It's D&D's 40th anniversary. Tell me your D&D history, and what it means to you!

[Baron Greystone]

I've been a fan of F&SF since the 60's. I frequented the NYC conventions in the 70's, where I watched a few OD&D games played. I was a subscriber to S&T, and sent away for some orc miniatures from an ad in one of the issues. At a con I bought the Dungeon boardgame and Traveller's Snapshot, which I played with my little brother. Next, he bought the Holmes box, and we fooled around with that. I went away to college, and met a guy who DM'd and invited me to a game he was forming. He had the new 1st ed AD&D Monster Manual, but still used a lot of OD&D rules as there wasn't a DMG yet. And some Judges Guild products. I lusted after EPT in the game store near campus, but couldn't afford it. I did buy my own 1st ed AD&D books, and that summer when I got home I started my own campaign. And some Judges Guild products. I picked up the little Traveller boxed set at the Compleat Strat in NYC. This was followed by Call of Cthulhu and Runequest. Did some SCA, and some LARPing. My friends and I tried a lot of different games over the years. We didn't make the move to 2nd edition AD&D. On a semi-regular basis we played Stormbringer, FASA Star Trek, Paranoia, Star Fleet Battles, Arkham Horror, Awful Green Things, dabbled in a lot of games I wouldn't touch today, and gave most of what was published afterwards a miss. Since we enjoyed the games we played, and didn't see the need for the changes as editions came and went, we just kept on playing what we liked. There are a few games that I'd like to see more of, but those are the main ones.

I've met tons of good friends through D&D. It led to a few other games I really like, too, but I've played more D&D than anything else. Roleplaying games are a way to live out the fantastic fiction that I enjoy so much in books and movies, and much more fun than the computer games I've played.

 

[Gilladian]

I've told this story here before: I was 11 in 1976 when my brother learned to play in Boy Scouts. He loved it so much that he wrote his own set of the rules, then taught me to play. Later that summer, we finally got a copy of the Basic rules, and gaming took off in our lives! I still remember my first character - a cleric - got stung to death by giant bees. My third character was a dwarf named Gilladian (he had a 6 INT and a 4 Wis).

I've played DnD ever since with my brothers, my parents, and my husband (we met at a gaming club meeting). I've played every edition of Dnd, but my favorite is 3.5, E6 version. Right now, we're not playing, as life has been in the way, but when my big brother gets back from a long trip to China in about 6 weeks, we're going to start up a new campaign.

I do intend to try 5th Edition when it comes out, but it will take a lot to usurp my current favorite game's place.

 

[Rygar]

The first time I played D&D I was at my cousin's house, who was 4 years older than me. He tried teaching me how to play by running me through the module "The Gem and the Staff" (I would learn the name years later when I saw the pictures again). As I was about 7 or 8 years old, I was fairly incompetent.

A year or so later, we were on vacation with my Cousin in Virginia Beach. We stopped at a bookstore, and my cousin and I chose a module each. I bought "Blizzard Pass", and played it on the car ride home.

A couple of years later, I saw in the back of a comic book one of those "Become a seller for us in your neighborhood and receive prizes!". I was around 10 years old at the time, and did it. The prize I chose? The Red Box! I was hooked. My friends and I played, and bought the other BECM sets. I owned B, E, and C, my friend owned M. It was great fun, we didn't understand campaigns yet, so it was just an endless series of dungeons. We were young kids, we couldn't afford modules.

A few years later, I acquired my first AD&D books. My friends and I played all through our teenage years. We hit 21-ish, and playing slowed down for awhile. I still bought the occasional product, but we really didn't play. Then 3rd edition released. My Mtg group dedicated Friday nights to 3rd edition D&D instead of Mtg.

So how big a part of my life has it been?

The day the Challenger exploded, I was sitting in my mother's restaurant reading the Dragonlance comic book with Sturm's uncle in it when the news announcement was broadcast.

I have all of the Dragonlance novels, I've spent countless hours playing the D&D video games (Never did beat Pool of Radiance now that I think about it). Even during the years I didn't play, I still was receiving Dungeon.

32 years it's been now, my only regret was my late 20's when I decided that my D&D books were why I was single, and ebay'd them. Years later I would realize it wasn't the books, it was the women I was dating, and even today I'm still trying to reacquire what I foolishly lost.

 

[Fox Lee]

I know not everybody will agree, but for me D&D is like Pokemon - it always seems to get better with each new version, even when I didn't necessarily expect it to. I don't always love every change, and I understand why this or that edition isn't to everybody's tastes - but for me it's always been a net positive, and there are always reasons I never want to go back. I'll even give Next a try, despite the fact that I expect 4e to be where I stay - because there was a time I thought that about 3.5e, too. No mater how dubious I am, I feel like D&D has earned the right to a fair shake, because it hasn't disappointed me so far.

