How Old Were You When You Played Your First TTRPG?

[Corinnguard]

10, 2nd edition AD&D, and quite specifically that module that has you playing as young dragons which I don't immediately recall the name of. I'm pretty sure our play had a very loose relationship to the rules at that point, and it was duet play with a truly absurd number of GMPCs.

The Council of Wyrms setting.

 

[Corinnguard]

I remember when Dragon Magazine came out with the Dragon classes for both the Chromatic and Metallic dragons for 3e. The classes covered the dragons' wyrmling to young adult categories by spreading them across 20 levels.

 

[CleverNickName]

The Council of Wyrms setting.

The first "module" I ever played was X1: The Isle of Dread. It was about a year after I had started playing D&D, and I was the Dungeon Master for my siblings and my friends at school.

I didn't put a whole lot of stock in it, to be honest. The cheesy artwork on the cover of some adventurers fighting a dinosaur didn't wow me, and it was a flimsy 32 pages long. The adventure was written for adventurers of a much higher level than my group, and I hadn't the foggiest notion of how to run a 'hex crawl' style adventure. Also, it came free with my copy of the Expert Rules, too, and free stuff usually isn't very impressive. And, well, I was 13 years old.

But I gave it the best chance I could. I used lemon juice to re-create Rory Barbarosa's ship log, then handed it to my brother to "discover" by heating it up over a candle. Watching my siblings' eyes light up, and hearing their gasps of surprise, when the treasure map appeared 'like magic' on the blank sheet of paper was the best moment of DMing that I've ever had, and I've spent the last 45+ years chasing it.

 

[aco175]

I was about 8. My father brought some people from work to introduce it to my brother and I. My brother and some of the neighborhood kids are a couple years older so I get to tag along with everything.

 

[Thomas Shey]

1975 NASFIC (North American Science Fiction Convention) in Los Angeles. Was already a wargamer and an SF (though not so much fantasy) fan, and saw someone fiddling with some game charts and asked him about them. He handed me about three of the early Alarums and Excursions zines, and I was intrigued. Played in two games that weekend, and was hooked.

Edit: Just realized I never actually answered the question; I was 18 at the time.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I voted under 8, but I'm not 100% sure. I was somewhere between 7 and 9 when my older cousin ran a BECMI game for his younger brother (who was my age) and I. We obviously had no idea what we were doing, but it was fun and it got me interested in the concept. We ended up moving on to Palladium's TMNT game around the time the 1987 cartoon came out and the main thing I remember was I played a mutant porcupine.

The synergy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness coming out and the TMNT craze striking just two years later is the kind of kismet that every RPG company dreams of. The closest we've seen since was probably 5e and Stranger Things.

 

[Fenris-77]

I unearthed the Moldvay Basic box in my attic in 1986 when I was 9. The rest is a sad story of a misspent youth.

 

[schneeland]

I think I was 13 or 14. I had contact with D&D earlier through video games, but that time a friend of a friend ran a game of The Dark Eye/Das Schwarze Auge - it was quite boring . Luckily, shortly after said friend started running Shadowrun, which ended up being much more up my alley (rules were a bit hard to parse, but we kind of figured out stuff on the way).

 

[johnmarron]

My first RPG was Empire of the Petal Throne, which I got for Christmas in 1976 (I had turned 13 two days earlier). I went to my first convention (Gencon South in Jacksonville, Florida) in march of 1978 and had no idea what this "D&D" game was that everybody was playing.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Summer camp at the end of elementary school.