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What the subject says? Friends? Family? You saw a particular game, bought it, read the instructions, and started your first game? Joined a rpg club?
I was introduced by a neighbor, who played in his brother's campaign. Said neighbor was able to start a DnD club at the junior high where I met many of my fellow gamers.
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I was in the 6th grade, and had just moved from Florida back to California (mid school-year)...
The new kids I had made friends with played this "mysterious" game that used these equally mysterious small metal figurines, and when I finally played it with them, I was hooked...
We were playing Basic D&D, using the J. Eric Holmes set...
I was 10 at the time and we would play after school and on the weekends at each other's houses...
-That One Digitalelf Fellow-
Nothing special really ; back in 1986 a friend that was already playing the "red box" D&D ed from TSR asked me to try. Took about 1 year to get hooked by it ( wasn't very convinced at first ) but haven't stopped after that.
Unlike you guys, I got started only about 3 years ago, when I was 20. Some 40some friends of mine who had been playing for decades needed some more people in their game, and thought that I would enjoy it. I got so into 3rd Ed. that I got my room-mate and our friend to play, we started our own group. A friend of ours recommended upgrading to Pathfinder, best advice he ever gave by far, and now game just about every chance we get.
My friend Checked out the Players Handbook from the Library and Memorized, well at lest the important parts, then My Brother got the Red Box for his birthday, because my dad mix my brother and I up and thought that he would like that, and he did not. So I took used it instead.
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The first time was 1984 in high school. I went to one session but didn't really enjoy it. Then 25 years later, my son finally convinced our family to try again last summer with 3.5. My oldest son was the DM and my wife, two younger sons and I were PCs. My first character was Tordek Rumnaheim, dwarven fighter.
I was hooked. Then they went all went away to college and I was suffering serious DnD withdraw. That led to me searching on the internet and finally to Paizo. Now I have a monthly game I GM, I have family campaign we run when everyone is home, and 2 PBPs. My only regret, is that first session way back when had gone better and I had started sooner.
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==This is EXACTLY how it happened==
In a high school geology class someone turned to me and asked "Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?" I answered that I had heard the name before, but didn't know what it was. "Oh, it's this really cool game. Wanna' Play?" "Sure" I said. He then proceeded to pull out all three core 3.0 books from his bag, hand them to me and say "Cool. We're going to play in two weeks. You're going to be the Dungeon Master."
Yup. I DM'ed a game before I ever got to play. I talked a little bit more about this in a podcast a while ago.
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==This is EXACTLY how it happened==
In a high school geology class someone turned to me and asked "Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?" I answered that I had heard the name before, but didn't know what it was. "Oh, it's this really cool game. Wanna' Play?" "Sure" I said. He then proceeded to pull out all three core 3.0 books from his bag, hand them to me and say "Cool. We're going to play in two weeks. You're going to be the Dungeon Master."Yup. I DM'ed a game before I ever got to play. I talked a little bit more about this in a podcast a while ago.
OH! I would have smacked him with his books. ;-)
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OH! I would have smacked him with his books. ;-)==This is EXACTLY how it happened==
In a high school geology class someone turned to me and asked "Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons?" I answered that I had heard the name before, but didn't know what it was. "Oh, it's this really cool game. Wanna' Play?" "Sure" I said. He then proceeded to pull out all three core 3.0 books from his bag, hand them to me and say "Cool. We're going to play in two weeks. You're going to be the Dungeon Master."Yup. I DM'ed a game before I ever got to play. I talked a little bit more about this in a podcast a while ago.
This was the first in a long tradition of utter BS from this person.
Here's more info about this particular person|
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In 1977 I started my first degree (Botany at University College Cardiff, if you must know). A long-time hobby was the study of medals, and that had led to a passing understanding of the uniforms they got pinned on, so when I went to the 'Society Fair' held for freshmen to find out what to do with their leisure time, I wandered past one stall, the Wargames Society, which had some miniatures on the table. They spooked at my identifying them down to regiment (French Napoleonic 21eme Regiment de Ligne) with a glance and asked me to join. Seemed like a good idea to try something new and they looked friendly so I signed up.
A week or two later I got notification of the first meeting and trundled round...
... to be greeting with a crash of jawbones hitting the floor and cries of "It's a WOMAN!"
Eventually one lanky youth recovered his poise and asked, "Would you like to play D&D?"
"What's that?" I asked, and the rest is history.
+1. Especially with the jawbones dropping.
1980, I was going away to junior high school and was home for a visit. My mom asked what I wanted for my birthday and at Sears I was looking at wargames, rpgs, etc.
I neglected to read the name of the game I had wanted, remembering only that it had a dragon on the box. (It was Wizard's Quest, several years later my brother got a copy.)
Well, I went back to school, and my mother went to Sears and bought me the Basic D&D (J. Eric Holmes version) boxed set. That was the start of a life-long RPG hobby. Thanks Mom! :D
I'm also one of those who DM'd before they played, though in my case it was somewhat by choice. In that, we needed a DM, I owned the rules, and thus volunteered for the job.
