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

[Illirion]

Also the D&D cartoon was the first time I heard the words (wasn't particularly impressed though, mainly because of the anyoing goat). The D&D movie was the first time I realised that D&D was actually a game (read it in a folder about the movie somewhere). A friend of mine saying that we should try D&D sometime with our Magic: The Gathering group and handing me a copy of the SRD was the first time I tried actually playing it.

Cheers,
Illirion.

 

[Soel]

My first brush with D&D was the cartoon on saturday mornings. A couple years later I found two of the "choose your own adventure" books at the library.

Later 80's, one of my big sisters played with her friends, but it wasn't until 94 that I got into the game itself using 2e and playing in the adventure "Assault on Raven's Ruin."

 

[FireLance]

A friend in seconday school (aka middle school/high school in other countries) loaned me the Basic D&D set. I started by DMing for my younger brother (over the years I have tended to DM more than play). Of course, by then I was already interested in RPGs because of computer games like Wizardry and Ultima, "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. I had also read and enjoyed several fantasy books like the Lord of the Rings, the Sword/Elfstones/Wishsong of Shannara, the Earthsea trilogy (it was a trilogy then), the Chronicles of Prydain, as well as science fiction books, in particular, the works of Isaac Asimov. Growing up in Singapore, I had also watched television serials based on Chinese martial arts (wuxia) novels, and Japanese cartoons such as G-Force (aka Gatchaman/the Battle of the Planets). This predisposed me to like fantastic, imaginative and creative works of all genres.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

The novelisation of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Then I found a British copy of the third edition of the D&D Basic Set at a book sale - the British edition had the same red cover and everything, but it was in a single A5-sized (148mm x 210mm, or 5.8' x 8.3') softcover instead of a boxed set. This would have been in 1991, I suspect, the year after my family moved from Melbourne to Sydney.

I still have that book - I've never thrown away any roleplaying books, only ever lost them or had them stolen (with my schoolbag, not by another gamer).

 

[Shades of Green]

Circa 1996, in the summer between my Eighth and Nineth Grades, me and my friends used to spend our vacation nights (up to th next morning) playing various board games, especially Talisman; eventually, a few of them who've had experience with D&D have tried to introduce it, though that game didn't last long (I've played a Halfling Thief in that game IIRC). About a year or two later I've borrowed the AD&D 2e PHB, DMG, and MM, as well as some dice, from a friend of mine, and started DMing to two newer friends, and that game lasted for months.

 

[KenSeg]

My first experience was in 1978 in High School. One of my friends was playing the basic game with two other kids and invited me to join in their game that weekend. I rolled up a hobbit thief as no one else had one. We were being chased by a manticore so I had all of us draw our bows and waited outside a doorway, zapping it when it entered. I seem to remember that my toon died several times that day. I was hooked!

I can still remember sitting at the table in Jeff's house, looking out the big bay windows onto the forest preserve behind his house with the sun glinting down through the branches onto the snow and thinking that this was cool, real cool!

-KenSeg
gaming since 1978

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I first heard about D&D on the short bus. (Not what you think -- I was participating in the school district's "gifted/talented/creative" program, and they specially bussed us from widely separated neighborhoods to a school that had "GTC" support. So there were a bunch of suburbans and vans for us.)

Anyway, I first heard about D&D on the bus, but didn't get to play. When I got home, I told my parents about the game. My father looked surprised, and pulled the Holmes "blue book" out of his briefcase; there was a buzz about the game at his office, too (he was an officer in the U.S. Army). The blue book he had was borrowed, and I didn't really get to read it.

The next day, he brought home a shiny new Holmes boxed set. He made a small, one-level dungeon (the dungeon of the mad wizard Kraylor), and I rolled a PC (Tahi the Hooded), and several NPC hirelings to go along (I can only remember Mochu the Dwarf). He ran me through the dungeon, where Mochu and another NPC both died fighting a giant spider, but Tahi emerged laden with treasure. Needless to say, I was hooked, and hooked hard.

After dabbling with it, Dad just turned it over to me. It never caught on with him. But I'm still playing it decades later.

 

[JVisgaitis]

It was around 1982 and I was really young. I think I was around 6 and in 1st grade, but I could be wrong. My sister knew a lot of people who were playing D&D at school and she got it for Christmas. My dad was going to DM and I remember he redrew the Keep on the Borderlands map huge on poster-sized graph paper.

I wanted to play, which I never did with them (not even sure if they played), put I did roll up my first character. A Fighter that I wanted to name Starbuck after the character in Battlestar Galactica. My dad wouldn't have it, so I spent maybe an hour spouting different names: Luke Skywalker, Percival, Han Solo. Finally my character had a name! Boltar... named after the character from Battlestar Galactica. Well, whaddya want? I was six!

I always thought it was cool of my dad that he gave me such a hard time. He wanted to challenge my imagination and come up with something original. While Boltar wasn't original, he knew I could never base my own character from him.

 

[Mark Hope]

There was another thread about this a while back that makes for similarly interesting reading. In that thread I posted a long, waffly account of how I got into gaming - cut and pasted below .

(It's cool to see that I wasn't the only one for whom William Kotzwinkle's novelisation of ET was a formative experience...)


Way back in 1976 or 1977, I was reading a hardback compilation of the Trigan Empire comic series. In one scene, the heroes are commanding a large army and have a wargame-style table laid out with little miniatures representing troops and units and stuff. At 7 years old, I was so taken with the concept that I made a big map of the Trigan world and played a proto-wargame using counters stuck to the board with blu-tack. This has nothing to do with D&D at all, but it set the stage for what came later.

