What was your first D&D session like?

[The Other Librarian]

I was about 12 or so, and a friend had the AD&D hardbacks. He made characters, just by assigning scores he felt were appropriate. First character was named Theoden, imaginatively enough. We would play at recess, working our way through Dieties and Demigods, pantheon by pantheon. Once you've beaten one god, it gets a lot easier. You can use their gear against the next one. It was glorious.

Eventually I got my own set of books and found out how you were really supposed to play. :\

 

[David Howery]

I played a ranger named Griff. He went up against the Slave Lords and died.

Wanna hear about my second gaming experience?

I played a ranger named Hawken. He went up against the Slave Lords and died.

In spite of that, I went on to play the game again....

 

[Thanee]

I was a magic-user (already liked them back then) and I could cast sleep once and then I was useless for the rest of the evening.

Thanks WotC for changing this!

Bye
Thanee

 

[Li Shenron]

A friend of hours got a boxed re-edition of OD&D as a birthday present, from some older relatives which were already veteran OD&D/AD&D players So this friend decided to give it a try as DM, and gathered us to be his pawns, I mean the characers

We had to roll everything: the stats, the alignment, the gender, the spells known. We were allowed to choose the class, but only one player rolled the appropriate stats to play the class he wanted to, the Elf, which was also the class that everybody else wanted to play.

Our first casualty was at the entrance door before we even entered the dungeon, because of a hidden trap we didn't check for. The consequence of this introductive experience, every time we reached a door we usually spent about half an hour checking for traps in every possible way.

Combats were boring. Admittedly we couldn't conceive any strategy yet, however it was terrible because every encounter costed the life of half the party, which the DM eventually always saved by letting us find loads of potions on the critters' bodies.

Roleplaying was worse. Most of us simply didn't RP at all, because we were shy or embarassed. The 2-3 players who tried to, limited their RPing to speaking in falsetto

The DM was definitely overruling too much, often dictating what the characters should or shouldn't have done (even decided to change my own PC background!), and severly punishing the ones who wanted to exercise their free will too much

As a first time with D&D, it could probably not have been worse... neverthless, nowadays I am still here playing the game and being somewhat addicted to it

 

[kolikeos]

originaly brought up by a friend of mine a long time ago, i was about 10 years old at the time i think, we did not have any rules or dice or anything, it was just talking, i say what i do and he says what happens, with lots of acting and stick fights to repreasent bad guys.
we started to think about games with dice and rules about three years later after we've played a computer game called 'baldur's gate', it was only a year later, however, that we really set up a group and started playing with 3e rules.
we've been playing now two years with this friend of mine as dm, very boring, lots of other players came from time to time, never stayd to long, two or three sessions at most some stayd longer however.
now he gave up dming and im the dm, two more losers joind us but we bearly have time to meet and play cause of (f-cking) highschool.
but wtf am i writing this sh-t?!

anyway, my first gaming session, about two years ago, was 3 hours of character creation.

 

[Stalker0]

I started freshman year in college, 4 years ago. I person who I had just become friends with told me he was playing dnd on friday night and invited me to play.

Now I had heard all the hype, so I was thinking black robes and cult rituals. I was nervous, so I told him I would just watch.

I get there, and obviously no robes or bloodletting in sight. They quickly roped me in to playing a mage that another person had given up. He was spectacularly crappy, but I did my best with my signature quote:

"I'll put a shocking grasp up your ass!!"

Which was very intimidating to a couple of thieves we captured

I made a new character for the next session, who conviently killed off my first character, and I've been going ever since.

 

[Jolly Giant]

Well, I was a late bloomer.. I din't start gaming until 3.0 came out. By then I was 31 and had already played through the Baldur's Gate CRPG 4 times, so I at least had some idea what an RPG was about.

Back then I had a bookshop that among other things sold Magic the Gathering, and the group consisted of me and five of my customers. We used to sit around the backroom after closing time, playing Magic. Then 3.0 came out, and we decided to try something new...

The DM was an experienced player, but first time DM. None of us players had ever played an RPG, but we'd all played CRPGs. He gave us the standard "you meet in a tavern" opening...

Our first "quest" was cleaning out a nest of dire rats from a noble's basement. Boy, were we ever exited when we discovered that tiny tunnel the rats had entered the basement through actually led to a vast complex of ancient tunnels and dungeons!

The bookshop is long gone, so these days the guys come around to my house once or twice a week. I've been the DM for a few years now. Last week we actually played a few rounds of Magic even, just for old times sake!

 

[MonsterMash]

Back in 1977 my older brother and I were already doing tabletop miniatures gaming and saw the White Box advertised in one of the magazines, my brother got it as a birthday present and it all started from there. The first few sessions were just me as a player and my brother as DM, I had a group of four characters: a fighter, magic user, cleric and an elf (in OD&D elves could cross class as ftr/MU).

I don't remember what the first session was like as I was only 11 at the time and its 27 years ago, but we didn't have any polyhedra at that time so just d6, meaning we had to use house rules for the to hit and save tables till we got some d20 (some of the Lou Zocchi dice we got then are still going strong in my brothers dice bag). I suspect we ended up with Orcs or Goblins for the first melees.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

It was in the summer of 1980. I went with a friend (rode our bikes) to the local hobby store (no, it was not a gaming store, it was mostly models and train sets). Tom the Dungeon Master, to my 11 year old brain, seemed like he was a grown-up, but I think he was probably about 17 years old. He had set up a small table in the store and was running a game. I do not recall what kind of character I had, maybe an Elf.

I remember one of the other players had a character with 1 hit point and had named him "Sir Die-a-lot." He took time to explain the game to us as we played. He told us (tongue-in-cheek) it was not about the character, or the DM, it was all about the stuff you had - the dice, a dice bag, a clipboard, a mechanical pencil. If that stuff looked good, then you would be successful in playing D&D.

I recall our first encounter was with a large group of orcs. We ran away from them, up a set of stairs and dumped several barrels of oil down on them which we then torched. We all ate roast orc for dinner that night - if I recall correctly orcs were pictured much more pig-like than they are now, so we thoght it was like having a roasted pig - yum!

Ahh, the good ol' days.

 

[billd91]

I started playing back in Summer 1981. My friend had gotten the Basic box set (the last one before the red box came out) for Christmas after having played it with some older friends in the local Boy Scout troop. He brought the books and explained the rules to me on the bus before school.
He loaned me the set and I worked up a party of 6 characters. Then we met at his house and played with me running all 6 characters. We lived out in the sticks and other players were scarce in our neighborhood.
I had a pretty broad mix of characters, all of them with names pulled from John Carter of Mars stories. They went through a pretty basic, if largely random, dungeon. They fought a variety of monsters, including some way to powerful for 1st level characters. The party slowly whittled down in size, until it was down to 2. They continued to loot the dungeon until the cleric, Tars Tarkas, died, leaving Carthoris the fighter to emerge alone, having rising to 2nd level, and armed with Gauntlets of Ogre Power and a magic sword.
I never really played that character much after that. My friend was gone much of the summer after that day so I started up with another 2 of our friends and a recently acquired red box and started DMing on my own. We had a long adventure through Keep on the Borderlands.