D&D General How Long Did You Play Only D&D Before Trying Another Game

[Longspeak]

I said 'a year or so,' but that memory is 40+years old, so the timing may be off. Gamma World. My first GMing experience.

 

[the Jester]

A couple of years, then we tried Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and Paranoia in pretty rapid succession.

 

[Charlaquin]

TLDR, I voted “I didn’t start with D&D,” but it’s kind of complicated what constitutes “starting” and also what constitutes “D&D.” D&D kind of defined my gaming experience for many years, despite not always being the rules system I used.

As the annoying-yonger-sibling’s-best-friend to a regular D&D group in the 90s, I grew up having D&D deeply intertwined with my developing interest in fantasy, and I spent many years incorporating concepts I had passively absorbed from D&D into my childhood roleplaying. And not just “lore” elements like pretending to be elves or borrowing proper nouns from D&D settings, but actual pseudo game mechanics my friends and I would make up and play by. At a couple of points in probably 5th-7th grade I tried to essentially DM a game with maps drawn on graph paper and pretty much entirely improvised dice mechanics for some friends, just based on my outsider’s impression of what roleplaying games looked like.

It wasn’t until 8th grade that I switched schools and met someone who was both familiar with actual published RPGs and willing to teach me to play them. At that time we played several different systems in rapid succession, and I don’t remember what specific systems we tried or which was first, but I remember that among them were D&D, and some d6-based system that to me came across as functionally D&D without as many cool different dice. We also tried Call of Cthulhu but my understanding of probability was not yet good enough to produce a competent character in a percentile system and I hated it, so we switched to the d20 conversion (I actually still have the book for that!)

 

[Autumnal]

My group started dabbling pretty quickly. From D&D to Traveller, Superhero 2044, Arduin, Star Frontiers, Chivalry & Sorcery, Villains & Vigilantes, RuneQuest, Top Secret…we continued cycling back to D&D between and alongside whatever else, but we had fun checking things out.

 

[Scars Unseen]

Nearly a decade. Started with some form of Basic (don't remember the version since I didn't own it) when I was 10, moved on to AD&D 2E maybe a year later, then joined a group in high school that mixed in some World of Darkness stuff, most notably Changeling. Moved and joined another group that played D&D (WotC owned by this point) along with more WoD (Vampire this time) and Rifts. Then I joined the military and mixed some Legend of the Five Rings into the rotation, but still played mostly D&D.

 

[Shiroiken]

I technically didn't start with D&D... because my brother wouldn't let me play. So I made up my own game based on what I'd remembered from the 1E PHB. It didn't have the rules of how to play in it, so the game wasn't very good. My friends didn't mind, and we had fun for a few weeks until my brother's DM found us. He immediately invited us to join the game, quickly setting me up to apprentice DM.

If you don't count that, it was about 6 years before I tried another RPG. The Legend of the 5 Rings CCG was huge with a different group of friends, and they knew I played D&D. When the RPG came out, they nominated me the GM and we jumped right in.

 

[Temperantia]

Voted 10-20 years.

The localized version of 3E D&D has been my entry into the hobby in 2001 iirc and remained my only game until 5E came around, save for a single foray into Shadowrun as a player that I didn't enjoy much. I started to pick up other games around 2016, dropped D&D entirely soon after and only picked it up again late last year, but it is very much a change-of-pace-game these days for me.

Thinking back, it's interesting how long my initial thought of "Oh, I'm never going to need another game" held true.

 

[Vendral]

I started with The Fantasy Trip 1980 as GM and a year (?) later I also was a player in Traveller and AD&D, there have been a multitude of different RPG systems since then.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

I stumbled into D&D, but when I got my first issue of Dragon Magazine back in the early/mid 80's I found out that D&D wasn't the only RPG. There were ads for TOP SECRET, STAR FRONTIERS, GAMMA WORLD, BOOT HILL, TRAVELLER, VILLAINS AND VIGILANTES, and a new MARVEL SUPER HEROES Game was coming out or had just come out. Within a year of me reading that first Dragon magazine, I was playing Star Frontiers, Top Secret, and Marvel Super Heroes. I think that we didn't have such an adverse reaction to trying and playing a new game other than Dungeons and Dragons.

 

[TiQuinn]

The TSR games were mine and my friends go-tos. AD&D was like 95%. But sprinkle in a little bit of Marvel Super Heroes and a dash of Star Frontiers and that’s probably the first 10 years of my gaming life.