Your first brush with D&D (OF ANY STRIPE)

[thedungeondelver]

Sherman set the Wayback Machine to 1981...

There's a sort of preamble to this, a "scenes played during the credits" that leads up to when I got in to D&D and it goes like this: when I was a young'un, I remember going to the Circus World toy store in the Gadsden Mall and seeing this... well, what was it exactly? A game? A comic book? Something in between? No idea. Little metal men under the glass counter...nah. Not my cuppa. I wanted Star Wars figures! (Or rather, I wanted to look at Star Wars figures - being the tender age of nine back in '79 I had no liquid assets with which to acquire Kenner's boon to kid-dom).

Fast forward to a move to Florida. One day at school, at lunch, I espied magazine-like booklet being viewed by my cohorts at the lunch table. I asked if I could look at it and...

Well folks, I was hooked. I didn't (at the time) make the correlation with what I'd seen in the toy store a couple of years earlier, but damn this was a cool thing. I know it was A2 SECRET OF THE SLAVER'S STOCKADE because I to this day remember reading about the hobgoblins and young hobgoblins in the stable, and how one would use his shovel to ring a gong and bring down the whole place on the adventurers. But what was it? CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE? A monthly publication of some kind? Aha, right there on the cover "ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS". Everything seemed like some magic power word that, if I could understand it, or become a part of it, it'd unlock something awesome. "For character levels 4-7" - "characters", like in a movie? Levels 4-7? Like floors of a building (close, at least in one usage)?

The maps held my attention almost as much as the text. And the preamble in the text - obviously this was part of some great, multi-part adventure of some kind! And what did the numbers mean? AC, HP, D1-8 - I had to know more.

After a month or so of dutifully taking out the trash without being asked, cleaning up my room, helping keep the apartment squared away, I'd earned enough allowance and pestered my folks enough to get a trip down to a local toyshop to get my hands on my very own DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.

I'd wanted that "A2" thing, but alas, they didn't have that one! So where to start? I was confronted by a wall of books I had no idea how to interpret. Having only a few dollars, I couldn't afford the big box with the dragon and the lady with the magic spell and the guy with the spear...oh that hardback with the red giant, the wizard and the woman in the bikini (and the guy in armor) was neat but...a king's ransom! Besides, that said ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS in the corner - better to work up to that rather than jump right in.

Then a magenta-colored module caught my eye.

B2 KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS by GARY GYGAX an adventure for character levels 1-3.

And even better, in one corner, "SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY MODULE"

Aha! Perfect! Introductory, not the first in its series (it took a while for me to grok that not everything with a letter-number code involved it's precedessor or follower), but surely this was all I needed, right? And besides, while they had a shrinkwrapped book that featured the art that was on the box (the guy with the spear, the woman casting the spell, the big dragon thing), if I got this "Keep on the Borderlands" thing, I could buy some dice as well!

So I bought it, some of those crumbly blue dice (with a red marker crayon - still got the d10!), and away I went!

Now was it providence that I grabbed that particular module? It seemed to have nearly everything that I needed to play the game - spell charts (no descriptions of the spells - what was know alignment? what was an alignment?), to-hit tables, saving throws, indications of when to use them, armor class tables, and indications of how to handle combat.

With my sister Beth and my friend Tommy from down the street I headed up my first party of adventurers and away they went!

Of course, B2 wasn't the complete rules for D&D by any stretch of the imagination but I had that going for me - imagination. Where I had no guidance, I filled in. How did a character reach the next level? Why by...uh...killing a certain number of monsters! How much damage did weapons do? No idea! One whack took off one hit point for the character, one whack from the character killed the monster. Easy as pie! (Big monsters took five hits to take down).

So for about a year or two, the totality of BASIC DUNGEONS & DRAGONS was, for me, one booklet and one set of dice.

The rest, as they say, is history.

 

[Bert the Ogre]

Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl with the weapons from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks...

That was MY first encounter with D&D, over at a friend's house. He showed me how to create a character, then GAVE me the weapons from Barrier Peak, and I started tromping my way across the glacier. Zapped a few critters, couldn't figure out how to move mastidon tusks, and had a blast!

Afterwards, I bought Dungeon! the board game (still have it!), then the first boxed set (Eric Holmes), and then received the PHB/DMG/MM for Christmas. Later I bough the Basic and Expert edition boxed sets, and began playing with my friends on a regular basis. Played all through high school, a little in the Navy, and have gotten back into the game through the combined good fortune of a gaming game-shop owner, RPOL.net, Yahoo Groups and meeting people at said gaming store.

