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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 251978" data-attributes="member: 1300">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.</blockquote>

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