D&D General How Did You Learn to Play?

[Retreater]

When I was growing up I was interested in playing D&D and first got the AD&D 2E Players Handbook when I was around 12. Those early games mostly felt like old Nintendo RPGs like Final Fantasy: random encounters in the wilderness, fighting until death, NPCs with one scripted line of dialog, a dungeon of mazes with random encounters. I didn't even know books outside of the core rulebooks existed or where to start if I did. (So there were no modules to guide me in adventure creation that I knew of.)
I had been running for a group of friends, and we all went to an older kid's house (he was probably in early high school). I started running for him, and he said "you're doing this all wrong. Let me run and show you how."
So that was my first real D&D game. A couple years later I would read my first book on how to DM ("The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacombs Guide" by Jenell Jacquays, which I still keep on my active games bookshelf).
So I learned by watching another DM do it and by reading books. Now there livestreams, copious starter sets, blogs and online communities.
How did you learn the craft of DMing and how has that changed how you run games compared to other DMs? Are you still honing your DM skills, and how are you going about that?

 

[commandercrud]

I bought the red box (BECMI). I got a group of people willing to play and started DMing.

 

[Rhenny]

I was at a sleepover when I was about 13 and while everyone was sleeping, I saw the red box on a shelf in the den. I stayed up all night reading it. It blew my mind.

Then, a year later, a friend ran a solo adventure for me, and I joined the group he played in. I’m still friends with most of the kids I played with all those years ago (45+ years...yikes).

 

[DND_Reborn]

I was 5 y.o. when my cousins, sister, and one of her friends introduced me and my friend to D&D back in 1979 when we were all visiting my great-grandmother's during the summer. It was the Basic set, and three years later I started DMing for AD&D with them for the first time.

 

[aco175]

A couple people from my father's work came over and ran something for my father, my brother, me, and another friend. I think it was a module, but this was back in the early 80s. The other guy from my father's work had a NPC that was a statue in the adventure that could have joined us if we touched it and it came to life, but we were all paranoid with the DM asking pointed questions back then and nobody wanted to touch it. We all died when a set of bars came down and cut the party in 2. I was going to run away, but the other players convinced me to come back and a bugbear or hobgoblin got me in the end.

The next week we had the red box and my father was making an adventure for us kids and a few from the neighborhood. Today, only me and my father still play and my younger brother got into it early and still plays

 

[Fanaelialae]

I had been into Final Fantasy (the Game Boy games, since my parents wouldn't let me have a Nintendo) and tried to make my own TTRPG based on it. It didn't really go far because I was a kid and had never seen a TTRPG, and had no idea how to reverse engineer one (or that I was even trying to reverse engineer it).

Eventually I found the 2e DMG and read it, but still couldn't figure out how to play.

Finally, around the age of 9, I discovered the black box and was able to learn from that, and started running games for some of my friends. Though, for a time, I was doing it wrong since I thought the 2e DMG was a module for D&D (not realizing that D&D and AD&D were separate games). Allowing multiclassing in D&D produced... interesting... results.

 

[Oofta]

A friend's brother who was a freshman in college introduced us all to the game when I was 15. Pretty soon a bunch of us had the old blue box set and played D&D or board games most weekends.

We had no clue what we were doing, but we had a lot of fun so that's all that mattered.

 

[Nikosandros]

The Red Box from BECMI taught me how to play and then I taught a bunch of friends.

 

[DnD Warlord]

My sister had played shadow run, and I had meet some guys doing LARP... one of them really wanted to play D&D again... he convinced me to buy the starter box and run a game... yes my first experience with paper and pen rog was a DM for a guy with 8ish years experience...

I made a LOT of mistakes including trusting his idea of house rules... but we figured it out

 

[BookTenTiger]

Back in Middle School (1998) I read about the Star Wars Roleplaying Game in the introduction of a Star Wars anthology. I thought it was interesting, so I tried creating it myself, and couldn't figure it out myself.

I went to the local comic book store and asked them about it, and they didn't have the Star Wars RPG but they did have something called Dungeons & Dragons. A customer squatted down and walked me through the introductory box for AD&D. I still remember the magic of those books being opened for the first time.

I think I got the box for my birthday or Christmas and started teaching myself!