How did you start?

[Vartan]

I answered "something else" because I first heard of D&D from persistent advertisements in Marvel and DC comics. An editorial in an issue of "The Shadow" which ran tangential to DC's D&D comic line, as well as a fascination with ads for Forgotten Realms in my favorite comics, lead me to buy my Basic Rules boxed set in 1990. The rest is history.

I'm surprised that "I played Magic" isn't an option. I know a lot of players who migrated from Magic when WotC bought TSR and RPG books started to appear on the shelves of their local card shop. The impact of Magic on D&D rules can't be underestimated...an older-school gamer can't help but think that "combos" of feats and skills didn't appear in our RPG vocabulary until after 3E hit the streets.

 

[thalmin]

My FIRST rpg (D&D Basic) I learned from a friend (one of my scouts), but virtually every succeeding rpg and adventure game I was introduced to in a game shop, (long before I became a game store owner.)

 

[Xyanthon]

My Intro to Gaming

I said through a friend, but that is not strictly the case. When I was young, my mother, brother and I moved around quite a bit. Every other weekend I would go stay with my dad who was big into science fiction and fantasy. I remember him taking me to see John Boorman’s Excalibur in the theaters (this was around 1980 I believe, I was around 8 years old) and I was hooked on fantasy.

When my mom moved back to Missouri from Texas halfway through my third grade year, I remember some of the other kids talking about this game Dungeons and Dragons. While I don’t recall any of them actually playing at school, I know they gathered after school to play. Unfortunately for me, they were all neighbors and too far for me to venture over to their house after school to play. I think I pestered them quite a bit about details for the game. So, not ever really knowing what the game was about, I set about creating my own version of Dungeons and Dragons based upon the information I could gather from the kids at school. It was really more of a make believe (somewhat similar to LARPing today) game of pretend than any sort of formal gaming system. The other kids all thought it was kind of silly, but I did persuade a few of the younger kids to play.

Anyway, I don’t recall exactly what I said to my mother or how she knew about my interest in Dungeons and Dragons (I am sure that I spoke to her of it in some manner), but she purchased the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Coloring Album for me from the college bookstore. Man, I was completely blown away by this! I loved to draw (and I still do in the rare moments when I find the time) and this coloring book just totally catered to my blossoming third grader imagination. I colored every picture, studied every inch of that book for inspiration.

Unfortunately it was also at about the time the big satanic stigma was plaguing all of us grade school proto-gamers. I didn’t get any more D&D books for quite sometime. We later left Missouri for Illinois when my mom transferred jobs. I was in 5th grade, still dreaming of this mysterious Dungeons and Dragons game that I thought I would never get to play. However, much to my surprise and delight, for Christmas I received the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual with that glorious David Sutherland cover from my mom. I sold GRIT newspapers (remember those ads in the back of comic books?) door-to-door until I had enough points to buy the Basic Dungeons and Dragons set. It seemed a little more restrictive than what the Advanced rules promised so I ended up saving up my allowance money to buy a rather tattered copy of the Player’s Handbook off of a friend of mine.

So it’s really hard to say exactly what my gateway was, either the kids at school that tantalized me with the idea, or my mom who got me the first few books. While I’ve only been able to game on sporadic occasions since my youth, I’ve always maintained a love affair with the game.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Friend (without gift). At school, to begin with. I think a lot of people started at school.

 

[Shieldhaven]

I bought several of D&D's choose-your-own-adventure books, along with similar books by other companies. This must've been in... 1990? 91? Anyway, there was this box of paperbacks at a garage sale, and they quoted me a price for the whole box that was much cheaper than buying one book at a time.

So then I started trying to derive rules systems from what I saw in those books, and what I saw in various video games. Eventually (1993, my 12th birthday) I conned my parents into getting me the AD&D Second Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. I was... very disappointed indeed, when I saw that I needed yet another book to play, and the Monstrous Manual was even more expensive than the first two. But boy, was I ever hooked. I must have spent almost every waking moment reading those books, and the ones that came after. And yet... I don't have as much nostalgia for those days of my gaming experience as I have for the campaigns I ran and played in during college.

Haven

 

[Captain Howdy]

I've never met someone who, to my knowledge, just walked into a game store and picked up an RPG.

That's how I started. I went into my local game store one day to spend some birthday money on Magic: The Gathering cards, but I saw this....

I had enough money to buy it, and I was hooked. 7 years (and many games) later, I am glad I made the purchase, and so are all my friends that play now.

 

[yipwyg]

When I was 11 I saw a bunch of older kids playing the red box set at school, that is how I learned about it. I had my grandparents buy it for me when I visited them over the summer.

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

I was in a friend's dorm room when a couple guys came in and wanted to finish a game they'd started the night before. Some guy couldn't be there to play his character, so they asked me if I would run it. I told them I'd heard of the game but never played it, and they said, "Just do what we tell you and you'll catch on."

I ended up leading the party. I've been hooked ever since mid-September, 1985, just a few weeks shy of my 22nd birthday.

Thanks, Wolf.

 

[genshou]

Chainmail, followed by 1E when they were satisfied I wouldn't muss up their group dynamic.

 

[demiurge1138]

Although I was first introduced to D&D via summer camp, I didn't play. My real gateway was through Baldur's Gate. From there, I bought the 2e Monstrous Compendium, then got the 3.0 PHB and DMG a few years later as birthday presents (I had bought the 3.0 MM, like the 2e version, for the pictures and flavor-text).

Demiurge out.