What was your first RPG experience if it WASN'T D&D?

[Will Doyle]

The first one I played was a role playing game version of battletech (I don't know if the GM homebrewed it or if there was an existing system he used)

Most likely Mechwarrior.

Man, I used to spend hours just looking at that cover.

 

[meomwt]

I started with Tunnels and Trolls - firstly playing the Solitaire Dungeons they produced (my copy of Buffalo Castle may well fall apart through use!), they writing Eagle Caves for my brother and a friend to run characters through.

I hope my adventure writing has improved a bit since then...

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I started on Hero Quest when I was 7. That was sort of D&D for kids, simplified and utterly devoid of roleplaying.

Around 9 I started to realize you could actually talk to the monsters in Hero Quest and invent actions. Then my friends and I started making up our own games that were a bit like D&D. I think that's a fairly common experience amongst gamers in their youth, no?

As for real roleplaying systems I started out with 2E.

That is my experience as well. We got to the point where we were creating new mechanics and writing our own Quests with roleplaying interaction prior to the dungeon and long running plots. Since we had all of the HQ stuff I bought the 2E rules for inspiration and we started adapting it for HQ. Then in a beautiful "duh" moment it dawned on us that since we wanted a more complex, open game we should just play the more complex, open game instead of trying to convert it.

 

[ACreepierFolklaw]

I started on Hero Quest when I was 7. That was sort of D&D for kids, simplified and utterly devoid of roleplaying.

Around 9 I started to realize you could actually talk to the monsters in Hero Quest and invent actions. Then my friends and I started making up our own games that were a bit like D&D. I think that's a fairly common experience amongst gamers in their youth, no?

If I have friends and family with kids it's still fun to rope them into some Hero Quest with their parents and tell the kids they can sort of do whatever their imagination wants.

As for real roleplaying systems I started out with 2E.

love that game: it was very simple and i never play it now of course, but it will always have a special place in my heart. come to think of it i don't think i've ever played it with the rules at all. we just chucked them out as we were already gamers by the time we found it...

my first experience of rpgs was with choose your own adventure books. there was a particular type i loved called galactic spy or something, though my best friend at the time liked the tolkienesque fantasy fair. we ran out of books, he asked me to make some up on the fly and the rest is history

 

[SnowleopardVK]

I started on White Wolf; Werewolf the Apocalypse.

The friend who introduced me was a big werewolf fan. He turned me off the game though. His and the next WoD ST I had populated their entire verse with nothing but jerks, so for a while I thought that WoD required NPCs to be s to the PCs. I've since gotten an offer to join a WoD (Vampire) larp that apparently actually has some nice people though. Too bad I can't fit it into my schedule.

 

[Meatboy]

Heroes Quest FTW

My first experience with rpgs in general came from Heroes Quest in several incarnations. First was the old Sierra game, which for legal reasons got renamed to Quest for Glory. This was my first experience with any kind of nonlinier, your choice makes an impact game. (opinion time: I feel game designers today (bioware im looking at you...) need to go revisit this game to see how things like skill sets and class and player choice can really impact a game.)

But my first PnP experience came from Heroes Quest the board game. With its simple rules it didn' take long for my friends and I to start making or own classes to play, then came new adventures, and finally talking... once we got that far their was no turning back. I never got into DnD until 3e though. Though I tried I never seemed to "get" older editions.

 

[Storminator]

We went from Ogre to Melee to The Fantasy Trip to D&D. TFT was a protoGURPS, so that might be the best answer for me. I chose other.

PS

 

[Umbran]

My first game was Tunnels and Trolls, from Flying Buffalo. My eldest brother brought it home to play with his younger siblings and our friends, when we were somewhere in the single digits of age.

I didn't so much gravitate to D&D as had it dropped on me, as selfsame brother then gave us the 1e PHD and DMG for X-mas soon after he went to college.

Other games followed...

 

[kitsune9]

Simple poll question, here--if D&D wasn't the first RPG you ever played, what was?

I'm interested in hearing stories about people who eventually gravitated to D&D after trying other RPG systems. Or, if the poll doesn't apply to you, talk about why you didn't gravitate to D&D after trying other stuff first, or gravitated to other systems stuff after trying D&D first, etc.

Traveller was the first rpg I saw being played at school in which I ran home to ask my dad about it. I got D&D Basic (the BECMI version) for Christmas. Had there been no D&D, Traveller would have been it. I did get that box set that I saw at school and have almost all the editions ever published. However, the only version I did get to play was GURPS Traveller (which was fun).

 

[kitsune9]

We went from Ogre to Melee to The Fantasy Trip to D&D. TFT was a protoGURPS, so that might be the best answer for me. I chose other.

PS

I played TFT in the 90's. Awesome game and oodles of fun. Really quick to make a character and get completely pounded on.