In two paragraphs or less, describe your first D&D (or other RPG) experience.
My first RPG experience was at the age of 8 in 1983. A friend of my dads was visiting with his two sons. They brought the Star Frontiers boxed set. I don’t remember much of the game other than I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I never saw those boys again, but I sure wanted to play again.
I don’t remember how exactly, but somehow I obtained the D&D Basic Boxed set. Remember when you could play an Elf or a Fighter, but not both?! Really funny to think back on it. I can’t remember my first D&D game, but I sure do remember killing many a wary Kobold!
I was 11 in 1990. I was new to the area of New Jersey having moved up from Virginia. In order to try to make friends and fit in, I joined the Boy Scouts in Belvidere. The guys there had an Assistant Scout Master who used to bring along RPG games. I don’t remember playing D&D then. But he did have this cool game called Price of Freedom, which supposes a Russian takeover of the US. In retrospect, the setting seemed a bit like the movie Red Dawn. I made a huge 6ft+ black guy, a former college football player who went through West Point and joined the Army as a computer hacker. Powergaming was obviously not my forte, but the roleplaying of that character was awesome.
My first D&D experience came a few years later, after entering high school. Boy Scouts had fallen by the wayside with other commitments (karate, soccer, school), but my (new) best friend’s older sister invited us to play D&D with some of her friends. It was AD&D for the first few sessions before someone picked up the 2e books. We played a lot of D&D on the weekend then. My first character was an elf named Legolas. I was 14, so give me a bit of a break. He was more popularly known as Legless. He was consistently the worst thief ever and there was one intra-party conflict between him and the dwarven battlerager. Legless pissed off that guy and ended up having a dagger thrown at his head. On a 50% chance roll, because the dwarf didn’t want to actually kill the elf, the handle smacked Legless right between the eyes. The dwarf had rolled a critical hit, and with the Rollmaster tables as a guide for the DM’s houserule, Legless was just damn lucky to live. I spent the next three sessions either unconscious or in jail. But I never stopped playing thieves. By the time I graduated high school in 97 I had the art of the 2e thief to near perfection.
My first D&D experience OTHER then watching my older siblings when they played it long long ago was in 7th grade.
I played an Elven Ranger. Despite making the wisdom check that something was up. He drank the ale the dwarves gave him.
They stole his pants while he was past out.
On one adventure he managed to get knocked out or miss every combat.
First time he gets pricked with a magic brownie arrow and passes out. By the time he wakes up the fight is over.
The second fight happened while he was in bed as he wasn’t on watch. The fight was over just as he finished getting dressed.
Later while taking up the rear crawling though a small tunnel with the rest of the group he is clubbed from behind.
The party fights off a group of kobolds before realizing the ranger is missing.
As it turns out my elf was held captive by a tribe of amazon women.
My first actual pen-and-paper roleplaying experience came in about 8th grade, when a friend, his little brother, and one of his little brother’s friends agreed to try to play a game I’d made that involved them trying to navigate a dungeon I’d drawn on graph paper, while they hunted for treasure and tried to escape before the minotaur tracked them down and killed them. Only the little brother managed to survive, when his Beast Tamer managed to find a secret passage to an underground river which swept him out of the dungeon to safety.
A few months later, we went out and bought the 2E D&D PHB, with the same little group. My friend offered to try DMing (and I remember him telling me to multiply my start hit points for my cleric by 10, since 3 hit points for a cleric at level 1 seemed low to him). My cleric of the hunt teamed up with a blacksmith-turned-fighter during an invasion by a foreign army to learn about the invaders before they ran to another city in our home kingdom to warn them about the enemy (my cleric avoided getting captured by stabbing himself in the arm with his javelin, and then playing dead when the invaders’ patrols came through his part of the city). I also seem to remember my cleric having grandiose schemes about wanting to use this to leverage his way into the upper-echelons of the clergy in the kingdom. I think that was the only session of that particular game that we ever played.
1979 - recess in elementary school. My friend Matt and his older brother Chris were playing on a pic-nic table outside with some other guy… Derek?? I went over to see what they were doing and they were playing a “gladiator game”.
“You make this guy and fight other guys and take their stuff!” they said. I liked it and made a character that got killed right off.
I bought a Red box set, then soon got one of the older ‘wizard, fighter, red dragon’ box set and thought: “Crap, they’re playing it all wrong.
In 1980 and 1981 is when I went all ADnD and bought those books.
My first game was actually 2AD&D and was around ‘93 or ‘94, I was 13 or 14, and I played a Thief.. can’t remember my race. But our job was to get some treasure for this noble, don’t remember how it ended but I had fun playing. In fact, after that I made my first campaign setting and my best friend and I started playing it. He had an Elven Fighter (more like Monk) / Cleric and I played an Elven Thief / Fighter (again, more like Monk). We played that until I joined the Army in ‘98.
