How was your first time?

[MortonStromgal]

It was 1985, I was 7, my 13 year old friend's dad had this funky looking board game called dungeons and dragons in the closet. We decided to play it along with his 8 yr old sister. We played it occasionally along with monopoly, sorry and other board games. No DM, no storytelling, just rolling up a character and slaying miniature monsters. We would take turns of who rolled for the monster. Mom later said I shouldn't play D&D. None of us thought the game was that great so it wasn't a big deal.

Fast forward to when I'm 15 and invited to play Traveller. Heavy roleplaying group had a great time then we moved to Shadowrun at which point it became a hobby for me. After Shadowrun the GM pulls out D&D to which I said something like "but I want to play a roleplaying game" to which they laugh and tell me it is. To my shock it actually was!

 

[Merkuri]

My first time playing was in 1991-ish and myself, my brother, and two friends played a 2nd Ed. intro boxed set. It had four short adventures (two dungeons, one haunted house, and one spelljammer)

That sounds like one of the boxed sets I picked up when I started playing.

 

[Merkuri]

Nice! I still have most of the dice from it but not much else.

Same here.

My local toy store must have been trying to get rid of really old stuff in its warehouse, because at the same time I bought that I also picked up a (relatively) really huge box set that actually had a thick boardgame quality dungeon board, some PC minis (this was a special edition of whatever it was and had a double of each mini, one plastic and the other metal) and a whole mess of monster paperboard "minis". The dungeon board didn't link any of the rooms. The DM was encouraged to place paperboard doors as the PCs advanced so even though they could see the entirety of the dungeon map they didn't know which rooms were used or which rooms connected.

I think it was a 1st edition product. It used rules that were definitely similar to the AD&D box set but there were a bunch of differences (I believe the possible alignments were Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic and you just had a class, no race... "elf" was a class).

I also only have the dice that went with that one (which I think looked exactly like the dice from the AD&D box), but I wish I had kept the board. That might've been interesting to use for a game or two.