How were you introduced to RPGs?

[Thornir Alekeg]

I voted the FLGS/book store option, but that is not entirely accurate. in 1979 and friend and I went to the local hobby store to buy some new models to build. In the store at a card table were four guys with these strange looking dice talking about attacking orcs. We watched them for a bit and the players started telling us about the game while Tom the Dungeon Master ran them through an adventure.

I went home, told my parents about it and received the Basic Set for my next birthday.

 

[haakon1]

The New Neighbor + family influences from the 1930s'

In 1981, we got new neighbors, diagonally across the street. They were Indian-American, and had just moved to exurban NY from suburban Illinois. Sharad had been in a gifted program in Illinois, and had learned D&D there.

About the first idea he had after meeting me was asking did I want to play? I was hesitant, and told him I'd heard about the satanism accusations. He handed me the AD&D PHB and talked me into making up a paladin.

The next day, his little brother (aged 7), who had apparently made his character overnight, and me say on the floor in front of the coffee table, while Sharad sat on the couch, and told us our characters were walking up to the gate of a castle, which he described in intricate and intriguing detail (he'd just been on a trip to visit his cousins in Scotland and had taken extensive mental notes about Edinburgh Castle). I was hooked just walking into the Keep on the Borderlands and answering the guard's questions about who our characters were.

But before that, there were preparatory experiences for years:

1) Watching Erol Flynn's "Robin Hood" on TV with my dad (from his childhood days), plus other similar black & white medieval adventure movies. I believe one was "The Black Shield of Falworth", with the memorably Brooklyn accented line: "Yonder lies my fadder's cast-tell."

2) Going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and obsessing over the arms & armor exhibit.

3) Reading a National Geographic article and studying a map of castle, monestary, etc. ruins in the UK.

4) Reading Caesar's Gallic Wars (in English) in about 4th grade, and getting in trouble because it was obviously "too hard" a book for a little kid to read, so my book report must be plagarism instead.

5) Reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Beowulf with translated English across the page from the original Old English (my dad was an English professor, which in those days meant learning Old English in grad school).

6) Watching: lots of World War II movies like "The Longest Day", "Gunga Din" (another of my dad's childhood favorites) and other "Saturday at the Bijou" 1930's action movies, lots of kung fu movies with bad lip syncing on Saturday afternoons on New York's Channel 5, and of course "Star Wars". I was primed for stories of little guys/groups of little guys taking on world destroying evil and beating it, one little fight at a time.

 

[Pig Champion]

My brothers played dnd all through their childhoods and when I was born they decided it was a good time to mold a person they'd always wished they were. So I was eventually introduced to dnd but didn't really care until Baldur's Gate came out. Tired of the limits of the computer I raided my brothers books and never looked back.

 

[deadsmurf]

For a long time I knew about thing called roleplaying games, but nobody I knew played them - then I started reading dragonlance books and noticed ads in the back for modules... and wanted them (without really knowing what they were) - but still didn't do anything about it.
I started playing magic: the gathering and heard more about this dungeons and dragons thing... but nothing happened still. Some friends I had in scouts that played a diceless storytelling game (based on star trek) and I wanted to play, so I did - and it was fun enough that I came up with my own superhero version and played it with a friend or two, but the lack of consistency in resolution really irked me, and playing it died pretty quickly.
Finally played a little 2nd Ed (almost entirely houseruled based on what I can remember - I mean I played a minotaur wizard with a monocle) with some friends around 97 or 98, but the game fell apart before it got off the ground, and I had the feeling that the DM didn't really KNOW what was around a corner, or what was going to happen, or how to give an adventure hook (and really he still not good at it, but a great player! )
I got a Vampire: the Masquerade quickstart rules book and ran that for a short time and it was a lot of fun, and tried cobble together the full rules without the rulebook, and I think we only lasted about a month playing that vampire thing!
I had a couple encounters with D&D 3.0 (playing a samurai, then a barbarian) in some one offs that I was randomly invited to.
Then finally in 2002 at 19 I decided "we need to fricking play some roleplaying games" - and my roommate and some friends decided to download the BESM rules (followed by their d20 rules)
I started buying miniatures that summer, and books started appearing on my shelf shortly after (thanks mom!), and have been playing since.

So, short version, basically it's friends that brought me in, but it was a very stop and go process - I really with my friend was a better dm when he was 12 or I probably would have started playing regularly then!

 

[Jhaelen]

Well I voted for 'A friend, colleague, family member, or acquaintance introduced me to RPGs' but that's not the whole truth.

Before I was introduced to an actual roleplaying game, I was introduced to 'Fighting Fantasy' books.

Then in 1984, 'Das Schwarze Auge' (DSA) (A German rpg) was published and advertised as 'a completely new kind of game'. That's what piqued my interest. After asking around a bit I found someone who had received it as a christmas present but didn't have a clue what do with it. Together, we kinda figured out how to play it.

When talking about it on the school bus, someone overheard our conversation and asked us if we were interested in playing 'AD&D', since DSA was only 'a shadow of the real thing'. And that was when I first learned about roleplaying.

 

[grizzo]

My high school had a club recruitment day in 1977 in the first room i walked into was the Wargame club.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I was introduced to it by my dad, who learnt it from college.

I wish they had taught RPG's at my college.

 

[Nyeshet]

In high school I became interested in anime, and around graduation joined a local anime club that met weekly at a semi-local gaming / anime / comics store. However, I tended to arrive an hour or so early and generally read various fantasy and science fiction novels in the meeting room while waiting. Right before our group met a gaming group met in the same room, but it was big enough that my sitting on a couch near the opposite side of the room was not an issue to them at the gaming table. So my introduction was mostly via overhearing the last hour or so a 3 hour meeting of a gaming group, once a week for about a year - after which I started buying a few of the books at the store to have a better idea of what they were talking about and out of a general interest developing in world building and rpgs in general. This was just before 3e came out. I recall buying the player's guide for D&D - and then a few weeks later seeing a totally new edition (3e) now displayed. So after about a month I bought that one as well.

About the time psionics for 3e was first coming out I joined my first rpg group. That group lasted about 2/3 of a year as I recall, after which the DM moved (was in the army, got sent to another state), and I joined another group, but differences of play style (a strong DM vs player style) caused me to leave that one about a half year later (after about 6 or 7 character deaths, as I recall, although everyone had gone through at least 3 or 4 character deaths by then, generating a new character each time). After that I didn't have as much trouble with gaming groups, but about a year before 4e came out I more or less faded out of the hobby. Most of those I gamed with had moved out of the hobby or moved out of state, and real life was starting to intrude more and more often. Now days I still world build, still sometimes create scenarios, creatures, or characters just for the fun of it as an idea pops into my head, still buy the occasional rpg book (such as all 3 core pathfinder books), but I generally don't play much these days: just the occasional one shot.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Voted "A friend, colleague, family member, or acquaintance introduced me to RPGs"

My little brother and his friends needed a DM and as I was driving them back and forth to showings of Star Wars, I was talked into it.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I saw a commercial for Hero Quest and got it for Christmas one year. Eventually my friends and I played through all of the stuff they had and a bunch we made up ourselves. Then to get more options I bought the 2nd Ed. D&D stuff from my comic book shop. We started to convert D&D races and classes into Hero Quest and add options until we came to our senses and decided to play this more complex game instead of trying to convert it all.