We also played Cyberpunk but had a discouraging experience with the GM who obviously favored his NPCs a bit too much. As a result I designed my 2nd setting that focused around a Modern/Superhero/Cyberpunk-ish type thing. We bounced between my 1st and 2nd settings when we played, we gained and lost many other players but my best friend and I were the constant.
As a side note: Whenever I have new Players that I am DMing for, I always start out with a noble named Lord Sighpoli and his desire to re-gain a family heirloom… “and wackiness ensues”.
[ Edited: 27 January 2008 08:17 AM by fessus viator]
I think I was in 4th grade, maybe, 1991 or 1992, when my brother ran a one-shot for me on a camping trip. I played a fighter, but was always enchanted with the picture of Tasselhoff Burrfoot, insisting it was a girl and I wanted to play her. I was hired by a winemaker to figure out why gigantic swaths of grapes were smashed in his field every night. I never dig figure it out, but I was hooked.
The lovely brother later revealed that some troublesome will-o-the-wisps were playing tricks on goblins by pushing their sacred wheel down the hill. They’d push it back up and replace it each night. I at least realized goblins were involved!
So I was about 10 when my next door neighbor who was about 19 came back from the Marine Corps on leave. He was bored since all his friends had day jobs, or were in college, so he invited me over to play this new game he got into in the military. He made me a character and a really simple dungeon and ran me through it. He didn’t have the books with him so he just made up some simple stats for me and I used his cool dice to roll to hit things. I was totally hooked, and wanted to know more but he couldn’t remember what the game was called. I talked about it with one of my friends later and he said it sounded a lot like this game D&D that his cousin played.
He borrowed his cousin’s 1e AD&D rulebooks and we made characters and played D&D for like two days straight. I also found out that another friend of mine from school had the Basic and Expert boxed sets so we would then play with those during recess. A couple of years later, my neighbor in the Marine Corps came home from leave one day and had the 2e PHB and original FR grey box. We played while he was on leave and then he gave me his books before he went back! It was the first D&D book I ever owned. I even still have that 2e PHB although its falling apart now. Later I would go on to buy many other D&D books, and get into other RPGs as well. Interestingly, the very first RPG book I ever bought myself (as opposed to getting books as gifts) was TMNT and Other Strangeness from Palladium. To this day, I still have a soft spot for the boys in green even though I actually no longer own that book.
My first RPG experience involved some TSR Dragonlance books when I was in 4th or 5th grade. It was a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure meets D&D, where one player plays a good party and the other plays an evil party. I loved the artwork in the book and remember mimicking quite a bit of it. I brought it to school quite often and played at recess.
I don’t believe I played an RPG until much later. Someone had picked up an AD&D boxed set while I was in high school...16 or 17. Eventually my brother and I got Second Talon to run us through it. That was the beginning of the end.
My first character ever made was a cheesy rogue named Darian Lanx who was probably the least effective rogue ever created. I still look back fondly on our pet white dragon, Rover. It was big enough for the entire party to ride. We painted iron crosses on his wings. He had the personality of a puppy. Oh and after feeding him a few bags of random magic items, he grew another set of wings, got even bigger and gained bug eyes.
I was in 7th grade and stumbled upon the Players Handbook at a local library. I brought it home and found out that my dad had played AD&D when he was in high school. He told me stories about what the game entailed and I attempted to facilitate a game for my two brothers. This turned out to be fairly difficult with only the players handbook and no outside help from people more knowledgeable. We basically gave up hope and found other things to do, but some months later I found a similar game.
We were out with my dad and his girlfriend at the time and she was shopping for clothes. We were board so went to see what stores were close by and went into a thrift store and saw Warhammer Quest and another box with miscellaneous Warhammer minis. We took this home and were able to play with more ease and had a good time. Later on, in high school I overheard some people talking about playing D&D (which I had never heard it be abbreviated as, lol) and I was able to work my way into a group and create my first real character, Talae: a Tiefling Shade Rogue Shadowdancer.
My first RPG experience at all was, I don’t know exactly when, but I guess I was about 12 (so 1992). Maybe a bit earlier. Anyway, my uncle decided to introduce me to it, but didn’t have any books, so he pretty much came up with a game system of his own (or maybe it was SERIOUSLY misremembered AD&D, mixed with the NES Robin Hood game). My first character was a green dragon (which I created on my own), and my first fight was against a bunch of skeletons, which I quickly defeated in one go with my dragon’s special ability, an earthquake (which I rationalized by saying he stomped the ground). The game didn’t really go any further than that. I actually co-designed the game “system” (as far as there was one) and gameworld, which was practically a videogame-like linear progression of adventure locations (along a winding road), each with its own boss, with a final boss at the end.
