Why did you start the hobby?

[Dirigible]

As with Eternal Knight, there was Fighting Fantasy, Lonewolf, and (critically) the Dungeoneer/Blacksand/Allansia RPG series. Ahh, great days. Three stats, no classes, no waiting.

Then, most importantly, there was Through Dungeons Deep. A combination of the pseudo-AD&D rules discused in TDD and Dungeoneer led to my first homebrew RPG system and world. Which lead to another. And another.

Oh, and at one point I bought the Introduction to AD&D boxed set with the audio CD ('good idea... cleric' ). Never found much use for AD&D until Birthright came along... after that, it was history.

 

[Zappo]

I voted vidogames as I reckon that was the main factor (I remember purchasing the red box shortly after completing one of the Eye of the Beholder games). However, I was already reading Dragonlance and playing book-games (Lone Wolf, that kind of stuff... I used to have about 100 of them, I so regret selling them...)

 

[Gnarlo]

I was always a fan of mythology and fantasy growing up, and along about '77 when I was 12 I saw the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit cartoon on TV. My mother got one of her student friends at the University (she was a senior secretary in the main dormitory housing office) to check a copy of the book out of the university library for me since my local school's didn't have any Tolkien at that time (I think they'd all been stolen). I tore through it and the trilogy and fell in love with drawing maps of moria and figuring out the languages and so on.

Then the next year the Bakshi film of LOTR came out, and mom's student friends who had set me up with the books were going to see it and asked if I could come along. Mom and dad said yes, I went with the group, and afterwards they got to talking about this game they played with graph paper and dice that you could use to play act roles in the books. They let me sit in on an impromptu game in their dorm room, showed me how characters were made and how you did combat, and a week or two later I had my own copy of the rules from a local hobby shop and was playing with my friends and brother.

I believe the first "dungeon" we ever explored was my map of Moria I had drawn from the descriptions in the books Still got the old worn out graph paper map around here in a closet somewhere with my 1E stuff

 

[TiQuinn]

Fantasy movies.

I really, really wanted to be Tom Hanks' character from Mazes and Monsters.

Actually, I must've watched The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, Sword and the Sorcerer, and Clash of the Titans umpteen times when I was a kid. Then I saw some kids playing the red box set at school (Catholic School, no less! And SHOCK! HORROR!...the teachers and nuns thought it was harmless fun.), and the combination was enough to pique my interest.

And the rest is plastic dice and little white crayons.

 

[Hand of Evil]

It was 1977/78 I was spending my youth doing the normal things a young man does at the age of 17/18, chasing girls and drinking (it was safe & legal at that time). Sure I was semi-geek, working part-time in the up and coming computer operations field, going to school to become a Marine Biologist but I was also a reader, enjoying those fantasy novels and let me tell you, no one knew what was LotRs! My younger brother and his friends were into the game but no one wanted to be DM and so they came to me. I read the rules, ran the game and as they say the rest is history.

So, it was a combination of those.

 

[Aeolius]

...I was semi-geek, working part-time in the up and coming computer operations field, going to school to become a Marine Biologist...

If it's any consolation, the guy who created Spongebob Squarepants was a marine biologist (and yes, I have a species of sentient sponges, the gorgonians, in my undersea campaign)

 

[MrFilthyIke]

Other - I saw the red Tom Moldvay edited 1981 Boxed Basic Set in a Circus World in 1981. The rest is a long, long story...

Circus World...have not heard that name in YEARS....

edit: I got into gaming because some guys were doing it, it looked fun,
and I'd just finished The Hobbit in 7th grade. I tried AD&D 2ed, thought
it tough at the time, and bought up ALL the Basic D&D stuff instead.
about 2yrs later (around '90='91) I got pulled into AD&D again, and
along with Cthulhu, Traveler, Elric/Stormbringer, Talislanta, Cyberpunk,
Twlight 2000, Palladium, etc.

College was for LARPing and White Wolf (re: debauchery).

Now I feel more full-circle, enjoying ALL games.

And I was a computer gamer, a bit, as well.

 

[Deadguy]

An 'Other' here:

Back in 1981 I was injured and had to miss sports. I got chatting with a guy in my class who I'd never really talked to before, and he mentioned this thing called 'Dungeons and Dragons' which he gamed from time to time. Now I read fantasy and SF, so it seemed kinda interesting. Then the following week I bugged him about 'what do you do in this game?'. Hunting mythical monsters, overcoming evil priests, finding magical stuff... this sounded intriguing! But I couldn't afford the game at the time, and it might have ended there.

However, on the bus home I mentioned D&D to a friend of mine from the class in the year below. This guy I used to spend Saturdays visiting, playing games on a really old computer (TRS-80?). Well, the next Saturday I turn up and there's this red-boxed set; I'd intrigued him enough that his mum bought him the game that week. We read through it and created characters, and over the next two weekends he DMed 'Keep on the Borderlands'.

So whilst I had friends who gamed, I never joined their group, but gamed one-on-one up to University days. Probably accounts for why I still like the solo-player games today.

 

[Fester]

I used to know these guys who were in a military academy for teenagers. They used to come back during vacation and one day they brought back a box set of D&D, so we played the old B2 module.

A few vacations later, they returned with the 1st ed. AD&D manuals and that was that. I ended up buying them off of them (I believe one of the guys wanted to buy a load of black paint to redecorate his bedroom and needed the cash...)

Completely missed out on 2nd ed - got drunk in some pub and then sobered up six or seven years later (well, college and university years, but same thing). Got back into D&D when I saw a post on slashdot (this was about two years ago) which was about a D&D site and something inside me awoke. I found a club, joined, had fun.

It's good to rediscover something you'd totally forgotten about and realise you still have all the same old passion for it.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

IIRC (that was a long time ago) I started because I watched the D&D cartoon and saw the D&D red box at a local hobby store. I was hooked. That must have been around 84-86. I don't really remember what computer we had back then, but I also played (with my dad) the first Wizardry, Might & Magic and Bard's Tale games. I'm not sure if they came after or before D&D, though.

AR