My dad went to some kind of teachers' conference in Toronto, and he brought back the Basic D&D boxed set as a present for my brother and me. Maybe my brother asked for it? This was in 1980 or 1981, I believe -- he also brought back a Rubik's Cube with the name of a textbook publisher on the white face.
From my Uncle's Satannic cult.
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Like most things that I've enjoyed over the years, I found it myself. I was thirteen years old in the summer of 2000, angry, trying too hard, and on the verge of becoming a spooky person.
On my semi-regular trip to the bookstore (in which I would peruse the Anne Rice novels on sale, then move on to the most recent Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comics), I noticed a big flashy cardboard display next to a pile of shiny books. To this day, I'm not sure why, but I shelled out for it as only a pathetic rich kid can, and took it home.
Within the week, I'd read it from cover to cover several times, and even made a character--directly on the cardstock sheet intended for photocopying in the back of the PHB. I didn't have any friends, so I just kind of read the book over and over again. A few months later, my family moved to upstate New York, and I took to taking my Player's Handbook to school, possibly in an effort to look more like some sort of dark magician and less like a troll-shaped emo kid.
Strangely enough, there was one kid at school, in my grade, no less, that played D&D. As I later found out, his entire family, comprising his mother and younger sister, also played. My new (pretty much my first ever) friend quickly taught me the finer points of Third Edition (right on time for 3.5 to come out), and we found a few other people to game with us. I credit these people with very quickly turning me from a nasty Goth-wannabe to some sort of punk rock nerd. Five or six years later, I started subscribing to Dragon Magazine, found the messageboards, and the rest is history.
My friend Alex is still my best friend, his younger sister and I have been dating for the last year and a half, and I'm still in touch with almost everybody we used to game with, even if they're no longer in the area. Most of them are still gaming.
A friend of mine noticed I like playing Final Fantasy 7 and was like "would you like to play a better version of that?". The rest is history.
When I was four, in 1988, my parents and their friends played AD&D. Apparently, I would beg for hours to be allowed to play, until finally my father helped me roll up a cavalier out of Unearthed Arcana. I chose to name him after my newborn baby brother, Bryan.
My father reintroduced us all to the game at a later point in time, I was ten I think, as a means of teaching us how to work together towards a common goal. From then on, I was hooked. Been playing and GMing every opportunity I've had for the last sixteen years.
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I was 4 years old.
My fourteen year old brother was the DM for his 14yro friends; I have no idea how he (they) got into it.
But he let me look at the pictures (Monster Manual, Deities & Demigods) and watch them play.
I was allowed to roll the dice for the monsters!
I remember when we got the Fiend Folio and falling in love with the Githyanki.
I was 6 before I actually got to play. It was Christmas and we were doing family stuff "only" so my brother DMed for me and my other brother.
I made a Fighter named Fred (after Fred Flintstone of course; who else would be better for a D&D character to be based on, I ask ya?!).
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In the mid-70s, I'd read a bit about D&D in SPI's wargaming magazine, Strategy & Tactics. Then in 1977, Friday night at my first SF con, a girl I had just met told me there was a D&D game starting up in a few minutes, and if I was interested in playing could I hurry up and get blown into subatomic dust (I was playing the Star Trek computer game at the time)? I sat down, someone handed me a character, and I played until sometime after midnight. The next night I went looking for a game [1], and the rest is history.
[1] Still looking, if anyone knows of a game in the Plainfield/west Joliet Illinois area....
From my Uncle's Satannic cult.
Seriously, my friends and I got into it in grade school because we heard D&D would make us kill our parents and commit suicide. We had just learned to our disappointment that listening to Black Sabbath had no effect in that regard, so we figured we'd give D&D a try.
I received a copy of Moldvay Basic as a gift in '82 or '83. I don't think what I did with it could be properly called playing D&D until '85 or so, but I tried. :P
Reading my own post, I just realized that I've been gaming for just over ten years. Time flies.
N00b! ;)
Year 9 in High School, back in '82. A new student had arrived from somewhere in England and brought the AD&D books with him - including a soft-bound MM - and got a group of us together to try it at lunch times. It became a regular weekly thing until the end of High School pretty quickly. Once I hit Uni and discovered the Fantasy Gaming Society on campus, I think I managed to get to the point where me and my friends would pause from gaming just long enough to sleep and attend lab classes - lectures were optional!
Reggie
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Sometime in the mid to late 80's bought two modules (The Gauntlet and All That Glitters), later purchased the Monster Manual II. After trying unsuccessfully to puzzle out this mysterious game on my own without any real rules books, finally bought the AD&D Player's Handbook in 1988. A friend and I must have generated like 100 characters without ever really playing the game. Then he bought the red box and later the blue box and we regressed into D&D before returning to AD&D and then 2nd edition. Gained a few more players off and on over the next couple of years during high school. Lots of memories of staying up way too late and cranky parents getting tired of the goblins laughing all night long in our bedrooms.
When I was 14 my cousin and I would draw mazes on graph paper and makes rooms that we would fill with monsters and traps that we had made up (and drew in) then as we would go through each other's mazes with 3 lives we rolled a d6 4+ meant we passed the room.
