Tarondor |
14 or 15 White Box, by the time the first supplements came out we were playing off of topo maps from the backpacking store.
Yep! We used the topo maps from Avalon Hill's "Outdoor Survival" boxed set, as suggested in "Men and Magic."
I was so thrilled when I found a copy of Dragon Magazine #16 in a hobby store. I couldn't believe actual adults were involved in "my game".
Charlie Brooks RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 4, RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32 |
Depends on how loose you want to be with the definition of an RPG.
I was 11 when I first played D&D (black box with Escape from Zanzer's Dungeon as the sample adventure).
About a year prior to that, my brothers and I spent a lot of time playing Milton Bradley's HeroQuest, which is technically a board game but which we added enough dialogue and house rules to that it basically served as my first RPG.
Fig |
A group of 4 of us began with Hero Quest (the board game) when we were in middle school, so we were about 11. We didn't start a proper D&D sort of game (theater of the mind, unrestricted dungeon dimensions, etc) until a few years later in 1999 when a buddy picked up Eye of the Wyvern Quick-Start AD&D 2E adventure from this new fangled Amazon. The next Christmas, I gathered up my gift money and purchased all three core rulebooks for the new 3E (at that time, the books were $20 each).
I recently picked up a copy of Hero Quest (original Milton Bradley published, licensed by Games Workshop) and it is just as glorious as it was in 1996: simple rules, every character has something to contribute and the board is such a gorgeously textured piece of cartography when the doors and fixtures are on it.
We also still have that original copy of Eye of the Wyvern and I've used updated versions of the included adventure to kick off numerous short lived campaigns.
UnArcaneElection |
1st Edition D&D. 1980. I was 6, my then 8-year-old cousin was the DM, and we played in one of the spare bedrooms of our grandparents' house. He eventually got bored with it and declared that my character's head exploded from accumulating too many experience points.
That's a new one on me. Fave'd.
Jiggy RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32 |
Tin Foil Yamakah |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I played my first ADnD 2nd Edition Character when I was 4 years old... he jumped into a pool he didn't know was acid and died quickly and painfully. There wasn't even enough left of him to raise.
Substitute "jumping in a pool of acid "with fell into a river of lava" and you have my second attempt at the ToH
thejeff |
Somewhere around 11, AD&D at summer camp. I think we made characters, did some shopping and might have made it to the entrance to the dungeon before we ran out of time. Didn't matter. I was hooked.
I don't think the DMG was out yet, but I scraped up the cash and bought the PHB and MM when I got home and managed to play a little bit in middle school before most of my friends got too cool (or too worried about being uncool) to do so in high school.
Found more players and more different games in college.
Salafax |
1984 - seventh grade, red box (Mentzer).
In seventh grade English class we all did presentations on our hobbies. Two kids - one girl and the other a boy with whom I was friends - each did D&D. I did stamp collecting.
Guess which one I'm still into.
For some reason, I thought it would be more like Choose Your Own Adventures but with dice (kinda like the old Lone Wolf books) -- no idea why.
D&D was a great gateway game for me. I next started playing TSRs Marvel Heroes before I really knew anything about Marvel. Now I've got a basement full of comic long boxes and fairly addicted to Marvel AND Pathfinder.
Ripples in the pond, man...
Hitdice |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Moldvay Basic, Christmas gift when I was 10, maybe 11. I moved to AD&D as soon as I stumbled across the Monster Manual in my local hobby shop. What can I say, they were published in hardcover and, y'know, advanced.
That was the same hobby shop (you couldn't find dedicated gaming shops outside Lake Geneva at that point, I guess, you had to look for the RPG stuff right next to model trains) where I bought my first issue of Dragon magazine, #73. My mind was blown!
Edit: It seems like most of the responses in this thread are from people who started playing RPGs before "pen and paper" or "tabletop" were relevant terms to the description of RPGs; those were just the only thing to play with, or surfaces to play on top of, at the time.
. . .
No insult to video gamers, I've wasted plenty of time breeding chocobos at the chocobo ranch, too. :)
John Benbo RPG Superstar 2011 Top 8 |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
8 years old, AD&D. Played a thief- a staircase trap triggered, turning into a slide that sent me right at a stone golem. I think it was a short session...but it was the Monster Manual that got me hooked.
Shortly after I snagged both a Player's Handbook and Monster Manual, 2nd edition came out, invalidating my first long running character- a half-orc fighter named Beorn. 10 year old nerd rage ensued!
Alex Martin |
7 or 8, the original D&D Red Box. I was pretty much put in the DM role.
The Blue Box followed and went into AD&D from there - still have my original Player's Handbook and DMG somewhere. Somewhere in the middle of this, we also tried Top Secret and Star Frontiers.
You know... This made me realize that 1 year from now, I'll have been playing RPGs for 20 years! That means I'll officially be a grognard! XD
Well now I feel very much the grognard after that statement.
Lemmy |
This summer marks 40 years of playing D&D for me
Lemmy wrote:You know... This made me realize that 1 year from now, I'll have been playing RPGs for 20 years! That means I'll officially be a grognard! XDWell now I feel very much the grognard after that statement.
I look forward to your guidance and advice on shooing kids away and recalling how much bluer the sky was "back in the day". ;)
Angry Wiggles RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32 |
Alex Martin |
2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I look forward to your guidance and advice on shooing kids away and recalling how much bluer the sky was "back in the day". ;)
In my day, we only played with "yella" dice. You could barely read the numbers, so you colored them in with a pen. None of this swirly colored dice or two-tone stuff with white "purty" numbers.
And we liked it that way! *Grumble, grumble*