Just curious. ^^
For me, it was Lord of the Rings (Red Book, spanish version by Joc, don't know who made the original) when I was 15. Many people I know begin with that game and have fond memories of it. During too much time, we made new PCs for each session.
My first contact with D&D was like a year later with Dragonlance in 2 Ed. We made maaaaany things really badly during the first months. Later I discovered Forgotten Realms, and loved Planescape. I was looking during years for the box of Planes of Conflict, in fact.
On the other hand, for the future, I really want to arrive February to see Exalted 3 Ed. Really like the setting, but the really complex rules made 2 Ed (and 2.5) incredibly difficult to DM. In fact, I know of Exalted players that consider Mythic to be "Pathfinder + Exalted".
Original D&D. 1977. Brown box, 3 tiny booklets.
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And I feel veteran beginning on the firsts 90's . Seems on this forums are a good quantity of first generation players. That's a good thing.
D&D Red Box Basic - the one with the Elmore dragon cover. Still have the books on my shelf these decades later.
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My friend had to beg me for an hour to play AD&D. I looked at him like he was crazy at first, and laughed at him as I sat and played video games. Then I said ok, I'll give a try, and after about 30 minutes I was hooked on RPG's like a fat kid gets hooked on cake. I couldn't stop playing that night. We played until our brains were zooming. The adventure was going so strong, and we couldn't sleep that night because the adventure seemed so real.
Way back when I was young I bought a lot of stuff for "The Dark Eye" (which still is the leading German RPG, much to the dismay to those who like simpler systems). Never really played it, though.
D&D Red Box Basic - the one with the Elmore dragon cover. Still have the books on my shelf these decades later.
Yup, same for me. I wish I still had the originals - alas, they were lost in a move somewhere back in the 90s.
Holmes D&D for me.
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My dad had a copy of the Holmes D&D Basic Set... I guess it must have been the fourth or fifth printing (c. 1978), because it included module B1: In Search of the Unknown. He broke it out and ran it for my brothers and I... we were pretty young at the time, and I know we never finished it, but we had a blast anyway. So many memories...
Old World of Darkness, a One World by Night LARP. Most of the players were part of the same theatre troupe.
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The Year- 1975. The Place Fullerton College in So Cal. A 15 year old boy joined his friend at the weekly wargame club meeting there and wandered the halls watching the wonders of gaming unfold before his eyes. There were grown men moving miniatures around on a mock battlefiled of France complete with buildings and rivers and trees and hills in a Napoleonics game. There were boad games like Tactics II and Wooden Ships and Iron Men being played. And in a science Lab that had been acquired for the evening were a gathering of maybe 12 men and women of varying ages with 1 maybe 20's age guy standing up at a green chalkboard drawing maps and describing what they group was seeing and doing.
One of the people playing saw the 15 year old in the doorway watching with interest and said "hey you want to play?"
Thus was born Dorian The Hammer a Dwarf who went into a dungeon for his first time and rescued an Elf from a Beholder with some good d20 rolls on saving throws.
For Christmas said 15 year old told his parents the only thing he wanted was this game.
Of course he got it..and soon on Thursday game nights he was DM'ing his parents and his brother and a couple cousins and friends of the family in what became a weekly D&D game for years to come...
D&D white box
:D
The original Gamma World back in 1982.
Army. US against the VC. My older cousins always made me the Viet Cong.
As far as pen and paper rpgs go, it was AD&D 1st edition.
My friend had to beg me for an hour to play AD&D. I looked at him like he was crazy at first, and laughed at him as I sat and played video games. Then I said ok, I'll give a try, and after about 30 minutes I was hooked on RPG's like a fat kid gets hooked on cake. I couldn't stop playing that night. We played until our brains were zooming. The adventure was going so strong, and we couldn't sleep that night because the adventure seemed so real.
This was pretty much my experience.
Except it wasn't AD&D, it was Warhammer Fantasy RP 2nd edition. As such, my definition of 'lethal encounter' is a constant source of amazement to my group.
