How did you arrive at D&D?

[Alzrius]

I vaguely remember being aware of some guy I knew getting some fantasy RPG game around Christmas of...hm, must have been '94 or so.

Some months later, I went over to a different friend's house and saw that he had Hero Quest. I immediately went after it, but he refused to let me read anything other than the introductory booklet, which did nothing but whet my appetite for more. I think it was that next Christmas when I got the D&D Introductory Set (or whatever it was called...it was the one in a black boardgame-like box...it had Zanzer Tem as the villain).

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I started with Shadowrun, First Edition. Later we played AD&D2E, and when D&D3E came out we played that as well.

And I still play D&D, though it's not the only RPG that I play.

 

[MonsterMash]

Started with miniatures wargames and saw D&D advertised in the back of Battle, which was a British wargaming magazine in the late 70's and it all went from there.

Of course I forgot to say that I started with the White Box set, which of course usually leads to <invoke Diaglo> - "OD&D(1974)..... etc" - we all know it by now

 

[glass]

I started of by becoming interested in Warhammer, after a kid brought some miniatures into school. I sort of conflated war games and roleplaying games in my head for a while, so when it became obvious that I couldn't afford a Warhammer Army (and my hands weren't steady enough to paint anyway), I picked up WFRP instead.

One day my local newsagent didn't have White Dwarf, so I picked up Dragon Magazine on a whim. Then I went looking for a PHB to explain what all these exotic 'new' stats meant. It took me several months to get hold of one, by which time AD&D had taken on a kind of mythic status.

Since then I have played GURPS, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu and (currently) Shadowrun, among others, but I always seem to come back to D&D in the end.



glass.

 

[DrZombie]

I just wanted to paint miniatures,really. Honest. Then there was a big black box with a red dragon on the cover. The comic-book owner told me there were a lot of miniatures inside, the basterd. There were just a few fold-up counters and a lot of complicated rules. So I read them, called up a few friends, drew up a large dungeon on a piece of paper and we started to chop away, weehaa. Then it was rolemaster for about ten years, then mostly white-wolf, and then dnd 3.0.

 

[diaglo]

Of course I forgot to say that I started with the White Box set, which of course usually leads to <invoke Diaglo> - "OD&D(1974)..... etc" - we all know it by now

OD&D(1974) is the only true game. All the other editions are just poor imitations of the real thing.

 

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

In something like 1986 (in the mists of antiquity), I was in the car, Mom driving, my brother and a friend of his in the back seat. I tuned in to their conversation when the friend started talking about this game he'd played where you roll dice and kill monsters (or something succinct like that). I found out the details and lo, it was D&D. Probably 2AD&D.

That led to many other games--Call of Cthulhu, Metamorphosis: Alpha, MERPS/Rolemaster, Traveller.

I also remember one of my gaming buddies buying me my first set of dice, too, and the wonderful leather dice bag I still use, at a little bookstore on the square in downtown Huntsville. Had soaring ceilings, with kites decorating the heights. Sadly, it burned. I hate to think of the gaming stuff that I didn't know about yet going up in flames. >shudder<

 

[Von Ether]

raise three fingers ...

I was at a Boy Scout camp and some older kids were talking about flaming swords and "orcs," whatever those were supposed to be. I was 13 and my main reading at that point had been Shakespeare, Jules Verne and Heinlien. Not much fantasy.

I tried making my own dungeon that night. Lots of long cave tunnels, which my "mentor" corrected by making into a matrix of rooms that shared most of their walls with their neighbors. I guess I was leaning towards "storytelling" and "ecology" style rpgs even before I knew it as compared to hack n' slash.

Bought the red box mail order from Sears and Roebuck later that year and started running my own games in 1984 as a high school freshman. I also found a paperbook set of LOTR in my grandparent's library. Which is strange since the whole family was always going on about being practical and "realistic" when I started my writing career.

As an aside, I had a freind who got in with Vampire and later asked me how does leveling work. I told him that instead of spending XP as you get it, you basically save it up for while and then it gets "spent" all at once to increase several aspect of your charater all at once (this was back in AD&D).

"Wierd," he said. Made me realize that AD&D (and D&D in general ) wasn't as "intuitive" as some supporters claim.

 

[Sado]

I guess I'd say choose your own adventure books started it for me. From there I went to the Lone Wolf gamebooks, and that made me want to try a real rpg. At the time the "D&D is satanic" philosophy was still active, so my first actual rpg was D6 Star Wars from WEG. I finally bought the D&D red box in the 12th grade and hid it under my bed so my parents wouldn't find it (they've wised up since then )

 

[Buzzardo]

My best friend Jimmy Watzkie got the red box "Top Secret" for his birthday. We played Operation Sprechanestelle (sp?) over and over and over.

Top Secret was basically a gateway drug that led me to harder and harder stuff.