How/Where were you first introduced to gaming?

[Arcane Runes Press]

What D&D has done for me

Ok, when I was in high school, I had a guy friend who played but never invited me . Then when I was in college, some other guy friends were playing. I asked to play, and they told me it was "guy stuff". I moved to Washington State when I was 20, wanting to be in the SCA and logically called the local gaming store(say nothing). I went over to the store and talked for around an hour with some of the guys there. My second visit I met a clerk who invited me to join his group. Just so happened to be at my future husbands house.

Jennifer
ps-Patrick's story is different, he can post it himself

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

Seems like I've seen this post a million times but I NEVER get sick of boring all of you with my gaming life story...

So I'm cleaning my grandma's house with her one day, and see this old beat up game in my uncle's old room. I pull it down and ask her about it. That game was Dark Tower. I'm sure some of you have at least heard of the game. Since we were pretty much done with cleaning, we decided to give the game a try. After a hour or two of frustratingly slow gameplay (stupid tower...always jamming up) we got sick of it, even though I was very, very interested.

Then my grandma had an idea, "I'll go get you my old D&D books!" she said. I had heard about D&D from her before, oddly enough. While telling her about this "really cool game" for Sega Genesis called D&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun one morning in years past, she told me that she had played D&D with her son and our neighbors. "I was a 13th level cleric!" she proudly told me.

Remembering her story, I followed her back to her room and watched her dig around her shelves for a while until she pulled out a nicely preserved AD&D players handbook--the one with the big idol on the cover. I read that book pretty thoughoughly but didn't quite understand it.

Later on, I got a phone call from Mr. B, the neighbor who played D&D with my grandma and uncle, and still played cards with my grandparents. "So I heard you're interested in D&D, Jason..."

And thus my descent into madness began!

We played for maybe...2 years before sort of stopping in the middle of the Tomb of Horrors because our neighbors got really busy. Just you wait, Acerak...just you wait. You don't have long to "live" after making my character walk back to Hommlett buck naked. *squints eyes menacingly*

 

[thalmin]

I was at a scout camp on a ski trip. With not much to do in the evening, Scott taught the camp ranger and me this strange game I never heard of before. Basic D&D! He said it was kinda based on some books called Lord of the Rings. (I had never even read LotR at that time.) We played for a few hours and I was hooked!

 

[tburdett]

5th Grade

I had just transferred to a new school to be a part of the school districts brand new gifted program. This program consisted of two classes that were kept completely apart from the rest of the school population. The first year we were kept completely separate from the rest of the school population, having different lunch and recess schedules. They realized during the first year that we were turning into a bunch of snobby little elitists and overlapped one recess period with the (as we called them then) stupid kids. It's not a good idea to repeatedly tell kids how much smarter they are than average.

I fell in with a group of kids who were all very imaginative. One of the children had very wealthy parents and he would frequently bring new games to school, play them for a while, and then give them away. This is how I came to own the early white box set of miniature rules (Volume 1 - 3). Less than a year later I picked up the original blue box set and we actually started to play.

 

[Alcamtar]

I got the red box set with the Erol Otus artwork on the cover. Morgan Ironwolf and Black Dougal and all those other "first" iconic characters changed my life forever.

That was the set I started with too. I saw it in a store, shrinkwrapped, and it looked so cool I blew my allowance on it. I was always DM too.

Here's a blast from the past for ya...

EXAMPLE OF COMBAT

Four player characters, Morgan Ironwolf (1st level fighter), Silverleaf (2nd level Elf), Fredrik (1st level dwarf), and Sister Rebecca (2nd level cleric) enter a room through a secret door which was detected and opened by Silverleaf. The room appears to be empty. While they are searching it, a second secret door opens (which Silverleaf did not find) and the first pair of 12 hobgoblins walks in.

The DM checks for surprise: the party rolls a 2, the hobgoblins a 1; both sides are surprised. The two groups stare at each other while changing their order into better defensive positions. Since Silverleaf is the only member of the party who speaks Hobgoblin, the other characters elect him as their spokesman. The player who runs Silverleaf becomes the caller. He quickly warns the others that he may have to use his sleep spell.

Silverleaf steps forward with both hands empty in a token of friendship, and says "Greetings, noble dwellers of deep caverns; can we help you?" Just in case, Silverleaf is thinking of the words he must chant to cast his spell.
The DM decides that Silverleaf's open hands and words in the hobgoblins' language are worth +1 when checking for reaction. Unfortunately the DM rolls a 4 (on 2d6) which, even adjusted to 5, is not a good reaction. The hobgoblins draw their weapons, but do not attack. They do move aside as two more hobgoblins enter the room.

The largest of the hobgoblins shouts, in his language, "Go away! You're not allowed in this room!"

"It's okay; Gary sent us," Silverleaf answers.

"Huh?" the hobgoblin wittily responds.

(Much mayhem ensues. Black Dougal is stuck with a poison needle...)

 

[mattcolville]

My mom saw a story on Nightline about the Evils of D&D. It wasn't a very balanced article and my mom, who knew nothing about any game but was a theater major, thought there must be more to the story and, since the topic was somewhat hot, she decided to buy the game and try it with me so she could speak intelligently about it at work.

Ok, so that's the cool part of my mom. Here's the evil part;

I'm. . .8, I think. She buys the game and reads the rules and thinks she understands it. Hell, maybe she did. She knew I wasn't supposed to look at The Map, because I was a player.

I'm basically serving as an experiment, at this point. This wasn't a game she wanted to play with her son, it was just something she wanted to know about. I catch a glimpse of the Map and it looks cool! She chastizes me for looking at it and tells me that if I do it again, she's going to throw the whole thing away and we won't play.

I, being a smartass (thanks Grandpa) intentionally and obviously 'sneak' a microglimpse of the Map. "Ok!" she says. "That's it!" and get up, throws the thing away.

That was my first experience with D&D.

Later, I'm in California, I'm 13, and I get a modem. 300 baud modem. I spend a lot of time online. Downloading cracked games for the AppleII. I also start playing in D&D games, online, through a message board much like this one. This is 1983. I don't have any rulebooks and make a lot of mistakes, but eventually I'm running games. Sysops email me and ask me to run games on their boards, because having a running D&D game on your board brought people on, and there was a lot of crossover between hacker fandom and sci-fi and fantasy fandom.

Still don't know anything about D&D though. People email me their character sheets, and it's meaningless to me, ruleswise.

Then it's 1986, I'm 16, and some guys in my class invite me to play Axis & Allies with them, a 5 player game and they've only got 4 players. I agree. They're cool and we have fun. Eventually, we play D&D. It's 16 years later, I still play D&D with those same guys every week. Well, we all have jobs and families now, so often it's a board game or a LAN game, but we played D&D last Friday and probably will thid Friday.

Now I'm a game designer. Among other things, I design D&D stuff. Never in a million years thought I'd be able to make a career out of it, but it's been 6 years and I've every reason to think it'll keep going. Weird all around.

 

[spyscribe]

It was an ambush.

I was at a department Christmas party when I was approached by a couple I had met a few months earlier.

The encounter went something like this:

"So, you're a Buffy fan, right?"
"Yes."
"And you're a Star Trek fan, right?"
"Uh huh...?"
"All right, here's the question... Are you a gamer?"

My answer, oddly enough, was no. They were undeterred however, and a month later, I joined their campaign.

Turns out I was wrong. I am a gamer.