Although I started on First Edition, I never became an edition snob, since I think it's the story and adventure (and chips and soda) and NOT the mechanics that makes the game enjoyable.

But that's just me...

 

[Glyfair]

My first brush with D&D was through a newspaper article. It covered the game and a local group who would do the Lord of the Rings with their D&D game. I loved the idea of a game with the ability to go beyond the board game rules type of game.

After I got into the game (through the original basic set), I ended up becoming friends with that group. BTW, they still periodically do a LotR game every few years (although the game system varies).

 

[molonel]

Flair the Fortunate!

1st level human ranger. My brother ran the campaign.

I can still remember the color and texture of the paper my character sheet was written on.

 

[Aus_Snow]

B/X. X1. Elf.

School.

 

[billd91]

First brush was on the school bus, 5th grade, 1979. A friend, TJ, had two older brothers who played and even made their own swords for hacking up bales of hay in the barn. He told me of some of his initial playing of the game but I didn't quite get the concept.

One year later, again on the bus but this time with my friend Bob, I encountered it again. Bob had been introduced to it through Boy Scouts. He showed me the blue box version of Basic D&D he got for Xmas. I borrowed it and made up my first party of 6 adventurers, ripping off all the names from the John Carter of Mars series characters.

The first dungeon he DMed for me was homebrew. I escaped with 1 of the 6 still alive and he reached 2nd level. I was hooked. Clearly.

 

[lonesoldier]

I was looking at the boxes of older Magic the Gathering cards in a store once, looking for some cool things from previous sets and my eye fell on this "Player's Handbook, 3rd Edition" Putting down my cards I browsed the book for a little bit. It was that D&D thing I had heard about, and hey, it was on sale. Might as well...

That was in 2001.

 

[WayneLigon]

1978, I think. I'm 15-16. On the inside front cover of Analog was this ad for a cool-sounding game: Chitin from Metagaming. Wow, that sounded cool. No toy store I called had any idea what I was talking about. Huh. Purely on chance, I looked up 'games' in the phone book and found what turned out to be the local gaming store. I called them. They had it!

I go there. Through the open door to the back room I see a guy I know from the science fiction club I'm in. I wander over to see what's going on. He gives a brief explanation, and I roll up a magic-user. 15 minutes later he's dead, his brains sucked out by the nine mind flayers that ambush the five-man 1-2nd level party.

Couldn't wait to play more.

 

[Turhan]

Great Story.

I was about 31 or 32 when a friend of mine from work asked (after we'd played a PC game called Wing Commander for 8 hours straight) if I'd ever heard of DnD. I said no. How I'd managed not to ever hear of Dungeons and Dragons, I can't tell you. Then he asked me if I'd ever read Tolkien- I said "Yes, loved it. I've read Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock & Robert E Howard too. All great fantasy stuff. Why?"

He said, "Well, I know this game, it takes maybe 30 minutes to learn, and it's like putting yourself into all those great stories, except you get to make up a lot of the story as you go along." This was about 1991 and the game was ADnD or 2E...

So, the next Thursday evening, in a cold, drafty garage, with a lot of cigar smoke drifting about, I met some guys and one gal sitting around a sturdy wooden table. They’d all known each other for 5-10 years and the game was basically one endless campaign that my friend (the DM) had been running since his Air Force days back in 74 or 75 (the first rules). A homebrew campaign with most of the normal DnD stuff we have now- illithids, drow, neogi, orcs, dragons and, well, dungeons. They were all around 18th to 24th level PCs and I had to start out as a 17th level fighter, but I had to earn all of my levels before I could advance to 18th.

Have any of you heard of Larry Nivens/J. Pournelle’s books: Man Kzin Wars? Well, my friend and I had just read the first two and he said, You want to play a renegade Kzin prisoner? Your first job is to escape from this neogi spelljammer.
I said, what do I do? He handed me the dice.

The guy next to me asked me my character’s name. “I am called Hunter.”
Is that who you are, or what you do?
“Yes.” My catch phrase was, "Kill and Eat."

The next week I started on my long history of collecting, painting and sometime modifying miniatures. Hunter was my first mini and I still have that huge, cat like warrior fella hangin’ about. The DnD thing is still with me too.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Summer camp, 1979. We played the adventure on the front cover of the PHB.

Which is to say, everyone but me died horribly trying to kill the orcs and loot the idol. I hid. Until the orcs found me.