Really, D&D has always been the RPG in my mind - whichever edition you like, for its time it was probably (in my opinion) the best at being a solid, practical, mechanically rewarding system. Other systems have been more creative or experimental, have been more dedicated to a particular tone or genre, have excelled where D&D is weak... but for all-round excellence in the areas that matter to me, D&D has always been where it's at. For me, D&D has always been where I fit, and it's only become a better fit with each new edition.

 

[Lwaxy]

I know not everybody will agree, but for me D&D is like Pokemon

Aaah the comparison! Need to slap with nerf bat arising

 

[scottie4442]

D&D since the beginning, almost

I have been playing d&d since 1976, a friend of mine got the OD&D set and handed it to me saying "you like to read so figure this stuff out and we can play." I have been RPGing ever since. The thing my present group find funny is until about 3 months ago I have never "played" D&D, I was always a DM. I have played in other systems but never D&D. One of the guys is running a Pathfinder campaign and I am finally a player, interesting contrast from DM/GMing. I actually played a short campaign years ago with Gygax at a con, didn't know it was him at the time, and he was a pretty nice guy. I have gotten my son into RPGing and he and his group play Pathfinder. Thanks Gary and the rest of the guys for making D&D so the geeks could have a "sport" to play.

 

[DM Howard]

I started at 12 years old as well actually. I first bought the AD&D Boxed set that TSR did with the red dragon on the front which was essentially set in Dragonlance. I got a lot of mileage out of that set, and by the time I decided to take the next step with one of my friends in 5th Grade it was 3.0 and the rest is history. I would say that D&D has probably been one of the most important things in making me who I am today. That may sound weird, but it helped me develop my imagination, learn to love reading, and introduced me to all the wonderful games and hobbies that I now enjoy today.

 

[Henry]

1981, at a Circus World toy chain store. Saw the Erol Otus Cover, Moldvay Basic box set for the first time. Looked like a fun board game with sorceresses and manly fighters on the cover fighting dragons - I believe it was the art that hooked me, it was funky-looking, unlike anything I had ever seen before. I bought that, and (thanks to the TERRIBLE TSR marketing) the AD&D White Plume Mountain module -- and tried to figure out how the dice worked, and how to fit that higher level adventure together with that low level basic box. For the first three years, I never did figure out how the dice worked for the game -- I just made up whether the attacks hit or missed, whether the spells worked or not, etc.

I had one good friend in those days that I shared D&D with -- we probably played non-stop for three years -- until he turned 15, married his girlfriend and ran away from home. (He had kind of a rough home life, in hindsight I think that's why we played so much.) But though I had lost my one player and good friend, I was hooked -- I came up with stories by myself, wrote fiction, wrote modules (TERRRRIBLE modules), read DragonLance -- all until I came into knowing some friends in High School who reintroduced me to the wide world of D&D players again, and told me I wasn't alone in this crazy hobby, and that I wasn't really a closet Satanist, that there were plenty of people, girls and boys alike, to share this geeky hobby with.

How in the Hell did we get by without an internet back then?

• Thank you, Gary and Dave, for all your work in giving us the keys to Fun.
• Thank you, Emory, for being the one crazy fool who played D&D with me back then.
• Thank you, Mom, for reading the game, seeing it wasn't anything harmful, and going against the rest of the religious family members who didn't like it.
• Thank you, Dad, for bankrolling one Hell of an expensive hobby.
• Thank you Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams, Jeff Grubb, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Keith Baker, Erik Mona, Lisa Stevens, and about 100 other people who took a game into a Lifestyle.
• Thank you, Eric, for birthing the community that gave me some of the dearest friendships I still have.
• Thank you, Russ, for midwifing this community of misfits into a cultural Institution.
• And God bless RPGs and may the tabletop never completely disappear.

 

[Cadence]

By some point during 5th grade in 1980/81 LotR had already swept through school (I remember one girl in particular was devastated by a character's pin-cushiony-death), I was hearing about D&D from some of the people on the youth soccer team , and saw it at the toy store in the mall.

In 1981 I got a copy of Moldvay and read through it on my own for several weeks. On one of the fairly rare occasions when my folks went out, the sitter knew how to play and DMed for me. I made a dwarf (Alexis) and halfling (Antares) that I played for quite a while after - I think I still have their final character sheets boxed up downstairs. In that first adventure Alexis lost his hand in an unfortunate incident with a cursed sword, but at least they lived. After that there were several of us in the neighborhood who played. I want to say for some of the first games on our own we reversed whether low or high was good on the saving throw table.

Within a year or so we stumbled upon the game at the neighborhood comic/collectible shop. It had between 8 and 20 people playing one night a week - some using OD&D, some of us using B/X, and some using AD&D, all at the same time. That was my gateway to AD&D. I can still remember that my curfew in middle school was about the time the game usually ended... so I would have to leave a bit before to make it the 4 1/2 blocks home in time and a friend would play my character for me. Sadly that meant I missed the death of at least one of them (an elven cleric one level from retirement - perhaps my first AD&D character). In those early years we also played quite a bit of the original Gamma World (I might have purchased it at that comic shop) and I started picking up Dragon around issue 64.