Nor shall I ever forget my test character, Johann Schmidt, journeyman Grey Wizard, who met an untimely and gruesome end trying to cast a Mindhole spell that ended up with reality tearing itself asunder as a great clawed hand pulled me into the Realm of Chaos.
Spellblights ain't got nothing on Tzeentch's Curse.
When I was a kid, there was a local community college in my old hometown that ran a program for elementary and middle school aged kids called "Kids' College." In 1979, at the age of 9, I took a class on Pascal programming on Saturday mornings, taught by a junior faculty member. (Aside: the prof was female, which was kind of odd at the time-- a lady computer expert? Weird!) We used VT100 dumb terminals to program on a timesharing DEC PDP-11 mainframe. Printouts were on a 24-inch roller-fed dot matrix printer that wrote to green-and-white roller-fed paper.
Anyway, one of the other kids, who was a year older than me, tried to write one of those text-adventure computer games (like Zork) and brought these weird softcover books to use as source material: one was red, one was blue. I remember being kind of fascinated with them. Anyway, the game was "Dungeons and Dragons," but I'm not sure if it was the rulebooks fron the old Basic & Expert sets, or the earlier Blue Book Basic rules.
I got his phone number, and we tried to get together to play D&D, but he lived way over on the other side if town, and our parents' schedules never meshed, and we gave up trying after a few weeks. But I saved up my money from mowing neighbors' lawns that sumner to buy my own Basic and Expert Sets, and taught myself the rules. I then convinced my friends to start playing. This would have been 1980 or '81-- I don't remember exactly. I was the GM. I ran "The Keep on the Borderlands" and "In Search of the Unknown" and my own homebrew adventures. My parents never approved of the game (especially when the anti-D&D hysteria came to the fore in the mid-'80s), and they never bought me any game materials (even for gift occasions), but they never tried to stop me from playing or confiscated my books.
And I've been gaming ever since!
(Alas, I no longer have my oldest books. When I moved out of my parents' house in 1991, I'd left a few boxes behind-- including most of my vinly LPs and my earliest gaming materials. They got stuck in the back room of the basement, and were destroyed when the sewer backed up into the house in the mid-90s.)
1994 i cut my teeth on ravenloft, ad&d 2nd edtion. very complex setting.
the only male of 5 females, all aspiring writers, actors, and enthusiasts. i spoke broken english, and knew how to draw naughty pictures. they were very patient.
they weaved complicated stories where they had few battles but plenty of: skills and save rolls. plot twists. character development. dramatic trajedies, and over the top endings.
lots of online rp through chat rooms and dice rollers.
1999 i then became a dm 3.0-3.5. culture shocked hit me when the first time i dmed for males. it wasn't pretty. i learned alot in that decade.
We started with Metagaming's Melee and Wizard. Then we moved to the Dungeons & Dragons basic boxed set. Then we just went crazy after that.
35+ years of PRGs. Would not give it up for anything. :-)
Very early 80's Red Box/1st Ed AD&D Homebrew was my first game. Homebrew space game, Tunnels & Trolls, and MERP followed soon after.
The first module I played was The Keep on the Boarderlands.
Video-Game wise: Final Fantasy IV (2005)
Tabletop wise: Pathfinder PRG (2011)
Video-Game wise: Final Fantasy IV (2005)
Tabletop wise: Pathfinder PRG (2011)
Fresh meat!
:D
The Red Box Basic D&D I believe...though I am remembering my brother with a blue covered book. It was late 70's to early 80's.
GURPS.
I was getting a group together at school to play, and let's just say the local demographic didn't take to kindly to D&D or RPGs in general. I'm surprised I got away with GURPS.
Original D&D, then I played Rolemaster.
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Tom Moldvay's 1981 Erol Otus cover Basic D&D (which I have sitting in front of me as I type!).
AD&D 1E 1980. I am please to say I never played "Basic" D&D. Not until 4E that is<G>.
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The blue box 1979...1981, but the one I seem to remember starting with was the red box (gold dragon on cover). Games were run by a friend I still have, whom I still call, "the guru".
