How were you first introduced to the roleplaying game genre?

[Irda Ranger]

King's Quest, baby, followed by Quest for Glory. Oh yeah ...

 

[Arkham]

I saw some one of my neighbors working on his dungeon map somewhere around 82 or so, but was never allowed to play, being only 8 at the time.

A couple years later I got a copy of The Sleeping Dragon, first of Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series, and fell in love with the idea of roleplaying.

But it wasn't until about 10 years after I had first seen my neighbor and his dungeon map that I finally played an RPG... I bought and ran Call of Cthulhu.

 

[koxler]

AD&D 1st edition was where I started. It was a friend of mine who was playing and invited me to join in. I was hooked with the first adventure and it was the next day I was begging my mom to take me to the bookstore so I could get the books.

 

[RigaMortus2]

[rant] Arg! "Roleplaying" is a medium, not a genre! [/rant]

Hmmm, you are the second person to mention this. I had no idea my use of "genre" over "medium" was such a hot topic. My apologies.

FWIW, the dictionary.com definition of 'genre' is
a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like.

So, since there are MANY types of games (board games, card games, dice games, war games, roleplaying games, etc.) I don't see why categorizing 'roleplaying' as a genre is incorrect. After all, according the defintion, Monoply is a board game (form) with different rules than D&D (content) and you play it much differently (content) and the strategy is different too (technique). Since all those categories which define what a 'genre' is can apply to both roleplaying games and board games, I don't get the disconnect here. Am I wrong about this?

 

[The Green Adam]

On August 25th, 1977 a friend of mine got the Dungeons & Dragons all blue or red box for his birthday and we played it that afternoon. The GM was 7 (but had been helped by his older brother) and the other player and I were 8.

Next Saturday, August 25th, 2007 I'm running a 30th anniversary one-shot adventure to commemorate the occaision.

I am geek. Hear me roll.
AD

 

[Tonguez]

Two bullywugs and a carrion crawler

ie when I was about 8 I saw and wanted the plastic toys. My mother obliged and also bought the books in a red box that was sitting beside them - the rest is history

 

[Kanegrundar]

I got really interested in PnP gaming after I played Hero Quest, but I can trace my path to Hero Quest from video games like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.

 

[Keldryn]

My very first exposure to D&D would have been the two licensed video games on the Intellivision around 1982.

After that, it would have been the cartoon on TV and the Endless Quest books, which my mom picked up for me when I was into the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books when I was 10.

I saw ads for the D&D sets (Basic, Expert, etc) my my GI Joe and Star Wars comics a year or two later, and my curiousity finally got the best of me and I picked up the "Red Box" Basic Set in 1986.

 

[DragonLancer]

When I was 8 or 9 to keep my quiet during a house move, my folks bought me a series of Fighting Fantasy solo game books and something called "What is Dungeons & Dragons?" I absorbed the game books and read up on the D&D game and was hooked there and then. Took a couple years before I found anyone who played and jumped on the game ever since.

 

[RigaMortus2]

BTW... The reason for the poll, I was curious as to how today's gamers are being introduced to roleplaying games. Certainly in my day and age (the early 80s) there were many video games (especially roleplaying ones), so I was introduced to roleplaying straight from D&D. But I see a lot of people comparing video game RPGs (MMOs, console games like Final Fantasy, Zelda, etc.) to PnP RPGs. And a lot of video game companies are now trying to get into the PnP RPG market as well. There are Diablo versions of d20, there are WoW and Everquest versions as well. Then, on the flip side, there is the D&D MMO Stormreach.

So I was just curious, where are today's RPGers coming from? PnP or video games? Seems like the majority is still PnP.