A few years after this, when Empire Strikes Back was about to hit the cinema (ie. 1980) I picked up an sf/fantasy magazine with R2-D2 and C-3PO on the cover (Fantasia? Can't recall). On the back cover of the magazine was a full-page advert for the three AD&D core harbacks - that was my first encounter with D&D proper. Of course, I had no idea whatsoever what these books were - completely baffled, although they looked kinda cool. In addition to the Star Wars articles, the magazine also had other stuff of a more salacious nature (amazon hotties flashing their boobies!) that I wasn't sure was targeted at readers of my age. For some reason I presumed that those books with titles like "Dungeon Master's Guide" (for the adult roleplayer, wink wink) fell into that slightly naughty category. From time to time I would look at the advert and try to puzzle out just what the hell kind of game was this?

I also used to get the Star Wars weekly comic. After a while, adverts started appearing in the comic for the Dungeon board game. The idea of adventuring around a labyrinth, fighting monsters and collecting loot seemed incredibly cool and (like with the Trigan wargame from years before) I made a couple of boardgames of my own (set on pirate islands, iirc) in a similar vein.

In 1982 I saw E.T. and read the novelisation of the film. Although the movie only briefly features gaming, the book refers to D&D, characters, stats, DMs and the like in some detail. Suddenly it fell into place - so that's what those books on the back of the Fantasia magazine were about! It had nothing to do with naked bondage amazon chicks at all! Well, whaddya know!!

Just after this, a couple of friends at school asked me "Do you know what Dungeons and Dragons is?" "Yes," I replied smugly. "It's a game played by Americans." They snorted in derision. "Ha! Well, that's where you're wrong. Because we play it, and we're not American". "Oh, cool!" I replied. "Can I play too?" More derision. "No," they replied. "We only play with experienced players and it would take too long to explain it to you". In other words, you're a noob, Hope, so get lost.

Not in the slightest bit discouraged by this display of gamer snobbery, I bugged them relentlessly for weeks thereafter, pumping them for information about the game, how it worked, how it was played, just what a Dungeon Master was and how things like combat and the like were resolved. And then (like with the Trigan wargame and the Dungeon/pirates boardgames) I went home and wrote my own crude RPG called... Castle. It had two stats (Strength and Power!!), a sprawling map that players (ie. my sister, parents and neighbour) moved around taking turns like a boardgame, and any combat was resolved by rolling 5d6 (all the dice I owned!) and subtracting the result from Power. I can't remember what Strength was for...

This kept me happily amused for months on end until our next trip to the UK (I lived in Holland at the time and had no idea where to find gaming supplies). We stopped by Beatties model shop in Newcastle and I spotted the magenta Basic D&D box on the shelf. I bought it on the spot and haven't looked back since. Someday I intend to release Castle as a 672-page deluxe hardback with accompanying vinyl map - but I need to figure out what the Strength stat did first, though...

 

[wingsandsword]

I first encountered D&D around 1991. I was in 7th grade, and had a friend who had become interested in it and wanted me to play it with him.

Well, a day or two after he mentions he's found this really fun game called "Dungeons and Dragons" (which I recalled seeing a cartoon about when I was younger, but not remembering it well, just something about a little yoda-like guy called Dungeon Master, a unicorn, an inept wizard, and a guy with a magic bow all trying to get back to Earth), I am at a Toys R Us store in a nearby city.

I don't remember exactly which came first, the NES version of Pool of Radiance, or a Basic D&D box set, since I know I got one first, then the other one a week later. It was all they had of "Dungeons and Dragons" at that big store, and I didn't have enough allowance money to buy both.

The box set was the black one with a Red Dragon on the cover. It only had rules for going up to 5th level, and came with a big dungeon-map mat and a lot of stand-up counters. The video game was a direct port of the "gold box" computer game. Then, a few days later my friend brings the D&D books he has (Legends and Lore, one of the Taladas Dragonlance modules, and the Spelljammer box set, he'd found his D&D stuff at a local used bookstore and was trying to figure out the game from those sources).

So, together we sat down and tried to figure out how D&D worked from a Basic box set, a smattering of AD&D 2e suppliments, and the manual and gameplay of a game based on AD&D 1e rules. We came up with some horrible mangled hybrid that barely worked from these sources (we never could conclusively figure out if Clerics got their first spells at 2nd level or 1st level, and if Elves and Dwarves and Halflings got an additional class in addition to their racial class).

It was fun, but we burned out on it for two reasons. The first was we were getting frustrated with the lack of all the rules (we didn't know where to go to buy a Player's Handbook, that would have been a Rosetta Stone to us). The second was that we both got a lot of flack for playing the game. My father forbade me from playing anymore, he'd heard too many bad things about D&D at Church about how it was nothing but thinly veiled satanic recruiting and it tricks little kids into committing suicide supposedly, while we both got teased and bullied and ostracized as "satanists" when word got out that we were playing a "satanic game" since many kids in our rural school had heard the same propaganda. At one point I was even summoned to the Counselor's office because some students had reported I was suicidal, their proof? I was playing D&D, which was proof as far as they were concerned, and it was enough that the School Counselor wanted me to get professional help and considered me a suicide risk, just because I had been playing D&D for a month or two.

So, I stopped playing D&D of any sort for about 7 more years until I got to College and found a gaming club.