Played D&D along with some other games through middle and high school (with Star Fleet Battles being the biggest secondary game), a bit in undergrad, a lot in grad school (with VtM being the biggest secondary game), and then pretty regularly since (mostly D&D).

I don't think it's possible for me to overstate the value of the friendships I've made or strengthened over the years at those weekly D&D sessions.

P.S. - My 4 year old knows the breath weapons of each of the five chromatic dragons!

 

[Monte At Home]

I heard about D&D for the first time in Sunday school. Two brothers were talking about what they had done the night before and their conversation involved graph paper, a magic crown, some kind of monster, and traps. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I knew I wanted in. That was 1977.

I played with them using the original booklets, but eventually moved to 1E (AD&D) and at that point the game became a huge portion of my life. It defined and solidified my friends in junior high and high school--friends, thanks at least in part to D&D, that I'm in touch with today, other than my friend Jay--one of my favorite DMs of all time--who passed away last year.

I was about 14 when I was in a B. Dalton bookstore and noticed a new D&D module on the shelf--Dwellers of the Forbidden City. It looked cool, but what caught my eye was the name of the author. It wasn't the so-familiar-I-stopped-noticing name, "Gary Gygax," but "David Cook." When I saw the last name I thought, of course, "hey, that's my name." Which quickly led to the realization in my 14 year old brain that it was someone's job to write this stuff. Until then, I guess I hadn't thought about it much. I suppose I just thought that there was this untouchable, unapproachable genius out there somewhere (I had no idea where Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, was at 14) creating all of this stuff. But seeing someone with my own name made it all much more real and approachable. It was a real guy's job to write this stuff. "I want that to be my job someday," I said to myself.

I started working in the rpg field in 1988 (still in college, which means I never had a real job). I started working on D&D products in 1993, writing a portion of Elminster's Ecologies. In 1994, I moved to Lake Geneva and started at TSR full-time. Through a (very appropriate) coincidence, it was David ("Zeb") Cook who recommended me after I had met him at a convention in Denver. Very soon after starting there, I met my (now ex-) wife Sue at TSR writing Glantri: Kingdom of Magic. I helped get one of those junior high lifetime friends--the supertalented Bruce Cordell--a job there in 1995. I made new friends--many of which I'm still very close to today.

When WotC bought TSR in 1997, I moved to Seattle to stay with D&D, and most of my friends who also moved with the company. Soon thereafter, I became one of the designers of 3rd Edition D&D, a process of three years, which were some the best years of my life. It's certainly one of the high points of my now 26-year career. Even when I left WotC in 2001, I still continued to work full-time on D&D compatible products thanks to the d20 License and my own company, Malhavoc Press. (Although I played a lot of D&D from 1977 to 1997-- usually once a week--from 1997 to 2006, I played at least 2-3 times a week, and that's not counting the 2-4 times a week when I would play in a playtest during work hours. I once estimated that in those 10 years, I probably logged somewhere around 10,000 hours at the table, above and beyond writing for the game 40-50 hours a week. That's a lot of d20 rolls.)

In short, D&D and roleplaying games have been the dominant factor of the last 37 years of my life. I turn 46 next week (so I'm exactly 6 years older than the game), and I can't think of anything in my life that has defined my path more or has been so constant. It's been my major source of entertainment and fun, the genesis of the vast majority of my personal relationships, and my career.

A few years ago, I got a letter from a young guy. He wrote that for much of his life, he'd had no friends. He was awkward around other people, and didn't know how to fit in. But then he started playing D&D with some other kids and now soon found himself with a group of real, close friends. Friends that he will very likely have for a long time. He wrote to thank me, not for a game, but for friendship and a way to connect with others. What does D&D mean to me? It means that kid and his letter, which I still have on my wall. It means all of us. It means spending our time immersed in a hobby that encourages friendship, cooperation, interaction, imagination, problem solving, and a thousand other deep, true things that are so much more important than a die roll, a rulebook, or a character. More important--much more important--than a play style, a preferred edition, or a publishing company.

Happy 40th, D&D. Happy 40th, Gary and Dave. Happy 40th, Zeb. Happy 40th, Jonathan and Skip. Happy 40th, Rich, Bruce, Colin, Ray, Sue, Thomas, Steven, Michele, Ed, Wolf, Lester, Tim, John, Sean, Miranda, Chris, Erik, Keith, Andy, Jesse, Jeff, Stan!, Charles, Rob, and dozens of others. And Happy 40th Bret, Bob, Rich, Bruce (again), and in particular, Jay. You've all made my life better as we've all played and worked on this one, unique, wonderful game.