When school started some kids in the library were playing D&D and I looked on. Later I went out and bought the Orange bound MM (the one with the Red dragon/pegasus cover) to fill my mazes with monsters. The book made no sense to me, Hit Dice? 3+3, so 6 then? Attacks 1-4/1-4/1-3/1-3/1-6, how is that figured out? I then decided I had to buy the PHB and after that point almost any book or dice I could afford.
I taught myself mainly, a lot of trial and error with my friends, reading and re-reading the rules "Oh, you cant use one wish to have all 25's in ability scores". This has contributed to me being a rules-lawyer, as the only way I knew how things were done was because of what the book said.
On a side note, I treat it as a source of pride that D&D and I shared our 30th birthdays the same month of the same year.
MtG, Baldur's Gate, and Shadow Over Mystara :B
I was in the Air Force and a friend invited me to play Champions. I was a superhero comic nut so I loved it. I made 7 characters before I actually sat down and played it...not sure the year, but Reagan was president...
Later the same group swithced to D&D (AD&D 2nd ed)and they tried to make me a cleric whose only job was to heal everyone and get his butt kicked (I dont exaggerate by much). I declined and didn't play again for 5 year, but when I left the military, I did end up working with a guy who played Gurps. I never played it with him, but we would spend all of night shift making characters for his game.
Then I went into LE and ran into a bunch of cops who played 3rd ed and finally got into gaming for real.
When I was younger can't remember the year early 80's though. We had some friends from England who brought over the pond AD&D. The older brother was my sisters age and the younger brother mine. We played a couple of games run by the older brother. Typical Mounty Haul types. It was later my cousins got the basic box "the red one" where we began playing with more earnest. I was hooked from then on going to any hobby shop, game store or toy store to find the game. I also went to boarding school so I had many oppertunties to play and use my imagination there. I have since go through the different versions and currently I have stayed with 3.5 more because I have invested so much in the books and time creating my own world with it that I did not want to move to the next edition rather than anything against 4th edition.
Then I went into LE and ran into a bunch of cops who played 3rd ed and finally got into gaming for real.Am I the only one who read that as "I went into Lawful Evil..."?
:p
LE=Law Enforcement...although now that I think about it, most of the Cops wanted to play Lawful Evil character...you might be onto something...
It was shortly after 3.5 edition had come out and I was a fresh face twenty year old whose only experience with Dungeons and Dragons was the Baldur's Gate games. A friend and my-self were out cruising the mall in a nearby town one night, nearly crushed alive with boredom, when we floated into the Barnes and Noble to aimlessly wonder the aisles (and scope out the hottie of a clerk), when I spotted a fresh copy of the Player's Handbook resting between some video game strategy guides. Talk about a treasure among the trash.
Pulling it from it's ill placed nest, my friend spotted me taking a gander at it and said, "You play?"
"No, but I've been playing Baldur's Gate II recently and it's kind of the same thing I guess." Was roughly my reply, if memory serves.
He pulled the Dungeon Master's Guide off the shelf above and handed it to me. "Why don't you buy this and we can see about a game." So I bought them and we rolled out of the mall, drove an hour away while I was reading the Player's Handbook as fast as I could, before we drove into a trailer park and made our way to a trailer way in the back, pressed against the woods.
My friend went inside without even knocking and I followed. Inside the wall were covered with replica swords and period guns, the carpet was shag, and the air was thick with smoke, frenzied talk, and the rattle of dice on a glass table. Nobody even looked up as we came in. My friend walked up to the table, grabbing one of the fold up chairs from the wall and sat down as he pulled a sheet and some dice from his backpack.
Surround the huge glass table was a shirtless man in his early thirties and five younger women "I brought a new guy, cool?" He said to the goateed bare chested man at the head of the table.
"Cool, cool." The DM replied while tugging his goatee.
The oldest of the women who was sitting next to him looked at me and asked, "What do you want to play?" as she turned to the oldest, banged up but still working computer I think I've ever seen in person.
"Ah, sorcerer or fighter. Maybe." I responded.
In the time it took me to grab a seat she handed me a hand filled out character sheet. "Here, your a Lawful Neutral Human with 26 levels of Fighter and 26 levels of Sorcerer." She dug into a crown royal bag and handed me a fist full of dice and gave me a quick run down on the game while everyone else keep going.
After the game the DM invited me back for the game next week and told me he was impressed with how quickly I took to it. When next week rolled around I called up my friend to see if he wanted me to pick up for the game and he tells me. "Oh, I don't play with them. I just heard they had a game going."
It was the best group I was ever in but the start of the whole thing was insanely surreal to me and still gives me a chuckle when I think about it.
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I got into tabeltop with 2e AD&D about 10ish years ago. Me and some friends got together with one of their dads, who GM'd for us. Our group broke apart after about two sessions so I decided to buy my own core rulebook and GM for my little brothers. Since, I've only been a player in two or three campaigns but I've been GMing since.
My Evil older brother introduced me to D&D when I was in 9th grade, I was 14 at the time.