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

[cthulhubryan]

AD&D

I started about the 3rd day of high school in 1979. Since then Dungeons and Dragons has been a part of my life. Everywhere I lived it was my introduction to new friends.
"Concerned" friends gave me things from "Playing with Fire" to my first "Chick Tract" of Dark Dungeons.
While I never got to one of the Lake Geneva Gencons, I went to Cons from Maryland to California and finally met the EGG once and have a signed game from him, Alas it was not AD&D but was instead Lejendary Adventures.

Happy Birthday to (Lord this sounds geeky) my oldest friend.

 

[grafikchaos]

What D&D means to me.

I think it was 1981. I was at a friend's house, and he had a neighbor friend that was a few years older than us. I was 11 at the time, and I think his friend was 14 or 15. My friend said something about a game that his friend plays, where you fight dragons and goblins and stuff. We went to his friend's house and he handed us each a character sheet, and then we did a combat with a dragon, rolling dice, and him describing the action. It was the coolest thing ever. My friend and I ended up getting the basic red box set, and we would play almost every weekend. I can't even remember my first characters.

I showed the game to some friends in school, and we played obsessively. I remember someone mentioning the advanced version, and my parents took me and one of my gaming friends up to a book store that carried the books. We both bought the players handbook that day, and it opened up a whole new world of D&D for us. It was Advanced, and we loved it!

I played all through middle and high school, and found a group in college. Shortly after I left college, I met some of my very best friends through gaming circles. I continued to play through my 20's. When 3rd edition rolled around, I played it some with those friends. I fell out of the hobby for some 11 or 12 years, and got back into gaming through board games around 2008. I stumbled across the playtest for Next, and got to thinking about starting another group up, which I have, and I'm really glad to be back. I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of Next in a complete package.

I've met some of my best friends through D&D, and even though I don't live around them any more, we still stay in touch through facebook and the like. They all became my brothers because of a shared love of this hobby, and that is what D&D means to me.

 

[Lwaxy]

Picked the game up when I was around 7 or so from the US Soldiers in our village - good way to learn English, too. My parents actually encouraged us playing because not only would I pick up another language faster, but it also limited the time I'd spend just reading or watching documentaries.

It kind of did look weird though when we turned my old sandpit into a dungeon crawl Our first dragon to kill was build out of twigs and leaves and we had an assembly of toys for PCs and monsters. Of course in the end we ended up rescuing the dragon from the bad wizard who had made it do bad things.

Rules were secondary when us kids played without the grown ups, which is probably why the above example didn't end in a TPK.

Happy Birthday D&D!

 

[Serendipity]

I was first exposed to D&D by among the first of those comic book style ads for D&D in the back of an otherwise forgettable Star Trek comic in the fall of 1980. Shortly I was gifted with the Holmes Basic set and it's been a long strange journey of exploring the uncharted number of "weird and idiosyncratic worlds where nearly anything is possible with only your wits and your fellow players to rely upon." (Which is what I view as the soul of D&D to me.) Now it took me til the following summer, and the assistance of an older friend, to 'get' it but damn it's been a fine, fun journey.
Across many editions and many many other fine games that wouldn't be here save for D&D, I happy say happy birthday Dungeons & Dragons!

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

For me it was 1979 and four guys had set up a table in the local hobby store. Tom the DM was running a game of D&D. One of the players, who had a fighter with 2HP named Sir-Run-a-lot explained to myself and a friend that what really mattered for the game was having cool looking dice, a nice clipboard and a fancy mechanical pencil. When he was killed after getting burning oil splashed on him, he showed us how to roll up a new character - a fighter with 1HP named Sir-Die-a-lot.

My friend and I got our own copies of the Basic Set, learned to play and joined Tom and others at the hobby store for several years. I played with different friends for many years until shortly after 3.5 came out. Since then, it has been only occasional games of D&D as we all had kids and our time became more and more difficult to coordinate for a regular game. My son has played 4e, but I personally cannot stand that edition and only play it once in a while with him. I am holding out some hope that D&D Next will be a game we can both enjoy and I can start a new group with my friends and their kids.

 

[Elf Witch]

I discovered the game with the three brown booklets. I played at a con and had a blast. I didn't get to play again until Advanced. I remember my first character a fighter named Bunny. I had rolled godawful stats. So I expected him to die quickly. He didn't he had amazing luck. I played as a goof ball as someone who thinks he is the worlds greatest fighter. When Joxer the Mighty was introduced on Xena I wondered how the writers found my old character sheet. I loved gaming but I hated the misogyny that went with it. I was usually the only female at the table . Between that and being a single mom I dropped out of gaming. I played the odd game here and there but never DnD. Then in 1996 I walked into a comic shop and met a guy looking for gamers. I decided to give it a try and I have been playing regularly ever since.

