lol, boy does this pull up a lot of old memories. I think the first time I ever heard of DnD, well roleplaying in general actually was on the phone to an old friend. He called and during the conversation he began to tell me about this game he had been playing (turns out it was Heroes Unlimited from Palladium). He described to me this awesome fight sceene, well at least it seemed awesome to my 10 year old mind. He told me about his rock hero and his group who had fought these villians in a fight that raged over a city block. I asked him, "so, where did you get this video game!" I was determined to buy it. He told me it wasn't a video game, you play it out of a book. "So its a choose your own adventure then" Once again he said no, and tried for the next 10 minutes to explain it to me without success. I laid awake that night trying to figure out how this game worked.
Later when I was spending the night at his house he offered to play the game with me. We ended up playing Battle Tech (still a fav of mine). Me and my brother ended up playing dissposesed mechwarriors who were trying to infiltrate a compound to assassinate an enemy noble.
I remember some of the misadventures we had. It turned out that the enemies had a light mech with them. Well, me and my brother had both recently watched Return of the Jedi, so we though we knew how to take out this scrap heap. We choped some trees and laid them out Endor style in a row along the ground and lit a fire to attract the mech. Sure enough, it came, and steped on the logs. We were sure we had the thing....until it fired up its jump jets, shortly followed by trying to fire us up. Our characters managed to survive the ensuing chase sceene, thanks to a merciful GM. I don't think we ever finished the adventure, but I still have fond memories of that session.
Well, well I think it was in 1981, when I first heard about a truly original game idea in a German board game magazine. They described the basics of a roleplaying game without getting into details. A guy with a funny name (Gary Gygax) was mentioned as one of the developers. I was intrigued. Having been a gaming geek, inventor and collector, I tried to get hold of it here in Germany, but I could not get it anywhere. So I just made up the rules myself, drew my first dungeon a maze inhabited by a mean Minotaur and send my brothers in to explore it. We had a blast.
A couple of month later, I had the opportunity to go to Oklahoma as an exchange student. I was thrilled. The number one on my agenda was to play that game and get all the books. At the local high school we had a games club and I started playing AD&D as a druid. It was fantastic. I had the opportunity to get to know a bunch of very interesting people, learn a new language and play one of the best games ever developed.
When I came home one year later, I was infected with a very contagious virus. In no time I had a big gaming group set-up and we started to play on an almost daily basis with me as the DM. My parents still talk about it as the "locust" years, because during our marathon sessions we would drink and eat up everything in the house.
During that time we played only two campaigns. The first one ended after a couple of weeks with the "magic-item-power-gamer-munchkin-death". That was the point when we realised, that we should have reasonable limits on available magic items and establish some semblance of an economy. So we made a fresh start and I DMed the entire against the giants, drow, Lolth campaign. We finished with a climactic battle against Lolth and Tiamat shattering the structure of the universe and imprison one of the characters a powerful wizard in an intelligent two-handed sword known as the "SAW".
Today I still play ones a week currently DMing the SCAP and playing a gnome mystic theurge in AoW.
Thanks for your stories and Greetings from good old Germany
Deryl
Well... my first memory of D&D... actually I didn't start roleplaying with D&D. I started with "The Black Eye" (in French "L'Oeil Noir"), a German roleplaying game that I picked up books by books at a used books library. Anyway, D&D was introduced to me by a friend in elementary school, somewhere around 1996-97. We started by playing Magic, then he made me read some Dragonlance books, then someday he brought me the Red Box (!!) and said something like "Since you're a newbie to D&D, we'll start with the First Edition!" So I read the books.... and here am I, in 2006, being a DM in 3.5 edition.
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When I was five or six (1985 or 86) my older sister sat down with my brothers and I and played 'Dungeons and Dragons'. The difference was, she had learned how the game worked from her friends but we didn't have any of the books. It didn't matter, we played make-believe with my sister DMing, no rolls or statistics to worry about, giving us a quest and our choice of a few special items. I remember my brother's favorite choice was a folding hang-glider backpack. He also liked to play a ninja. Ah, the freedom of imagination.
It was probably 88 when I actually got my own orange folder and classic dice set. Man, I ran that introduction to Axel in the jail cell so many times.
Summer of '78, wandering through a game store in Louisville, KY. I'd just moved to town and was bored silly. Found a game called Traveller and was dying to try it. Found an ad at the store for D&D players, so I bought that game later. Best DM I ever had there, a lawyer named Jamie Fish.
