Your First Time

[dougmander]

I became a DM two days after playing in my first D&D game, at MaineCon 77 in Bath ME (September 1977 -- I was in seventh grade). The fact that my first ever PC, an elf, had been slain by orcs after about 25 minutes of play did not dissuade me from borrowing $10 from my friend Roger to buy the blue box set before the end of the con. I don't actually remember the first game I DM'd, but it was probably based on the cool cross-section dungeon map in the rule booklet showing the "Great Stone Skull," "The Pit," and the "Domed City." [nostalgic haze]
About a month later I used the D&D rules to run a Star Wars adventure in which the PCs had to rescue Princess Leia from the Death Star. Within a year I had moved on to Chivalry and Sorcery and various homebrew systems and didn't play D&D again until 2e, around 1990.

 

[Privateer]

I can't recall the year exactly, but it was hardly a year before 3e came out. I had been reading a bit of Dungeoncraft, and struck upon the idea of having the players breaking out of an Orcish prison/slave camp.

Highlights of what I can remember, in no particular order:
- The slave in the nearby cell was named "Peryton," after a quick flipthrough of the MM. I still think that sounds like a nice, British name... or something. Not an eagle with antlers, or whatever it really is.
- At one point, a table was thrown at another character... at full speed while running, IIRC. My first ad-hoc damage description.
- The thri-kreen PC kept trying to eat the elf PC after he read in the MM that they particularly like the taste of the meat. He never got the chance to eat him, but he did try to nibble on his arm a few times.
- In my first ever critical fumble description, a scimitar flew into some boiling soup. Delicious.

 

[Silver Moon]

May 1982. At that point I had been playing for 9 months in another group, and was actually too intimidated to DM for that group. I was in my second year of college and I also wanted to get whatever members of our old high school gang that lived in the area back together. So I started my own weekly group. As they were all close friends I felt comfortable and just went for it, improvising when they went off the map despite multiple hints to go the other direction. Next month we will be celebrating our 22nd Anniversary, with 905 games now under our belt, and with four of the founding members still with the group (and they still go off the map).

 

[Zappo]

Ghouls ate the party.

Which coincidentally is almost exactly what happened during the first 3E session we ran. CR 1, yeah right.

 

[Wombat]

It would have been in the autumn of 1975. Most of the detail, necessarily, have been lost.

My brother and my best friend were willing to give it a go. They rolled up characters (3d6, in order, change stats by a complicated formula of trading, then realized that stats pretty much didn't matter) and I had a sheet of graph paper with a minimalist dungeon.

My brother died to a skeleton straight awy. I forget what happened to my buddy.

The point was none of us had any idea what we were doing, but it was fun anyway

Things improved markedly from there

Of course it helped that I was reading a lot of Frizt Lieber at the time...

 

[StalkingBlue]

Two first times for me.

First first time was in the late Seventies or very early Eighties - almost lost in the mists of time, and it wasn't DnD at all but Dark Eye, a then brand new German RPG system. I remember hunching over a coffee table with sheets of A4 grid paper with dungeon corridors and rooms scrawled on them, puzzling over monster descriptions and stuff. I remember my mum, who'd bought us the game box for Christmas, hadn't seen fit to invest in dice as well (What?!?! That much money for just half a dozen dice? Ridiculous.), so we were having to improvise on the die rolls with bunches of d6's, which she had bought. :\ I remember my little brother sitting on the couch all by himself shaking his head sadly after all of us had lost a ton of PCs a the entrance to the first room of his dungeon, saying, "Maybe I shouldn't have put all the monsters in the very first room?..."

Second first time was just after the PHB and MM 3rd ed. came out. I'd bought the PHB and asked a good friend of mine (who'd never gamed before but was always interested in new stuff) to help me puzzle through the rules. We rolled up PCs and selected a monster from the MM to fight for fun. I thought an orc would be about right, he insisted that the ogre made for a much more monstrous-looking monster. I had a better grasp of the rules than he did so I made up a story around it all to give our PCs a chance: we were in an arena fighting gladiator-style, and whenever a PC went unconscius he was insta-teleported out, healed up and dropped back into the fight after a round. (groan) It still took an eternity for the two of us to whittle that ogre down, but we didn't lose spirit.
The good thing was that after that night, my friend said he'd had fun doing it and, "Why don't you make up a real story adventure so I can see what the real thing is like?" So he became my first player in my first ever DnD game. 8)

 

[Sir Whiskers]

1977, white box set, plus some early supplements. I think I used a sheet of the original Dungeon Geomorphs for the first level of the dungeon. I rolled all the monsters randomly, and their treasure.

A friend who taught me the game was the only player, running multiple PC's. The first room entered had 7-8 orcs, more than enough to wipe out a 1st-level party - or so I thought. One sleep spell later they're looting the place. They found thousands of gold pieces and a helm of brilliance. Oh well...

 

[Gothmog]

It was 1983, just about a year after I had started playing AD&D. I was 10, and I ran a grave robbing/murder mystery adventure. I don't remember all the details, but I had read Pickman's Model a few weeks before, so ghouls were involved with the body snatching, but the murders being committed were done by a deranged elf who used the ghouls as a cover (he'd kill someone then leave the body for the ghouls to find and eat, making it hard to identify the victim). The players seemed to enjoy it, but I did screw up some of the rules and details of the rules (elves can't be paralyzed by ghouls). A few weeks later my buddies wanted to play the same characters again, so I started running a regular game (1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month, with 2nd and 4th Saturdays for Kirk's game). Haven't looked back since.

 

[Creamsteak]

Winter of my Sophomore year of highschool. The only person at the table to have ever played before was my friend Jordan. All we had for books was these thin little pamphlets that belonged to Jordan's older brother (either OD&D books of AD&D books, I'm unsure even today). There were approximately 12 of us, but one kid walked out on the group claiming how uncool this was going to be, probably because we kept telling him to play an elf because he looks like one. We had to drive through the snow in order to get to a copy machine to make character sheets, but once that was done we came back and ran a session into the late late hours. I think it was 7 or 8 AM before everyone was done. I don't think we ever rolled dice, either. It was just moderated role-playing. The players did almost everything themselves, with me just stepping in to play NPCs and give opinions on certain things like "well, I think jumping is a dexterity check... cause um... gymnastics are dextrous."

That campaign lasted 6 weeks, which with gaming twice a week for marathon sessions, was great. We invaded 12 ancient dwarven mines to recover ancient dwarven magic items (which the dwarf used, except the rings that the rogue stole). Probably the most fun I ever had with the hobbie. The only problem was that Jordan started drinking before gaming and later during gaming, which made him hilariously stupid, but detracted heavily from the game and broke things down to arguments on more than one occation. After that campaign, we moved on to one where I was a player, and Mark ran the show. I proceeded to die hundreds of times due to my zealous play style... I set the record of 7 characters in a session.

Then we moved on to 3rd edition, and things have been mechanically more sound, but a lot lest consistent.

 

[Ao the Overkitty]

However, I just realized that I've never seen one discussing your first time as a DM.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've tried to repress those memories. It was 1999. I can't remember exactly when we started. Somehow, I'm thinking just after Thanksgiving, but that doesn't mesh with when my college got out and when I was in Florida....Hmm...

Well.. It was frighteful with me trying to deal with 2e Players Option. I allowed far too many optional rules and homebrewed stuff for a first time DM. At the time, I thought it went well. Looking back, it was a nightmare of a campaign. I
think I made every first time DM mistake possible. After that campaign ended about a year & 1/2 later, I stopped DMing for a while.

My attempt at DMing 3e went much better.