How/Where were you first introduced to gaming?

Where/Who/How were you introduced to gaming?

  • School

    Votes: 28 21.9%
  • Family

    Votes: 24 18.8%
  • Church or church-related group

    Votes: 2 1.6%
  • Public place or event (Comic book store, Summer camp, etc)

    Votes: 7 5.5%
  • Picked up a PHB one day and got interested

    Votes: 6 4.7%
  • Heard about that \"Evil game\" and decided to check it out

    Votes: 4 3.1%
  • Through DnD-brand novels

    Votes: 5 3.9%
  • The Internet

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Friends, in a context unrelated to any of the above

    Votes: 33 25.8%
  • Other (explain)

    Votes: 19 14.8%

Tsyr

Explorer
Like the topic says.

For myself, I was first introduced at a Boy Scout camping session, many a year a go.
 

log in or register to remove this ad


Hmm,

...it was sorta because of church, my mother was friends with a religious lady in the neighborhood and her kids played D&D (one of my first DMs was a Roman Catholic Priest, although I wasn't an RC).

It was in the first month of the year 1980 - I was 6, turned 7 in May and my momma bought me my box of little 'red' books. Although my DM used the brown ones.

We had just moved to Gresham, Or after my mother married my step father - East Gresham Grade school figured out that I wasn't 'hyper', as my previous school (Sterns Elementary in Klamath Falls) had thought, but gifted with an exceptional IQ.
They told my mother to find me a hobby that would entice and challange my mind, so she looked into a lot of things, realised that I was too much of a 'mean lil' creep' to do band, so she let me play D&D.
She felt all that 'evil' hype was a bunch of crap and I love her more for that choice every day of my life.

Anyhow, that's the rough basic, pun intended, of it.
 

Now this is a cool poll!

Boy it took me several minutes to remember that far back (it has been over 20 years since I first picked up that red covered D&D Basic book and a handful of lead(!) miniatures :D ).

I would have to say that I first heard about D&D through a local bookstore (W.R. Greenley's in Belleville, Ontario - if you are ever in town check it out - they don't have the selection of gaming books they used to but their Sci-Fi & Fantasy section is excellent). I saw the miniatures first - the old Ral Partha 'Manbeast' and 'Fighter in Chainmail' - then asked what they were used for. Mrs. Greenley showed me the D&D Basic Rulebook (the red one with the magic-user, dragon & fighter on the cover).

That was enough for me - I must have read that book cover to cover about 20 times and made up dozens of characters (after going back to the store to buy dice!). I didn't get to play until school started but I found that my friends had already heard of D&D and we played alot on lunch hours and after school.

Those are some great memories - thanks Tsyr!
 


I walked into the "games club" at lunch in junior high ... which was nominally a chess club but there were other games going on. I normally played chess, but there was this group clustered around a table playing some game I wasn't familiar with. I went to check it out.

The rest is history...
 

A magazine article

Way, way back when I was in eighth grade, my family had a subscription to Games Magazine. One issue, they did a rather large article on this game called D&D. It sounded great and I was immediately entranced. A month or two later, my parents and I were walking around a toy store in a mall (I believe it was Kay Bee Toys), and I spotted the 1E PHB, DMG and MM. I pointed them out to my mom and told her about that article and how it sounded really cool. Another few weeks later, guess what I got for my birthday? That's right, my very first D&D hardbacks.

Of course, it would be almost another year before I actually got to play a real game, but I read through those books and made up A LOT of characters before then...
 

I started with Fantacy Trip that I picked up when shoping for a new wargame. Starting doing arena battles then created my first dungeons. A year later 1st Ed AD&D came out and met some people that played it and the new game called Rolemaster. Great stuff. :-)
 

Tsyr said:
Like the topic says.
My best frind in 1st grade received the Blue Box for Christmas. Shortly after that, my parents believe a silly little tract by Mr. Chick, and I wasn't able to game 'til high school.
 

My expereince with Gaming was pretty much limited to computer games, Mostly text based adventures, and Kings Quest. My Exposure to Fantasy was likely limited to Kings Quest, This might have been after I read "The Hobbit" But I'm not sure.

I was in the 6th grade... I read a magazine article about the laberyth. The aricle was accompanied by a really lousy picture of a maze. I commented that I could design a harder maze in my sleep and proceeded to try.

Every laberyth needs a minator of course, so I added one, and then we need heroes to defeat it. So my brothers and sister got that job. I'd picked up the concept of hit points from one game or another, and I believe that was the only stat anything got. Basicly it became a game of lets pretend, but with a DM. Later a freind who played D&D introduced more RPG concepts to my game *Though I didn't know that's where it was from* and I designed something or another, using limited supplies I had, 2d6 from Monopoly, Had a great system running for a few years.

Parents of course didn't care, becuase it didn't actually say D&D which they had heard was bad, without hearing enough to know that I had basically reinvented it. Game improved greatly when I saw all the cool stuff in Wizardy on the Nintindo



As for real gaming, one day in college freinds asked me If I wanted to play D&D and I said sure why not.




My opinion of it has always been the difference between Gamers and Normals is, everyone Gamed as a kid, some of us just never stoped.
 

Remove ads

Top