Created six iconic characters (3d6 for each stat) on a hand-drawn character sheet that I mimeographed. Bought miniatures for each one and painted them. Still have them nearly 20 years later.
First time I DM'ed, I ran a module for this elderly couple that owned a game store there and wanted to try out the game. I forget which module it was, but it had a room with about a dozen pools in it, each of which had a different effect. Their thief character got put to sleep by one so, to wake him up, they threw him into the pool of water. Of course, it was really acid. The look of horror on their faces was priceless.
Junior high 1979, my friends and I had figured out the runes on the cover of the hobbit and were writing notes in runes to each other, the algebra teacher saw one and invited us to play in her lunch-time D&D game. I played her magic user with 2 hit points and the spell magic missile, I thought it was a one shot deal and never used it and attacked goblins with my dagger.
The next day I made my own character Bruno the Battler III, he died then I made Bruno the Battler IV, then V, VI, but Bruno VII made it to second level! Then I found out you weren't allowed to make lawful good assassins (like all the Brunos had been) and made a chaotic neutral magic user who made it to 5th level and retired in the remodeled kobold caves of Keep on the Borderlands.
I stood in Spencer's Gifts. It was the summer of '79 or 80. The usually crap was there but I looked down and on the bottom shelf was this blue box with a dragon on the cover. It read "Dungeons & Dragons" I picked it up. Read the back. It sounded neat. I had money left over from my comic purchases so I bought it. I took it home and read it. It made sense and was entirely confusing at the same time. Unlike any game I'd ever encoutered...that takes me back to my first real role-play memory.
My Dad loved Edgar Rice Burroughs. He read Tarzan of the Apes to me when I was 6 or 7 and I ate it up. I could see Tarzan and his ape friends. I was there. I would go out side an play it out right after. I would change the story. Practicing to be DM even before I knew about being a DM.
Back to the Summer of D&D.
I convinced my best friend and his brother to try and learn this game with me. My one buddy was a bonafide weight lifter and the other was pure brain. I was the smartass (just for fleshing out our chemistry).
We rolled up characters. Races were classes then and I chose Elf. My to comrades in crime chose humans, one fighter, one magic user. My Elf's name was Gantos the Giver.
Even then 1st lvl characters were boring so I boosted the characters to level 3 and off we went to the Keep on the Borderlands. I never looked back. Been gaming now for over 26 years. I plan to game right up until I die. Its social, its better than a movie, and you laugh all the time if you're with the right people.
I love this thread. Keep it coming, this is how i start my day at work by reading the new posts. :)
I love this thread. Keep it coming, this is how i start my day at work by reading the new posts. :)
Me too - 'course I read all the new posts, but this one is very entertaining. Helps me get over the "why am I here" feeling at work.
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Summer 1981, I think. My Dad and I had just seen E.T., where the kids are playing some incarnation of D&D or AD&D at the beginning of the movie. He bought the novel in a 7-11 right after the movie ended. He read it to me over probably a week--there's a ton of direct D&D references in the book. The next thing I remember, we're at a toy store in a mall and buying the 1st ed PHB and DMG (Efreet and City of Brass covers) and I don't know if we had a MM then or not. Flashes of memory (I'm only 7 or eight at the time), and we're cutting maze walls out of bossa wood at the kitchen table, and using cheap plastic dinosaurs and army men as miniatures; flashforward, there's six or seven other guys (gaming groups were much bigger back in the day), lots of bowls of M&Ms and peanuts, cans of Coca-Cola with the old pull tabs (you youngsta's have no clue what I'm talking about)...years pass...dad passes on, and Mom is wary of 'Fantasy' in general, thanks to Pat Puling; it's probably 1984 and Elmore's Red Box before I started playing with any gusto (for you brand new d20 children, the 3rd ed revised rules were split into five boxed sets with astonishing and imaginative --for the time-- artwork by Larry Elmore; these rules were very easy to understand and set up under the Building Blocks premise).
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...i was in a dark small area......I recall warm fluid and a steady thump-thump in the background....kept makin' the damn d20 bounce.......then a bright light......slap!! man, do that again and I'll F you up!......8-9 years go by with no gaming.....Don't threaten the doctors....
FH in utero
Must...resist...will save...dc 35...family board, shut up Heathensson. Ie Ie ftagn! Blaaaarg! I am not a troll, I am a man with free will! The man can beat the troll within! Family board! Family board! Family board!
I think it was 1982... maybe 1981. A friend showed me a "scenario" he wrote, really just an intro. But that afternoon I was on my way to the only hobby store in town to buy the basic set in the red box. I still miss Erol Otis art.
