Your intro to RPGs

[billd91]

My first introduction was in 5th grade, on the school bus. A classmate, Tyler, told me about the game his older brothers played, D&D. It sounded pretty interesting but I didn't have any way to pursue more at the time and Tyler moved away that summer. This was 1980.

The next school year, a new friend of mine also talked about the game on the bus. He had started playing with fellows in his Boy Scout troop. He loaned me his Holmes edition D&D set that spring and I made up my first part of characters. One player, 6 characters. We played that summer (1981) in a bizarre hodge-podge dungeon of his own design and I was hooked.

After that, I was recruited to DM another couple of friends on regular weekend games using the Red Box edition one of them got for Xmas. I've done a LOT of DMing since then.

 

[MacMathan]

Let's see it was 1982 aqnd I was in 4th grade and the red box that got me and 3 friends started.

We quickly moved onto AD&D after a few months and I can remember buying the books in Toys R Us along with these really cool metal things that looked like they could be characters (no one worried about us playing with lead back then).

We loved it. We rarely followed all thr rules or even completely understood some of them but it was great and brought to life all of the greek/norse/arthurian mythos I had read.

I remember eventually finding a store that sold transparent gem type dice, these were a prestige up grade from the mud-dice I had been playign with previously.

Discovering Dragon magazine was mind blowing back then, so many ideas.

It lead to a 30 year ( and still going) gaming adventure.

 

[Corathon]

I began with Holmes Basic D&D. While talking to my nephew (who is only 4 years younger than me) I mentioned having heard of D&D. He said that a friend of his owned the game. He borrowed it and we each read the rulebook. Having never played an RPG before, we each created a dungeon and a party of characters to explore the other's dungeon. we had no idea what we were doing (e.g. there was a purple worm on the first level) but we had a lot of fun.

Shortly after that on a camping trip with 2 friends I mentioned the game, and the other two wanted to try it. I didn't have the rules, but we bought paper and pencils and just made stuff up. That was the beginning of a D&D group in my home town.

 

[Wik]

Mentioned many times before, but it's fun, so why not one more time?

I am a second generation gamer - I learned it all from my dad.

He was in the navy, and we had just moved to Toronto. I was trying to make new friends, and really, so was he. He joined a D&D group mostly to talk to his work buddies, although my dad had been playing D&D since the late seventies - so for almost ten years at this point.

Anyways, he'd come home from his games, and around that time, his old D&D books were once more on the book shelf. I was a voracious reader, and I read all of them. Not really getting the game so much, but loving the fact that there was a book of all these MONSTERS.

Then my dad's gaming group kind of broke up (military postings!) and he felt the itch to play, so he had me roll up a character and we explored the "solo" dungeon in the 1e DMG together. He would have played a ranger of some sort. My first character was an elven ranger named "Nelf" (which stood for "neutral elf", even though nelf was chaotic good).

I only played Nelf because my dad wouldn't let me play a tiger. But he was okay. I guess.

Anyways. I devoured a bunch of the books, but never played the game with anyone but my dad. Every time a new D&D boxed set came out, I'd beg to get it... and then read the contents a hundred times over, but find no one to play with. I was a shy kid.

Flash forward two years, and I'm on Vancouver Island, trying to make new friends. Suddenly, I meet a guy who is familiar with D&D. his brothers used to play it, you see, and he's inherited all the books. "But D&D sucks" he said, mirroring something he had overheard his brothers saying "If you really want to roleplay, you should try shadowrun".

In that year (grade five) we played every weekend. Shadowrun ("It's like the future. only there are no spaceships. Most of the world is sort of like ours. But there are adventurers. and magic!") was a favourite. So was D&D (BECMI, primarily, at least at first). The two of us would add more and more games to our list, and more and more players, trying a huge range of products throughout the mid nineties.


D&D helped me kind of come out of my shell a bit, that's for sure. It also helped fuel my appetite for reading (though, to be fair, that ship had already sailed well before D&D came around). My interest in history (which would eventually lead to a degree) arose almost entirely because of D&D. And of course, in my teenage butthead years, when my dad and I could talk about, well, nothing else, we could still talk/argue about whether or not clerics are better than druids (Druids, I say! He says Cleric.... the jerk).

 

[karlindel]

It depends a bit on where you draw the line for RPGs, but here are my early experiences:

Choose Your Own Adventure books, starting when I was very young.

