How did you get your start

[Peni Griffin]

I was the eternal outsider. Never mind my sad story - you've all lived it. Kids today have it easy, I'll tell you - there's nerd cliques in junior high school now!

When I started college, in fall 1979, I realized that higher education is a potential sink into which the rejects of America's high schools can drain, accumulate, and form their own likeminded ingroups. So I spent the first week or so reading all the announcements and going to all the mixers that sounded remotely like the stuff I liked, hoping to find the people I could get along with. One of the announcements was for "fantasy roleplaying games" in the Student Union Building on Sunday after lunch. I didn't know what that "roleplaying games" meant, but "fantasy" meant Tolkien, Nesbit, Morris, Lewis, McKillip, Dunsany, and all the other writers who took me out of the fields I knew. So I showed up at the SUB after lunch on Sunday.

I may not have been the only female student there - I vaguely remember a young woman who left when told she couldn't play a troll - but I was close. Everyone was excited because something they called the DMG had just come out. People shoved dice into my hands. I rolled them and wrote down numbers. They said: "That looks like a thief. What race would you like?" I said I wanted to be a dwarf. One guy - Tony - said I'd have to be a guy because dwarf women were very rare and stayed under lock and key producing babies. This sparked an argument about the biology and culture of dwarves (probably beards were mentioned) which suddenly ended when the tall guy with the cigarette reading the DMG in the back of the room said: "Let her play a female dwarf."

So with some more directed die rolls and a borrowed PHB and a pamphlet called the Arduin Grimoire I rolled starting money, height, weight; hair, skin, and eye color; and selected equipment for Alendil, the first of many female dwarven thieves I would run in my AD&D career. Meanwhile, Tony announced that he was rolling up a dwarf, too. The tall guy with the cigarette told us that we all met at the door of the dungeon and should introduce ourselves. I don't remember Tony's dwarf's name, but his first action was to sidle up to Alendil and start hitting on her like a stereotype from one of those beer commercials apparently designed to make you swear off alcohol forever.

So I looked him in the eye and said, nice and loud: "My name is Alendil. I'm a lesbian. If you ever lay a hand on me, I'll cut off your ***** (bleeped for the sake of Eric's gramma) and preserve them in salt."

Tony sputtered and turned red to the roots of his greasy hair, the room erupted in laughter, the tall guy smiled behind his cigarette. In that moment, I became queen of the geeks, and I've never looked back. The ones who weren't my friends didn't want to face me in a fair verbal combat and the ones who were my friends knew I didn't need any special treatment to hold my own in the game.

I haven't seen any of those guys in years, but my social life still centers on the gaming group. My tastes have matured, but not fundamentally changed. I don't care what system I play, because the core of the game is social - stepping into a character and playing her from my gut, stepping out of her and being me again. You can do that in any system as long as you can get people together for the game.

 

[Mycanid]

Well ... I got started when my family moved to Syracuse ... I think I was 10 or so ... I was given Tolkien's books to read by my mom and LOVED them ... a few days later some neighbors down the block were playing this strange game. They invited me to sit in on a session. It was White Plume Mountain (this was 1979 I think). I was hooked.

Short and simple!

 

[MrFilthyIke]

So what memories do you have about when you started gaming? How did you get your start? Let's hear about it.

I had just read the Hobbit as required reading in 1989, and was in love with Middle-Earth.
I saw guys in Junior High playing D&D in the library, asked one to show me how to play.
He ran me solo as a Fighter through the keep map from the Mentzer Basic D&D boxed
set, and I was hooked.

But I could never get a seat in their group, so I gobbled up all Basic and AD&D stuff I could
find, forced MY friends to play with my DMing, and it's all gone down hill since then.

 

[RatPunk]

It was in late 7th or early 8th grade (I believe sometime in 1979). Games Magazine ran a huge, multi-page article about Dungeons & Dragons. I read it and was hooked instantly. My parents got me the PHB, DMG and MM for Christmas that year. I showed the books to some of my friends, we rolled up characters and talked about it (I think some of them even went and bought books at that point), but we never played. In the fall of 1980, my freshman year, in the bleachers at a high school football game, I heard someone else in the marching band a couple of rows behind me having a D&D conversation ("Bree Yark" may or may not have been uttered). That weekend, on the bus trip back from a band contest, my new friend Rick and I discussed the game. He came over to my house a few days later and ran me through my first ever adventure (Keep on the Borderlands) right there at the kitchen table. 27 years later, Rick is still one of my best friends and is a staple in my gaming group today.

 

[heirodule]

Fifth grade "mentally gifted" class circa 1980. The teacher invited a high school kid (who seemed like an adult to my youthful eyes) came in with D&D and a dungeon (his map was a cool intricate maze of twisty passages) to teach us about this "new game" that is "in your imagination" and "has no 'winner'"

I remember making a dwarf theif, and opening a box of potion vials, and trying them out.

 

[John Morrow]

So what memories do you have about when you started gaming? How did you get your start? Let's hear about it.

I got Basic D&D (the Blue Book version) because I asked for it after seeing a Gary Gygax interview in People Magazine in the late 1970s. I learned from the books rather than being taught by someone else.

 

[Hypersmurf]

My parents played a weekly game on a Friday or Saturday night. If they were playing at someone else's house, they'd take us with them - my sister and I would sit up listening until we got tired, then curl up behind a sofa and go to sleep. (To this day, I can sleep pretty much anywhere, regardless of light or noise.)

We'd play with their miniatures and roll their dice, and by the time I was five, I had just about memorised the 1E core books. I could tell you the range of Sleep, the casting time of Call Lightning, or the speed factor of a horseman's mace.

When I was 6, my mother ran me on a solo adventure through a heavily-modified Palace of the Silver Princess; after that, I was allowed to join the weekly game.

I don't, to this day, understand why a group of late-twenties/early-thirties gamers would tolerate a 6-year-old in their game. But I'll be eternally grateful

-Hyp.

 

[Nightfall]

My,

I don't believe in short and simple. Not after the last 5 years of my life have been anything but that!


Tonguez,

So did you three go out and conquer the world then?

 

[Shemeska]

So there was this cute chick, and she had a 3e PHB on the corner of her bed.

That's pretty much how it started.

 

[DragonShadow]

When I was really young, probably around 7 or 8, our family spent alot of time at my grandmother's house. My uncles were geeks before I was, so the precedent is already in the family. It was around that time that one of my uncles taught me and my cousins to play Magic: the Gathering (first in a line of CCG's).

At around the same time, I'd been bugging them to teach us to play D&D, because their old 1st edition books were still there and collecting dust in the closet. Always it was a string of excuses like "you're too young" or "there's not enough time" or "maybe the next time you're here," or whatever else.

Finally one week I just asked them to borrow the books, and happily for me, they agreed.

'course they didn't let me take them all in one shot, but over the next few months I borrowed every single one of them at least twice and read them (more or less) cover to cover.

I'll admit that my understanding of the game was rudimentary, and I didn't get much in the way of an actual game. It was mostly just me and them talking about various crap.

A few years later (I'd been occasionally borrowing the books all along the way ) I finally convinced my mother to buy me a set of dice (which I still own and play with) and some short time after that I saved up my money and bought the 2E Fighter Manual which has unfortunately been lost to the forces of time and two moving trucks.

After that, my next leap into gaming was via internet and college friends. ;] A story filled with tragedy, heartache, and a happy ending.