True story: The GMs dad came home from work and yelled down the stairs, "what are you kids doing down there?" Someone replied, "sacrificing virgins". LOL
I remember coloring in my dice with white crayon, and completing the solo adventure in the booklet.
Next thing I knew I was buying the DMG for 14.95 at the local hobby store--and a gamemaster was born.
-Pax
Dungeons and Dragons, the three little booklets from 1975. I ordered them from an ad in my older brother's Strategy & Tactics magazine.
This was what I found in Walden's Books in 1980. It was all downhill from there.
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'76: Heard about this game where you play heroes and "kill dragons and stuff" from friends of friends who heard of a guy who...
We didn't have money or the wherewithal to find a game shop so we just made up rules and went 'diceless'.
'77: More savvy, we all begged our parents for money and a ride to the game shop where we got the first three booklets and (very quickly) the original AD&D books.
It's been downhill ever since. :D
EDIT: Grogninja'd by Shadowborn!
In 1996 I was 11 years old. My first RPG was Lord of the Rings Adventure Game by I.C.E. Next I started playing Middle Earth Role Playing(MERP) and Rolemaster. In 1998 I played AD&D for the first time and I have been playing it until 3.0 edition od D&D.
I started right around 2000 with D&D 2nd Ed and Rifts. Hopped on board fully for 3rd ed and White Wolf OWoD and been playing ever since.
Pathfinder's my first Tabletop RPG, started earlier this year. I'd wanted to get into it for a while but had no one to play with. Week after I started playing online with some good friends from another forum a game shop opened near my house.
=/
But hey, I have a new obsession!
However, my first RPG experience period is probably the Final Fantasy (but not really) games for the Gameboy Color, most prominently Final Fantasy Legend 2 (Actually SaGa 2, nobody thought it would sell in America under its original name) which I started playing in 1997 at the ripe old age of 5. Since then I've played many a video game RPG, as they're my favorite genre of games alongside the Action RPG. Dragon Age: Origins is one of my favorite games of all time. OF ALL TIME. And it plays a lot like Pathfinder does, right down to Mages destroying every other class late game (be thankful Pathfinder doesn't have a PrC that allows Wizards to use their Spellcraft skill or Intelligence score to determine everything to do with Str based activities while not hindering their spellcasting. So far as I know anyway)
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My folks actually recently told me they found some old D&D stuff, so I might actually find the old BECMI box sets that I had back in the day. Honestly, I can't really remember the exact year I got the red box...maybe I can puzzle it together when I actually get the chance to look at it (assuming it's among that old stuff).
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It was the early '80s, when I first heard of 'that devil game' in church. It was one of those churches where folk spoke in tongues and were 'slain in the spirit' (fainted) a lot, and I was getting out of that particular church and noticing that almost everything I learned there seemed to be kind of backwards.
So 'that devil game' piqued my curiosity, and, after finding out that you couldn't get it in Tulsa or Joplin, the two closest cities of any significance, I had a relative in Philadelphia get me the 1st edition Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide and Players Handbook to me for Christmas (which, given the price tag on those books, was easily the most expensive Christmas gift *ever*).
Awesome stuff. I no longer remember how to speak in tongues, but I gained a whole new language of gibberish to speak fluently, with words like 'bulette' and 'evoker!'
1980 D&D the red box I believe when elf was a class.I was living in germany at the time, being a army brat.Some friends invited me to local rec center where a older guy was running a game called Dungeons & Dragons.There was around 10 or so of us gathered around a long table.Even back then this guy had scenery and minitures that were painted.He broke us up into groups of 3 and 4.He gave me a 3rd lvl elf and I think I was dead within 10 to 15 minutes of the game.He had put a roc against us.He did not give me another character so I sat and watched for the next 4 hrs.I was not the only one who died and I did not care how he left most of us just siting there but I liked enough of the game that I am still a fan and gamer to this day.
3.0 by way of Neverwinter Nights.