How was your first time?

[megamania]

unnamed
Human
Fighter
Level One
Ravenloft
"Crown of the Goblin King"

I didn't get far with him. I was 1/2 way thru his creation when asked to roll a poison save. Damned ghouls.

I was killed twice that night. First by ghouls and secondly by my teammates... and I wasn't even completely written up.

Other members..... (we're talking over 20 years ago Sept 1989)
1/2 elf thief
human barbarian
dwarven fighter x2


and another 3 players I don't remember what they had.....

 

[Aramax]

It was 1977 and I was 17.I had found a mini wargamer group in a near by town and had been playing WW II minis for about 2 months w/them when they told me it was D&D night and they had me roll up 3 characters.I had read alittle bit about the game so I had a pretty good idea about what was going on.

I rolled a male cleric named Beowulf ,a female fighter named Bertha Battle Axe and a female thief named ? I said Beowuf was a Morman
and he was married to the other 2,so they gave him all thier stuff.

We adventured in a large Dungeon and the only thing I remember about the game was Bertha running around a huge collum after a troll who was chasing our paladin.

I thought it was ok but would rather play WW II.

It wasnt till about the 4 or 5th game that I really got interested

The gamers in the group thought it was very odd that I made female characters(even the wives in the group played male characters).

 

[Stormonu]

1979 and a few months shy of 10 years old, I DMed for about ten years before I played my first PC (beyond a single session). Holmes basic was what I started with.

My original group of players consisted of a human wizard (Stormonu, played by a friend), an elvin fighter/wizard (Arr Kann, played by another friend). At the time, we played at school, I'd misplaced/lost the rulebook after only getting to skim it and bringing dice would get you detention (for "gambling"), so we just talked out how everything went down. I played with that group for about 5 years, so it must have went well. (My 1st rules-based game w/ dice was when the Moldvay set came out, about 2-3 years into playing)

The only thing I remember about the first adventure was that the two ran across a Gold dragon at a four-way corridor, and Stormonu managed to charm it into helping them. They left it fighting a minotaur guarding the stairs down to the next level while they sneaked by. I still feel sorry for that poor minotaur.

 

[samursus]

Early 80's, I was 10 and was introduced to D&D through a volunteer at the local Boys and Girls Club. I think it was 1e, and I made a Wizard named Gandalf the Blue (original non?). The other 2 players played a Fighter and a Cleric. I remember making it to around 3rd level before the group split up (and adding my sister in that time who played a Thief). I remember getting a Cloak of Polymorph and turning into the Platinum Dragon in order to scare off some opponents. I remember the Fighter getting an intelligent Sunsword named "Peter". Yeah. The guy playing the fighter was a teenager so he had a heyday with that...

After that experience I was hooked, and soon after bought the B/X, then the BECMI books and DM'ed for my brothers and our friends. I have had the books of every edition since, but only played regularly BECMI. And there was a long dry spell after 3/3.5 came out... I liked the rules ok enough, but not enough to actually inspire me to get a group together for long. I found I didn't have the time anymore to master the rules well enough to DM. 4e really grabbed me (something about it reminds me of BECMI a bit) and I have been playing and DM'ing since it came out.

This is nice because I haven't been a PC since I was 10!!

 

[TheAuldGrump]

The first game that I ever played in, late '75, was actually pretty awful.

The DM was just plain bad, and allowed his best friend to use charm person on the rest of the party, then allowed him to tell us to fail our saves when he cast it again every few days.

After a few months of this we told the DM to get his friend to knock it off - we wanted to play the game, not play his friend's happy little slaves.

He said that he was the DM, and if we didn't like it we could leave.

We didn't like it, and told him to leave, and take his little friend with him. We kicked him right out, and I ended up running my first game that same night. I don't think that it ever occurred to him that the game wasn't taking place at his house, and that we could give him a right proper heave ho, over the rail you go.

I wasn't a good DM when I first started, but I didn't need to be good. I just needed to be better than him. (Though I have bumped into players from those long ago games... they seem to have a fonder memory of my first times running than I do. )

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* I very much doubt that I would wait months before giving a DM like that the boot, these days.

 

[Ainamacar]

I had played CRPGs for quite a long time, but my first time playing tabletop was in summer 2004, not quite a year after I started grad school. I just showed up at the game and made a 10th level human male samurai named Ainamacar, for lack of anything better. I'm staring at the character sheet, actually.

I'm a bit hazy on the details of that session, but we were in the basement of what amounted to a haunted house, except this basement had a little pond with an island and some chests on it. A couple failed will saves vs some illusions later and we were being accosted by several Tendriculous from the island while most of us were on shore. No one died, and I think there was eventually treasure.

The DM lent me the PHB, Complete Warrior, and I think Complete Divine. I inhaled the rules (I become the rules guy in the space of a month) and came back the next week with a human male rogue1/barbarian1/fighter2/ranger6, and an involved backstory to explain why that makes a lick of sense. His name was Aehrost, but at the table we mostly called him Shadowdancer because the rest of his levels before retirement were in that.

Meanwhile, the samurai disappeared for the same in-game reason he first appeared in a random basement: none whatsoever. As far as any of us know, he's still there.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I inhaled the rules (I become the rules guy in the space of a month) and came back the next week with a human male rogue1/barbarian1/fighter2/ranger6, and an involved backstory to explain why that makes a lick of sense.

Conan, is that you?

The Auld Grump

 

[MortalPlague]

When I found the D&D Moldvay box at a garage sale, I came home and read it cover to cover that night. Then I made a character and ran a solo combat against Morgan Ironwolf (I lost).

My first real game was at elementary school; we gathered some people together in the library at lunch, and I ran a dungeon I'd put together. I remember we had a cleric and a thief, and I don't remember the others at all. I don't recall how the session actually went either.

I found the dungeon I put together at a later point, and there was a lot of crazy stuff going on. I had a room at the back of the castle that contained a red dragon. I had a pretty whimsical floor plan. But to my credit, I had some neat stuff... like a vase with a clay plug that contained poison gas (so if they broke it, bad news).

 

[Ainamacar]

Conan, is that you?

Those 5 prerequisite ranks in Perform(dance)? I presume it was to the sonorous lamentation of their women.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

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) so each of us took one turn GMing. My favorite parts about the dungeons and haunted house were that each room gave us a new challenge or foe. If we fought little dog things called "koh-balds" in the first room, we got to fight a giant frog in the next room. It was a great way to grab our imaginations on what fantastical stuff was in this D&D game that wasn't in HeroQuest (the game we started out playing).

The most memorable part of that set was when my friend was running the spelljammer adventure. We went into a bar to learn some info on these neogi slaves we were tracking down. Being new to GMing, my friend read down the list of who was in the bar exactly as it was written in the text.

"Okay, you see two dwarves, a human bartender, and an elf spy."

We had a fun time joking about jumping the elf directly and beating him until he lead us to the neogi. Since then my friend became much better at keeping us surprised in his games!