What was your first D&D session like?

[Oryan77]

If you can even remember, what was it like playing D&D for the very first time?

I can remember my first session. I was 18 (I'm 27 now) and my new friends were into D&D. The DM asked if I wanted to try it so I did. He helped me role up a character (for Darksun). An hour or so later we begin to play with another friend as a player. The DM looks at me and asks me what I wanted to do. I didn't understand and the conversation went like this:

Me: "I can do anything I want?"

Him: "Yeah, yer standing at a bar in a tavern."

Me: "I don't understand, how do you know this?"

Him: "You just tell me what you do and I tell you what happens."

Me: "Uh ok, so I jump up and down."

Him: "Heh, ok so yer character is jumping up and down in the tavern."

Me: "OHHHHHHHH, it's all imaginative!?"

I got the hang of it right after that. It was really awkward for a bit because I didn't understand how he knew what happens and how he was able to make the situations be affected by what I did. But look at me now, I play more than any of them.

 

[ElvishBard]

I was 14 when I played with my dad as the dm. It was 2nd edition, and I was a magic user. My friends were mostly fighters though. It took us so long to make characters that my dad ended up just having us roll the 6 stats and doing the rest for us lol. The session was fun though once we got into it.

 

[Crothian]

So I make up a fighter because I rolled a 12 strength and that was my highest. The other guy had an elf. Then we rolled d6's to determine if we had a random encounter, if so we rolled on that chart. Everything was random like that we had no DM, just random chance to have anything.

 

[Rel]

I'm not sure I recall the exact "first time" when I participated in a game. I went through this long period of reading the books over and over without any friends who played on a regular basis. I cajoled my little sister into playing a bit and a few of those silly games stand out in my memory. But I distinctly recall the first time I ever witnessed a game.

I was a cub scout on a camping trip with the Boy Scout troop that was affiliated with the same church. I was 9 and these older boys, some of them 15 or 16 were like gods already given their relative size and strength. So evening rolled around and they all hunkered down in a tent and broke out books, character sheets, dice and flashlights. It sure as hell had ambiance.

The one thing that I recall was that they had slain some sort of a dragon and the sheer volume of the treasure was a problem to contend with. They were going through all manner of machinations to stuff it into bags of holding, portable holes and teleporting all over hell and gone. I was riveted. I begged them to teach me to play and they guided me through the process the following day. I rolled up an Elf and he could cast Magic Missile. I've pretty much been hooked ever since, though I didn't really start playing until I was around 10 or 11.

Good times.

 

[Wombat]

...no one has translated the ancient tablets...

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

It was about this September, 1985...about this same time of the month, as I recall. I was 21, and had gone back to college after a hiatus. My best friend still lived in the dorms, so I was up visiting him when these two guys I didn't know knocked on the door. "Let's finish that game," one of them said.

My friend, whose name is Wolf (yes, his real name) said sure, and began setting up. I was familiar with Dungeons and Dragons as being a game, but I've never played. I started to leave, and Wolf said "John dropped out of school, so you can play his character." Having no idea what to do, I said, "Sure."

The character I was given was a fighter named "Crusher". I quickly changed it to "Logan" (the first name I could think of). I pretty quickly grasped the basic concepts of the mechanics, and off we went into an icy castle to best a white dragon for its treasure. I was hooked, and still am to this day. I soon rolled up my first "original" character, an anti-paladin. Oh, what legends were born of those days!

I've used up enough bandwidth on this for now. The two guys I played with that first day demand their own entries. Their quirks and downright weirdness would fill pages online.

 

[Theron]

September, 1978. The start of my sophomore year of high school. My friends and I had been into wargaming, and through that discovered Metagaming's Melee and Wizard board games, and the programmed pseudo-RPG dungeon crawl, Death Test the year before. Somewhere around the spring of '78 I first heard of D&D, but was under the misapprehension that it was an SPI game, so I never found it at the hobby shop (back then, SPI games were generally packaged in these flat, clear plastic trays, so that's what I was looking for).

A buddy of mine got a copy of the first edition Basic Set (blue box, blue book), and ran us through a dungeon cribbed from the back of the book. We played on the patio outside the cafeteria on a Friday after school. I ran two PCs, a fighter named Feahor the Fearless and the oh-so-cleverly named Theron the Thief. I think they both died horribly, but who cares. It was a blast. The next week, I borrowed the book from my friend and I'm embarrassed to say, photocopied the entire book at my mom's office (I've still got the photocopy around here somewhere, on decaying 70's vintage thermal paper).

I don't remember much about the game session (it WAS 26 years ago, after all), but I still remember the cool breeze and the setting sun, the sheer novelty and thrill of it all. In my mind, I was walking in Middle Earth. Or maybe Hyborea. Or Lankhmar.

It still gives me a chill. It's why I still game.

 

[coyote6]

I think I was about eight. A neighbor helped me roll up a character -- and I really don't remember what he was. A fighter, I imagine. With really crappy hit points.

My character walked to the Big City -- it was the City State of the Invincible Overlord -- tried to cross a bridge, got stopped by a guard, then got knocked cold by the guard (crappy hit points, you'll recall).

That was the first time I played D&D.

(I think it was the City State map and the rulebooks that sparked my fascination, 'cause as introductory scenarios go, that one wasn't too great. )

 

[Shadowdancer]

Yeah, I remember my first time. She was, oh, what? D&D role-playing. OK.

I was 21, home from college for the summer. One of my best friends from high school, Mark, also was home from college for the summer. Mark had an older brother named Mike who had gotten a technical degree and gone to work in another state. Mike had started playing D&D with some of his techno-geek co-workers. Mike told Mark about the game. Mark started playing at college with some of his friends there -- some had played before, others in the group were new to the game.

Anyway, one day that summer Mark called me up and asked if I had ever heard of D&D. I said yes, because I had, but didn't really know much about it. He said he had been playing at college, and his brother Mike was playing, and did I want to learn to play. I said sure.

I went over to his house one night and we rolled up a character for me. I was a little overwhelmed with the choices (he had the AD&D 1E books), so I decided to stick to a simple human fighter, Dirk Stryker.

Mark told me he was going to ask another friend of ours from high school, Jimmy if he wanted to play. Jimmy said yes, and he had a cousin our age named Timmy who also was interested. So they rolled up characters with Mark, then we all got together one night to play.

Mark's parents had a fairly large pop-up camper. We set it up in their driveway (they lived in the country) and started playing one night about 7 p.m. It was a blast. Our characters took a job to put down a gnome uprising or something, and we had to go find their secret underground lair and infiltrate it. Jimmy, who was playing an assassin, had a side job to kill the leader of the rebellion and bring back proof.

I almost died really early in the adventure when I fell into a pit trap, then got attacked by watch weasels. Fortunately Timmy was playing a cleric and could heal me. We cleaned out the lair over the course of two or three game days, then travelled back to our home village. Jimmy cut off the leader's head and carried it back in a sack. We gave him a hard time about that.

When we finally finished the adventure, someone got around to looking at his watch, and we discovered it was 5 a.m.! We had been so wrapped up in playing, we had lost all track of time. But it was a blast, and still is.

Mark and I still play D&D together as well as other RPG games and computer games.

 

[Ed Cha]

I can't remember, but it was probably really bad. I think I was the DM and I was, like, eight. I probably played with my older brother.