Trivia: When did you first play D&D?

[steeldragons]

1981 or 82...dn't remember exactly, but I was around 10 with a family friend and his younger brother. We were playing from the Moldvay Basic set...I was a 1st level magic-user would just cast sleep at anything we encountered (we were kinda wingin' the rules that first game, so I was able to cast sleep as much as I wanted. haha) and then my friend's lizardman fighter walked up to the sleeping whatevers and stabbed them with his spear. I thiiiink we were working our way through Keep on the Borderlands, but I was only there for a few hours during a visit (our parents' were long time friends).

But those few hours were all I needed, I was totally hooked.

As I recall, my first rules/books of my own was the Mentzer (red box) set. Shortly followed by the blue-boxed Expert set and then I got the AD&D PHB, MM and DMG (figuring, confidently, the I had read through all of the Basic and Expert stuff and was ready for the "Advanced" material.

The group I eventually found myself playing with played AD&D and then 2e, though I still picked up/received, as the years went on, the Companions (turquoise), Masters (black), Immortals (gold) D&D box sets.

So, yeah...started 28, almost 29, years ago. Wow.

 

[jcayer]

God I'm feeling old. Probably 1979 in my neighbor's basement. I still remember chugging a potion of invisibility, whacking a hydra with my battle axe, the potion running out, and the end of me. What a great day.

Got the AD&D books shortly after that and played for a long time before taking a break and just returned with the release of 4E.

 

[billd91]

It was June 1981. Summer vacation between 6th and 7th grades. A friend had a copy of the Holmes Basic D&D box that he had gotten the year before for Xmas. We had been talking about the game on the bus all spring and, right as school was letting out, he loaned it to me to make up characters. I worked up six 1st level characters, all with names cribbed from the John Carter, Warlord of Mars series.
I ran all six PCs through a dungeon he had made up. I lost half of them to the brass dragon's secondary breath weapon - so they weren't dead, just out of action. I was grateful for this because one of them, cleric Tars Tarkas, was able to help out in a late encounter against a chimera. Finally, it was just Carthoris who dragged himself out of the dungeon, a 2nd level fighter, with a magic dagger and gauntlets of ogre power.
I know the DM went kind of easy on me for a lot of the encounters since it was my first time even though the body count was high. But I was hooked.

I've played some version of D&D, mostly of the AD&D strain, ever since.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Circa 1999 in a friends basement. I had very little idea what the game was and very little notion of the quality of experience that might come out of it.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

First exposure was at age 10, during Thanksgiving 1983, when I found a 1e Monster Manual in my older cousin's room and was totally fascinated by it. A month later for Christmas, I got a Red Box, and learned the game with one of my younger brothers and my mom. By summer, I'd fended off a number of anti-Satan pamphleteers and managed to get couple kids from school to play. Soon thereafter, I moved away and have been in nearly constant group seeking/building/disintegrating ever since.

 

[IronWolf]

I started playing in '81 or '82 with the Basic Set.

 

[Aeolius]

I started around '79 or '80 with the Basic set, which I "borrowed" from my oldest brother's closet (little brothers do that, you know). I was around 14 at the time. He went through hobbies like mad and the box was still sealed in plastic wrap, so it's not like I was taking something he used. Within a week, my best friend bought the Basic set on a whim, at the local hobby shop. We gamed from that point forward, until the time we went to college (1e, by that point). The last time I DMed a face-to-face game was in 1994 (a few years after I was done with college, and a year or more after I had gotten married and sired my first son), with my best friend, his younger brother, and a friend of my sister-in-law.

I started playing online in 1995, with my play-by-post game "Into the Land of Black Ice", a 1e game set in the World of Greyhawk (my campaign setting of choice). The game started in AOL's RPG forum, moved to TSR's fledgling AOL forum when I became a TSRO, followed TSR to the web (with those horrid iChat/Globalchat boards), then went to the web when I set up a URL and FrontPage message boards.

 

[Daazimal]

It was 1989, my mom bought me the Forgotten Realms boxed set. I played a human fighter who later dual classed to a mage. Our games took place in an old building, that a friends dad owned and used it for our games on the weekends.

 

[Sorrowdusk]

2007; during my First Year of college at UAlbany with The Guild.

(UAlbany "Guild" represent!)


About this time rigt after Halloween was our 3rd game, and I went ahead and showed up in my robe and wizard hat for the next few games.

=D

It was my first tabletop RPG ever, and I saved my party from a TPK with a wraith with a Bead of Force I bought for my first character 'cause I thought it was cool item.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Christmas Day, 1979, Holmes Basic.