 

[Tamlyn]

Believe it or not it was the D&D movie. Some of my single friends saw it in the theater. They thought the movie sucked but the game could be fun so they picked up the boxed set and brought it over. After we chased my laughing wife out of the room we got started and got hooked.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

as stated further up, games like dragon quest and legend of zelda planted the seed. animes like record of lodoss war gave that seed water.

I also remember, a long time ago, playing a game like d&d with a dm screen with a photo of a wizard that looked the like gandalf. It was a pre written adventure with minis. I distinctly remember being captured and having to find my loot on a weapons rack. the weapons rack was an actual mini too. This was around 1990. does anyone know the name of this game?

 

[Black_Swan]

My older next door neighbor got me into it.

We spent countless hours playing the basic edition and making up dungeons. Levels were granted not by experience but by the GM allowing you to find stairs leading up to a higher level of the dungeon. Fights were all about duking it out in a 5x5 room with ogres and whatever other monster was pulled out of the book.

The things I remember most? My brother having about a hundred Sir Armstrongs, not allowing girls to play anything but a cleric because it was the only female picture I remembered seeing, and the horrible smell of my neighbors burps as he ate a bag of skittles all at once and then proceeded to belch.

 

[rgard]

they grabbed me by the short and curlies.

and at the time i didn't even have any.

Too much information!!!

 

[Fifth Element]

I think it was the chain mail bikinis.

...PICTURES of chain mail bikinis, not wearing them obviously. Heh, yeah.

 

[sckeener]

real world Mythology.

I didn't know anyone that played and the first book that I got was Deities & Demigods. That was inspiring. My imagination was fired up and then I realized that the entries were based on real world mythology....'too cool' is what I thought...the lovecraft and moorcock stuff being in there didn't strike me as odd next to the real world stuff...I guess it was all myths & legends to me...