Then, in 1992, we bought the GURPS game, but didn’t really get to play it. (GURPS later became a significant part of my gaming career, but that’s another story.) The next gaming adventure I had, and the first with a real xD&D game (sort of), was when my uncle got the Ravenloft campaign setting and GMed it. Except he didn’t have the PHB, or ANY gaming book other than Ravenloft (the first version, the black box). All we had were very badly misunderstood and misremembered rules from an AD&D game he played with “some guys”. To give you an idea, characters’ height was determined by character class (my character, being a bard, was 1.62m tall; paladins were the tallest at about 2m, and rangers were 20cm tall, which is less than one foot). Bards like my character could create potions as a class ability, and anyone could pick up spells along the way like they were weapons (so my favorite attack was “Fire Boll"). We had a memorable encounter with a Brick Dragon (most dangerous type!), and the little boxes that instantly made us go up a level (DM was getting bored, wanted to speed things up) have been a popular gaming memory for all those years ever since.
I think I was 18 or 19, 2nd year college, and my Magic: The Gathering playing group was trying out D&D3;.5 c/o one player who’s had XP with 3rd Edition. Under his suggestion to try out one of the newer classes, I went out katana-wakizashi as a Human Samurai. Pretty nice, although I wasn’t too much into RPing then so I kinda underplayed my PC. Died at Lv5, when a foe charmed him and he committed hara-kiri afterwards, upon realizing he worked against his own friends. The DM was so impressed he didn’t give me a level-down for my next char!
My first RPG experience involved some TSR Dragonlance books when I was in 4th or 5th grade. It was a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure meets D&D, where one player plays a good party and the other plays an evil party. I loved the artwork in the book and remember mimicking quite a bit of it. I brought it to school quite often and played at recess.
I don’t believe I played an RPG until much later. Someone had picked up an AD&D boxed set while I was in high school...16 or 17. Eventually my brother and I got Second Talon to run us through it. That was the beginning of the end.
My first character ever made was a cheesy rogue named Darian Lanx who was probably the least effective rogue ever created. I still look back fondly on our pet white dragon, Rover. It was big enough for the entire party to ride. We painted iron crosses on his wings. He had the personality of a puppy. Oh and after feeding him a few bags of random magic items, he grew another set of wings, got even bigger and gained bug eyes.
Second Talon’s campaign was...unique.
What was awesome about the first time was while the characters you guys made were based in D&D, the MM I was using was AD&D 1st Ed. Hence me winging the crap out of everything.
You also forgot the part where Rover grew another head.
I was attending a two-week computer camp during the summer after 7th grade, 1981, and I heard about other kids in the dorm playing this game called Dungeons and Dragons. I didn’t get invited to play, but I heard a pretty good description of it and was very intrigued.
I lived in a small Kansas town where you’d never find D&D books on a shelf, but they were sold in the Sears catalog back then. (I was a frequent Sears catalog customer, being addicted to Star Wars toys, so I had seen them in there.) So I went to the catalog shop and ordered the Basic Set ("pink" box with the Erol Otis cover). From there, I taught myself and my friends to play, starting with The Keep on the Borderlands, which came in the boxed set.
My first D&D experience is actually from this site here just a few months ago at the end of July I had heard about it (don’t remember where, maybe on the internet somewhere or something) and I started looking at some sites and things to see if it was something I’d like to try out. I found this site and read other stuff where I could find it and decided I had to try it. So I ordered the books and got them like second week of August, haven’t looked back since I haven’t actually had the chance to play in person with anyone yet, but I am still looking. The PbP’s here are a blast though, and DM’ing my first ever D&D game was really a good way to jump into playing, feet first
My first D&D experience was back in 1977 - a friend of mine turned up at school with a photocopy of a photocopy (of a photocopy) of the original rule book. (naughty I know, but at that age I hadn’t even heard of IP) As a longtime Tolkein fan I was instantly hooked. Back in 1970’s New Zealand there was literally nowhere to buy such things so for a long time these photcopies were all we had. Likewise the only dice we could get were six siders from various board games and we had to make up ways of generating the d20 roll (usually by rolling 4d6-4)
Our first adventure had a bunch of 1st level characters tagging along behind the 2nd level character played by the guy with the rules (who was so much richer and more powerful than us that he had a horse to ride and a +1 mace) - we ended up on the moon fighting giant ants for some reason - no idea why exactly, but I’ve never looked back. Played a wizard back then and although dabbling with other classes over the years I always seem to end up back with one.
I had heard about it (don’t remember where, maybe on the internet somewhere or something) and I started looking at some sites and things to see if it was something I’d like to try out. I found this site and read other stuff where I could find it and decided I had to try it. So I ordered the books and got them like second week of August, haven’t looked back since 
I haven’t actually had the chance to play in person with anyone yet, but I am still looking. The PbP’s here are a blast though, and DM’ing my first ever D&D game was really a good way to jump into playing, feet first 
