Twenty Five Years

[eryndel]

Christmas '81. My Dad got OD&D red box (with the party wading in the water IIRC and Haunted Keep as the adventure.) from friends at work for christmas, and ran a game for his family. I ate the stuff up, and within a few months I begged to run a game. I've been running games ever since. I was 7 then.

I've been addicted ever since.

 

[Gilladian]

It was summer of 76. My older brother had played at boy scouts, and they got in trouble for staying up all night. We didn't actually own the rulebooks, he wrote down what he remembered and we started playing. I had a cleric, who got stung to death by giant bees. It was grand. I remember my mom driving us across town a few weeks or months later, all the way to a hobby shop in Kettering, where my brother bought the boxed set.

That was when we learned about going up levels! and those horrible cheap waxy plastic dice! Wheeeee.....

Been playing ever since, mostly DnD in one form or another, ever since. I was lucky enough to move to Copperas Cove, Texas, in 78. The hobby shop there was a favored hangout of Steve Jackson (or maybe it was his partner); I actually helped playtest a game called "T.H.E. Fighter" which later became "melee".

that was the good old days!

 

[MacMathan]

Let's see it had to have been around summer of '82. We were all young and self taught so our games were not very accurate to the rules for a time. It was with the boxed sets in the beginning and then we eventually moved on to Advanced DnD, back when you could buy the original books in Toy R Us, demons on the covers and all We would have sleep overs and stay up most of the weekend playing through what are now classic modules. Good Memories, I am glad I never stopped.

 

[Agamon]

I feel so young in this thread. I didn't start until summer of '84. Though I did play once in '82, though at 9 years old I don't think we were playing right...

 

[Theron]

Wow. It's nice to see the responses to this thread (even from the young whippersnappers ).

Given that my regular group is pulling our collective hair out trying to schedule a time when we can get together, maybe it's time to pull out some old stuff next weekend and say, "Whoever can make it, come play with me."

 

[Mercule]

In honor of the occasion, I decided to change my avatar to a picture of my original dice (which I still have).

I am quite jealous. A "friend" swiped my first 100-150 dice back in '87 or so. All I have left from those days are a pair of d10s that I had pulled out for a miniatures game.

Anyway, I started in, I believe, 1982 or 1983. It was at a summer "day camp" (aka. day care for preteens) at the YMCA. A couple of friends I made there got me into it midway through the summer. Went out and got the Red Box in the fall. I switched to AD&D a year or so later and went "hard core" gamer. About all I can say for sure is that Legends and Lore was my first AD&D book and that Unearthed Arcana was the most recently released hardcover.

 

[GMSkarka]

I'm a heretic: My first game wasn't D&D.

My friend John Cochrane got me a copy of TOP SECRET (not S.I., the original with the legs-gun-and-money cover) for my 12th birthday, June 1981. My parents followed up 6 months later with a copy of the D&D Basic Set for Christmas.

My mother accidentally bought a copy without shrinkwrap...and missing the dice (rectified a couple of days after Christmas with a trip to Friar Tuck's Bookstore in Bayshore, Long Island, where I picked up a set of dice). However, in addition to the rulebook and Keep on the Borderlands, someone had shoved a copy of AD&D module A1, Slave Pits of the Undercity, into the box. This was good, because it gave me a sneak look at the cool stuff that AD&D had to offer over Basic D&D, and led me to getting my AD&D books within the next year.

22 years. I haven't looked back, and now I write the stuff for a living!

GMS

 

[Theron]

Our Top Secret campaigns from back then largely consisted of rolling up new members of the Assassination bureau and shooting things. Lots of things.

Sprechenhaltestelle was a depopulated wasteland by the time we were through with it.

 

[LightPhoenix]

I feel so young in this thread. I didn't start until summer of '84. Though I did play once in '82, though at 9 years old I don't think we were playing right...

YOU feel young? I'm only 23!

But my first game was somewhere around '89 as well. Me and another kid played it at lunch, a long with a bunch of other games... he always made it so he would "win". Started with the red box too. Thinking back, he father was in the army, so I wonder if that's how he got exposed to them. Anyway, nobody really cared we did this, if only because we were "gifted" students (which is indeed a load of crap... can't help if I'm good at learning stuff).

Now I hate the kid, and his mother and grandmother too (long-ish story), but if nothing else they got me into role-playing games.

 

[Theron]

I am quite jealous. A "friend" swiped my first 100-150 dice back in '87 or so. All I have left from those days are a pair of d10s that I had pulled out for a miniatures game.

d10s? You mean those new fangled things that replaced our 20 siders for percentile rolls?