Goblin Squad Member
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Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first publication of Dungeons and Dragons, to which we owe so much. Rather appropriate that this falls in the same year as Pathfinder Online's alpha and (fingers crossed!) Early Enrollment.
So, happy 40th to D&D - and many happy returns to both Pathfinder and Pathfinder Online!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I can attribute my love for reading to my adolescent and teen years playing D&D. I played from 1977 - 1987.
You've got me beat by a year on the start date. I started playing in the summer of 1978, at math-and-science summer camp. My very first character was a female dwarf cleric.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I can attribute my love for reading to my adolescent and teen years playing D&D. I played from 1977 - 1987.You've got me beat by a year on the start date. I started playing in the summer of 1978, at math-and-science summer camp. My very first character was a female dwarf cleric.
My first character was a Halfling Thief, who I played for nearly my entire 10 years and his class evolved along with the games later editions with modifications coming from Dragon Magazine. He was eventually retired as a Quasi-Deity.
I've also played two female characters: NE Thief and a CG Barbarian
I've played a Lizardman Shaman-Warrior in one campaign which was a very interesting character to play.
The thing I liked most about D&D was the endless possibilities and the rules that were aka carte enough that you never had to worry about balance issues. The DM could always make rule changes on the fly to compensate.
I started playing the summer of 1979 with my brother and godmother's two sons. Her oldest was DM, seeing as he'd played before. It opened a whole new world to me. Changed my life forever, as I've spent more time in my life on this than any other hobby.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ahhh. Reminds me of the awesome feelings of wonder and sparks of creativity inspired when I picked up the first books. Devoured them and dragged everyone that I could into that world.
One of the best things though are all of the great people that I have met because of that "root" beginning in gaming seriously.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I started playing in '82. The husband of my neighbor who use to babysit me introduced me to D&D. Which I am glad, it improved my reading comprehension greatly and sparked my interest in reading novels and such.
Was also helpful in forming a basic skill in math. Calculating THAC0 and such. Very helpful for a 6 yr old boy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was introduced to D&D in 3rd grade/'83, and we had little idea of what we were doing. We mixed red-box basic stuff with AD&D, and were clueless enough about probability that we thought rolling a "20-sider" and rerolling anything outside of 3-18 was basically the same as rolling 3 "six-siders".
My memory could be hazy, but I think about a dozen years before PFO was an idea, Ryan Dancey was one of the main proponents of the OGL and d20 licenses, without which Pathfinder as we know it today probably wouldn't exist.
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Goblin Squad Member
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1977 for me, the spring of my junior year of high school; White Box transitioning to AD&D as the hardbacks came out. We began "5th period D&D" on campus, which still brings smiles among all of us so many years later.
We mixed that with many Friday nights around the pool table with maps and dice, sacking out in sleeping bags when we couldn't keep our eyes open any more. Our mothers still laugh about having to tiptoe around us early on Saturdays, looking for whichever kid needed to get up early for a dentist's appointment or such.
Started playing in 78 with my brother and two of my friends. My first character (who I named my avatar after) was a dwarves cleric/fighter. Lived for two sessions.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In '73 we were playing the Fantasy supplement of Chainmail. When D&D came out it was full speed ahead, but the geeks among us started experimenting with variable weapon damage and weapon vs armor damage (I think they called it Wizard when they later 'published' it though I was gone by then). Those guys went on to the extreme of "Swords Path to Glory". I went off to grad school in England on my wife's scholarship (I was the tag slog spouse). The game caught on at Cambridge and then that group drifted to Empire of Petal Throne variant because of environment detail.
Returning to California in the late 70's, AD&D, and 'Scratch" running games at the Last Grenadier!
Later with Paul and the 100 level dungeon at Seth's, Paul's, Chris's and Lee's apartments.
After that on again off agin with Eric.
What is amazing about Scratch, Paul, and Eric is that these were home written environments with depth and detail and supported upto 8 to 12 players well managed in any session.
I think Scratch actually was paid to teach D&D in a college down Long Beach way.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It must have been about '75. I had read everything in science fiction and fantasy at our public library in Rancho Cordova, CA and new books were slow in coming. I spotted D&D sourcebooks at a local hobby store. I developed a campaign but was unable to find anyone to play. However Dragon magazine led me to play-by-mail, which I hold to be the direct ancestor of the MMO genre.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In '73 we were playing the Fantasy supplement of Chainmail.
Nice!
I started with the basic set in 80 with my halfling - Keep on the Borderlands is still one of my favourite adventures. Graduated to AD&D in 82 when I started high school and still manage to catch up with four of our original group (of about 8) every month or two. We've moved on to Pathfinder as of about two years ago, and so far I have three of that group interested in PFO :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I envy those of you who still see and game with your original groups. I'm a military brat, and we moved around a lot; the group I gamed with in junior high isn't the same as my senior high group, or my college group, or the group I found when I moved after college. I'm still in touch with some of them - one was my best man at my wedding, ten years after we'd moved to opposite sides of the country - but the days of gaming with them are long past.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I envy those of you who still see and game with your original groups. I'm a military brat, and we moved around a lot; the group I gamed with in junior high isn't the same as my senior high group, or my college group, or the group I found when I moved after college. I'm still in touch with some of them - one was my best man at my wedding, ten years after we'd moved to opposite sides of the country - but the days of gaming with them are long past.