I have every edition sitting on my shelves. I really don't like 4E and to be honest I am suffering some burnout from DnD these days. But gaming it self will always in some way be a part of my life. I enjoy reading setting books and making up monsters and magic items.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I did a sort of magnet arts education as a small child and was well-versed in drama and film before age ten. When we fell upon hard times and had to move, I lost all that and was utterly miserable. While my IQ is high enough to do anything that requires it, only creative pursuits ever brought any satisfaction.

When a couple of friends tried to get me to try this "Dungeons and Dragons" thing, I didn't know what it was, and I rejected it because it sounded kind of sketchy. Eventually they convinced me to give it a shot. I started with 2e, having no books and a DM who basically made our characters for us. It was kind of fun, but mostly for the social aspect.

After a couple of years, 3e was released, and we talked it over and switched. I got a monster manual as my first D&D book (clearly my parents did not understand that it made no sense to start there). I was hooked into exploring the world and the mechanics. Eventually, our DM started to lose a hold on us, and I decided to give it a hack.

DMing opened up a whole new world. Daunting, both in the amount of thought required and in the need to please an audience in real time. After I stumbled around for a while, eventually it hit me that this was a new creative medium, with different features than the stage or the screen, some compelling. Real time improvisation was creatively exciting to me. I pushed boundaries, and pissed off some of the old guard in the process, but I was fine with that as it showed me who my real friends were and whittled our bloated group down to something manageable.

I came to look at D&D as the road not taken, a way to produce artistic work for all us frustrated pragmatists who dreamed of being stars but where redirected to boring professions. As a hobby and not a career, D&D enables its participants to have jobs and make money while doing something more challenging and serious than passively consuming fiction or trying to create it alone. Rather than one specific set of rules, the thing that defines the idea of D&D is shared creativity.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I just had my own 40th birthday party last night - so I am literally as old as D&D - and 30 years of those has been how long it's been since my first game of D&D. I guess you can say it's a significant part of my life!

 

[Grazzt]

Started with the B of the BECMI series, so like 30 years ago or so. My dad bought it for me for my birthday that year. Played it with my brother, sister, and friends in the neighborhood. My mom had gone back to college and noticed a guy in one of her classes playing D&D. Invited him over. He introduced our group to AD&D and joined us until he graduated and moved away (1986 or so). We never looked back.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was 12 in the fall of 1975 and already an avid wargamer when I started to hear rumors of this "ultimate game" that was like nothing that ever came before, you could do almost anything in Dungeons & Dragons. The idea of an RPG was like a bolt of lightning, but none of my friends had rules. Finally we pestered the 'big kids' in Boy Scout Troop 71 to let us play with them. So there we were, out in the woods on a campout, at a picnic table in the dark with a couple of Coleman Lanterns. The atmosphere was rich with the scent of the unknown. We knew nothing about the rules, had no idea what we would encounter. We were indeed just exactly like a batch of neophyte adventurers about to embark on our first adventure!

Honestly I don't recall what happened next. I think my character was the cleric (I wasn't cool enough to be in the favor of the big kids, so they gave me the 'crappiest' character no doubt). Did we live or die? I don't even recall. All I remember is our characters descended into the dark dungeon by torchlight while we sat around the table in our own pool of lantern light, with trees close all around. I don't know if the DM was good or bad or anything else, just the feel of playing.

Needless to say one session was NOT enough, a LIFETIME was not enough. We couldn't buy the rules, they were hard to find and $10 was a fair amount of money back then. So my sister and I actually wrote our own rendition of the rules based on what we knew, plus whatever we could steal from various fantasy authors. I think we only played a few times before Holme's Basic showed up, and soon we inherited the full rules from some older kids that weren't interested, etc. I still have the Holme's Basic book, or the remains of it, complete with our own homebrewed rules written on lines paper and stapled to the back of the book!

There have been some periods in my life when D&D wasn't part of my everyday activities, but the books have always sat on my shelf, and the campaign notes I scribbled out at age 14 are still in the back of one of the binders I have kept, along with tattered maps of 1970's dungeons. Somehow I'll never get the thing out of my head, nor do I want to.