Lone Wolf books during my pre-teen years, I collected the entire set, and replayed them many times.

In middle school, I had a friend that had a copy of Tunnels and Trolls that he leant me, and I played several of their solo adventures. Also in middle school, we had a person that ran a marvel superheroes adventure game on the playground. No dice, props, or books, just pure storytelling adventure fun.

So I started off with systems but no one else to play with, went on with people to play with but no real system. Freshman year of college I joined the local gaming club and tried out AD&D 2nd, and had a lot of fun. My first character was a female thief, and I obviously didn't know how to build a proper party thief. As one other player remarked: "So you have no hope of finding traps, but you can pick the pockets of a god? That's just great. . .".

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

A bit of background on my experiences with D&D.

The first time I encountered it was when I was in middle school, one of my friends had an older brother that played it and I saw him rolling dice and talking to someone on the phone as they played. It piqued my interest, but I didn't ever go beyond just being interested at that point. I knew at the time I loved the SNES fantasy games and whatnot, but I didn't know until much later how much I'd love actually gaming.

My second shot at the game ended with me being shot down before even being able to attempt to game. My brother and I were at a bookstore and I saw the cool books/art on the shelves and talked to him about it and then told my mother I was going to buy the books and this was I think my junior year in high school. She promptly replied that the books were of the occult and that they weren't allowed into her house. Guess she believed what they wrote about the books back in the 80's and whatnot.

I didn't get an actual chance to play until my early 20's when my best friend at the time broached the subject. I immediately jumped at the opportunity and we started a solo campaign for me with him DMing. I instantly fell in love with the game and remember fondly the first character I ever played (a Half-elven Ranger) and his heroic death fighting a white dragon.

I'm happy to say that I've played off an on for the last decade as both a DM and Player (when I can find groups) and am currently in a new group having just moved to Las Vegas and enjoying being a player in a Pathfinder game. Just gotta say that I love this game, any and all editions, any and all campaign settings, any and all systems!

 

[The Shaman]

First semester of junior high, fall of 1977. My friend Tim and I played all sorts of wargames - tabletop minis and board-and-chit. One weekend he showed up with the Holmes blue box and a couple of the OD&D supplements. My mom took us to The War Club, our local gaming store that night - we bought some minis, painted them, and played our first game. My character was a fighter, Sir Michael the Marauder - from the very beginning I had a taste for brigandage in my roleplaying games, probably from all the Kingmaker I'd played in the years prior; I painted up a chainmailed warrior with a great helm and a bastard sword, with a brown surcoat and a brown shield with a tan and white stripes across it.

He soon had a dwarf as a henchman; the dwarf's job was to boss the dwarf men-at-arm hirelings we picked up as well, so we simply referred to him as Chief - if he ever had another name, I don't recall what it was.

I know we encountered orcs and a gelatinous cube, and found a treasure chest loaded with copper and silver coins - it was like nothing I'd ever experienced, and I was hooked.

 

[Gargoyle]

1982, I was in the 8th grade attending a private Christian school. I learned about D&D in Bible class, and decided that since they warned me about it, it must be a lot of fun. After all, they had warned us about Rock n Roll, and I found out that was great, so this game about pretending to use magic and slay dragons sounded like it might be a blast too. When I saw the red box at Service Merchandise I bought it for $12 and have been hooked ever since.

 

[Flatus Maximus]

When I was a little kid (early 80s), my Mom would take me with her to the mall when she'd go shopping. I liked to read, so she'd drop me off at the bookstore where I read pretty much every Choose Your Own Adventure they had. I don't remember the moment, but eventually I noticed the shelf devoted to D&D. I saved up my allowance to buy the Red Box and the AD&D Player's Handbook (I had no idea what I was doing/buying) because they looked cool. I especially liked all the numbers and weird symbols.

Since I didn't know anyone else who played or was interested, I bought a solo module, though I don't recall which. I just remember it had an invisible ink pen, I was a thief, and I think there was a minotaur. Good times....

 

[Umbran]

I honestly don't know what year it was. I was in the single digits of age, and keeping track of the year just wasn't a high priority for me. My brother, who's a bunch of years older than me, took it upon himself to introduce his siblings and a couple of our friends to Tunnels and Trolls.

A few years later, when I got to Junior High School, he brought a 1e DMG and PHB home from college as Christmas presents, and ran us through U1, the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh over the break.