Was the same with me. I was a military brat also. 1st two groups were in Japan while I was in elementary school. (One was an adult group with my neighbor and the other was a group I formed with my classmates). Then another group when I went to Alabama with members leaving and coming in. Then two different groups when I moved to England while in high school. We named the groups based on where we played. Mildenhall and Lakenheath groups. Then had another group (and a club) when I went to college.
I then joined several online groups since then. (chatroom and pbp games) Currently don't have a group though. All the local players where I am at now are only Vampire LARP players. Not interested in those groups.
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Goblin Squad Member
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nostalgia time...
I started with AD&D in 1988 as 12-yr old after my older brother was hit by a car and ended up in hospital->bed->sofa for the next 4 months. RPG's were a totally new thing in Norway then, but our older cousins in Oslo had found this new comic/book/rpg shop and figured their nerdy cousins might like that sort of stuff. Since my bro was on heavy painkillers in the first weeks, I started DMing from scratch.
We had the PHB, DMG and 4" thick dictionary so we could discover the meaning of strange new words like 'leap', 'fumble' and 'glaive-guisarme'(*) that we didn't learn in school. Half a year later, I started reading English books and discovered that SF & Fantasy were actually proper genres with more than just handful of authors.
(*) glaive-guisarme wasn't in the english disctionary. But it actually was in my dads illustrated french one (petit Larousse).
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Goblin Squad Member
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I started with Basic D&D in July of 1981. As geeky Arthurian buff with little experience in cutting my imagination loose, my first character was a wizard named Merlin.
A few years later I was playing a schizophrenic thief/paladin/artist in which the artist (unaware of the other two) hated blood and regularly sold-off the armour and weapons to buy painting supplies. Meanwhile, the the uptight paladin, (who was aware of the other two and saw everything they did) was more-than-a-little put-off by the artist's many assignations with other men in the local city, but was at least smart enough to hide his own plate and weapons off-site or store it as securely as possible before going to bed each night.
I never played a necromancer before the Paizo boards....
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yeah, I started in 1975 or 1976. Members of the fencing club I was in got me into it. This was back when Elf and Dwarf were actually classes instead of races. :-)
We did an actual dungeon crawl - foam walls, everything dark until we discovered it, random monster encounters, a "safe" tavern in the middle of the second level where you could rest and recuperate and by some low level healing potions - if you could live long enough to get to it. :-)
You were prepared to die 2-3 times A NIGHT! If you made it to 4th level, you were almost a GAWD! lol!
Started running out of name ideas as I died so often. So I had a series of "O" named characters - Ohhell. Ohdamn! Ohsh*t. Ohno! O'Leary. O'Bryan. OSam - who put on a magic ring and found out it was a cursed ring of gender change and he became OSamantha! And she lasted through four more nights of adventuring before being killed by 4 hellhounds.
Good times!
Thank you D&D 3rd edition (and 3.5). Without you I wouldn't be in this particular forum, and my life would be very different from what it currently is!
This.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I received the D&D Red Box and the AD&D Player's Handbook for Christmas one year. It took me a few years to figure out why Elf and Dwarf were classes in one and races in the other! Despite the edition confusion, I was hooked.
I was already aware of the science fiction and fantasy genres, through my father's extensive paperback collection, but I'll always be grateful to the scofflaw first printing of Deities and Demigods for introducing me to H.P. Lovecraft.
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Goblin Squad Member
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1979, 4th grade at Wing Luke Elementary in Seattle was the start of it for me. We all had to share my buddy Mike's box-set dice when we played at lunch, because nobody else had anything besides plain-old d6s. Now I have buckets of the damned things, because I can't set foot inside a geek shop without buying the prettiest dice in the case. I am no better than a bird or a fish in this regard--oooh, shiny thing!
The core of Alderwag is a fine group of fellows who've been playing D&D, Cthulhu, Shadowrun, Warhammer and Pathfinder together since the late '80s. How many other hobbies can claim to bind people so tenaciously? Not many.
The summer before last on my way back from the east coast, I rode through Lake Geneva, WI, solely for the purpose of "blessing" a few dice on the Gary Gygax memorial plaque there and paying my respects to the man. We tabletoppers owe him a great deal, and visiting the old master felt like the right thing to do.
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Goblin Squad Member
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ah ... THACO ... we miss you so
The summer before last on my way back from the east coast, I rode through Lake Geneva, WI, solely for the purpose of "blessing" a few dice on the Gary Gygax memorial plaque there and paying my respects to the man. We tabletoppers owe him a great deal, and visiting the old master felt like the right thing to do.
I met Gygax once (he was in character as Elminster) at a Gencon dinner some 5 or 10 years ago now.