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Methinks it was in 1983, but possibly a year or so later. Me and three other pals, having worked all summer and being flush with cash, decided to go to town and buy something cool. We were all 10 years old, BTW, with something like $30 each... Naturally, what we bought was the Battlesystem box. No DMG, no PH, no MM - just the mass combat system. Naturally, it made no sense whatsoever, and it certainly didn't help that we hardly knew any English (choice quote: "What the hell does 'dice' mean?"). But over the next couple of months, we picked up the core rulebooks, and then the Bloodstone Pass module. I still think what really got us all truly hooked was the scene when the high priest of Orcus get enveloped in that mile-high pillar of green flames and the undead start bursting out of the ground. Thus, my first AD&D character was a level 16 Wizard...
Of course, it was only then we tried real roleplaying, starting with the Temple of Elemental Evil. High point: badly missing my save at the electrum pillar and ending up freeing Zuggtmoy - and then killing her IN SINGLE COMBAT with my relatively dweeby Assassin. Low point: playing in "The Random Dungeon", a dungeon made with the Random Dungeon Table, populated in its entirety by critters from the Random Demon Table - all made up as we went. Ah, those were the days...
It must have been 1996. I was in sixth grade at the time. We weren't even really play Dungeons and Dragons, at first. It was an approximation of D&D that we could play in the classroom amongst ourselves. Each person picked a random character with arbitrary stats and another person drew the little map as we went. All choices were "do I take a left or right" and we would die based on the whims of whomever was drawing the map. Our teacher played D&D when he was younger and told us that that was basically what we were doing. So I went out and got the AD&D basic set, the one with the cd where Macho Man Randy Savage was doing the voice of Bonecrusher the Ogre. I would sit with the map and books open and just roll dice and try to figure out what was happening. Then I managed to get a friend into it and things got a lot more fun. After actually buying the full rulebooks and getting some other friends into it, I was hooked.
Also, just so I'm not left out with all you folks remembering the first edition boxes and books, working at Goodwill allowed me to get my hands on copies of the first Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual. There's a charm to the first and second edition books that I miss in the new ones. Somehow they seemed more eclectic and charming, just because the art direction was all over the place. Some days I do really miss those Second Edition days.
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I don't know the exact year but it must have been in the second half of the 80ies. By then the D&D trend had engulfed Germany, too, and on a class trip one of my co pupils was finally willing to introduce a friend of mine and me to the mysteries of D&D!
The adventure started by rolling out characters and equipping them (quite confusing to us who didn't have the least grasp on the rules). After about half an hour of preparation the adventure finally started: We entered a clearing, in the background a hill with a cave opening in its side, right in front of us an unconscious men lying on a lawn. We approached him, he grew hairs, transformed into a werewolf, attacked us and killed our characters. Pleading didn't help, the adventure was over, same as our D&D experience.
Start of the 90ies. I had found a shop that didn't offer anything but roleplaying stuff!! The shelves seemed overcrowded with AD&D, D&D, Gurps and other stuff I cannot remember. I knew what I was headed to. It had to be D&D, and this time I would prepare the adventures and ensure that they would take longer.
I bought the (by then) brand new german AD&D 2nd edition player's handbook and part I (german as well) of the Dragonlance classics "adventure path". A few months later a monster compendium and the DMG followed. I quickly made up my mind and decided that Dragonlance was a great setting but that I wouldn't want my players to save the world all the time. A different setting was needed, something feeling closser to medieval knight and dragon sagas I had devoured as a child.
I felt magically attracted to the books with a Greyhawk logo on top, the cover art seemed to combine all I wished the game to be like: Dragons, knights, castles, ruins. That was when the shop keeper of my flgst informed me that Greyhawk was a great setting but there wasn't any starter's campaign setting available he could offer. Just the supplements.
So I settled for the second most beautiful product, a grey boxed set for AD&D first edition, but I didn't mind the differences between the two editions. My next AD&D product and my favourite product for years to come was the "FR adventures" 2nd edition update for FR. I learned almost every page of it by mind and quarelled with the decision to drop knights as a character class.
I kept on buying products, but my groups were short lived ones. Five years ago I decided to do a restart, I founded a new group (average age abvoe 25, oldest player 35 and first time D&D player). We purchased 3rd edition and still play in the realms, even though (by players' consent) it is a slightly less magic filled version of the world.
Strange how one playing experience can span twenty years of life. ;-)
Günther