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After reviving my friend's old thread, I decided to start my own. What better thread than to see what moment made different people become hooked to Pathfinder, D&D and other games with dice and homework xD.
Mine was a fairly simple, but brings a smile to my face just thinking about it. We had just survived a fight against a Drow Summoner. Are butts were kicked pretty bad, but we had managed to take her down, steal her magical gauntlet and were to return to base (was part of a helping to defend a city under seige).
Suddenly, her brother shows up, this dual wielding, full armored badass sent to recover her. He offers us a deal, we let him take her, he leaves us alone. We are dying, so most of us are pretty good with that idea. Our wizard jokes OOC: I cast magic missile at her body. He had done this many times to get a reaction from the DM and all of us, by this point our DM had had enough and said it was happening since he was being a jackass. DM allows me to attack and attempt to stop the spell, my Pali swings...Nat 20. Off go the wizards arms(find out later DM would have only allowed the spell to be negated if I rolled the 20), everyone goes home. Wizard wasn't happy but everyone was losing their minds. Ahhhh memories. Who's next?
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4th edition DnD. That would be when my half-elf warlock, who had made an infernal pact with Nicholas Cage, slew the boss of our adventure with the unholy fires of bad movies.
It was a fun day for me.
4th edition DnD. That would be when my half-elf warlock, who had made an infernal pact with Nicholas Cage, slew the boss of our adventure with the unholy fires of bad movies.
It was a fun day for me.
Ok....that sounds beyond awesome xD DM give his best Nick Cage impression?
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For me was playing in a campaign of nWoD, specifically Mage the Awakening. I played a TWF, Revolver using, Force using Mage who liked to screw with the electricity in buildings.
It didn't go very far but it became readily apparent to me that I loved everything about RPG's. Eventually I found Pathfinder and have stuck with it as my preferred system (not to say it's the only system I play, by any means).
No, but I had my characters constantly praising Nick Cage as well as quoting his movies as holy scriptures. To the point that I was introduced as the party cleric to the NPCs by my fellow players.
So we get to the end of the mega module in 1e called Vault of the Drow. In the climactic final battle we go toe-to-toe with the demon queen, loth. We're getting our butts kicked pretty badly so I turn to my big brother and say "remember you told me never to break this Staff of the Madge-Eye thing I have? Why not?"
What follows is a thermo-nuclear blast that finished the fight and somehow flung us miraculously back to our home city, a few HP each left on our character sheets. We're laughing but my OTHER big brother who's running the thing is cheesed off. He says we broke the artifact sword we had that was SUPPOSED to kill Loth and because of that we didn't get ANY rewards!
I was six.
The cherry on top was that Arumdia, the sword we broke, showed up as an homage to Tolkien in the campaigns of my brother that was a player with me. His character in the Loth game HAD been a ranger, albeit one called Killgore, but whatever. He used the fabled broken sword as a 1 use get-out-a-fight-free artifact for years and I still work it into mine, 30 years after that first game.
Kaiser: Nice xD
Dino: I prefer this system as well, but others are pretty fun. I dug Vampire the Masquerade and my first character in Rogue Trader is dear to my heart as one of my favorites (Just under the Pali I mentioned)
Mark: Gotta love those nuclear explosions xD
For me was playing in a campaign of nWoD, specifically Mage the Awakening. I played a TWF, Revolver using, Force using Mage who liked to screw with the electricity in buildings.
It didn't go very far but it became readily apparent to me that I loved everything about RPG's. Eventually I found Pathfinder and have stuck with it as my preferred system (not to say it's the only system I play, by any means).
I have actually been looking into nWoD, specifically Changeling and Hunter. I have only ever played 4th edition DnD and Pathfinder, so how different is that system from the d20?
And thanks. Though I didn't get to play him long, I will always remember Slappy the Warlock fondly.
I was nine or ten, round at a friend's place whose older brother had this new game called "Gamma World". I rolled some dice, had four arms, a mental blast and a thing I'd never heard of called a "morningstar" (which the older brother drew for me). We found a jeep buried in the sand and fought some kind of dog thing with about ten legs and a flying worm which shot purple rays from it's eyes.
I went home and spent the evening making my own post-apocalyptic game with all the d6s I plundered from our monopoly set plus various other boardgames and spent most of my childhood playing every chance I got and reading my AD&D books cover to cover, over and over again (I still know my way around the first DMG better than any other RPG book).
Hooked from day one.
For me it wasn't an instance of playing strangely (which I suppose is abit fitting since I GM 99% of the time), instead it was when I was going through the 3.0 Players Handbook and trying to figureout ideas on how to use the spells inventively. The possibilities amazed my seven year old mind.
I have actually been looking into nWoD, specifically Changeling and Hunter. I have only ever played 4th edition DnD and Pathfinder, so how different is that system from the d20?
Very very very very different. Even if you get used to the mechanics, the adventure structure and atmosphere are amazingly different so it can take some getting used to. Changeling is my favourite Chronicles of Darkness game though, it has a lot of possibilities in it.
Eight years old and my older brother who was on leave from the Navy introduced my best friend, his little brother, and me to 1st ed. My dwarven cleric/fighter, who i named my avatar after, lasted one fight against two were rats (my friend's wizard was bitten but survived). The second. Fight was against a few orcs. Wewere rocking, when an ogre came. Out of the woods andpunched B0ldstar twice. Killed him instantly. Not a noble beginning, but it was awesome. My brother was REALLY good at painting a battlefied picture in ourheads and the roar of the ogre was loud enough to make my mom come into the room to see if someone was hurt. Good times.
Teenage mutant ninja turtles and other strangeness.
I can play as a What?!?
Yep. I played a mutant Platypus.
Favorite game though was Invid Invasion. Played Hovertank pilot code signed "Ponderosa". Good times.
Actually I shouldn't say that's my favorite game I've played in, but it was the one that won me over to RP as a hobby.
Lost my mind just now at that Kangaroo xD
I was hooked at 9 years old when I got the box on the right side of this image.
For me, it was college. I hadn't heard of RPGs growing up. A female friend of mine (now my wife) invited me to join her in a game that another guy in the dorm was running. It was the d20 Star Wars (revised) game. From there, I got into D&D 3.0/3.5 (right around the release of 3.5), d20 Modern (still a personal favorite), and other games. I quickly went from player to DM; now that I'm older, I play one game and DM another as we have time.
RPGs hooked me because the game really spoke to my imagination, which I've always appreciated. It's fun to be able to play "make-believe" as an adult :-D. It also helped develop social skills, which I definitely needed.
While I was hooked on D&D with the Red Box, there have been other things to hook my on RPGs:
1) Marvel Superheroes. I was our normal GM. One session I winged the whole way, rather odd for me. Ultron had a bunch of robots running around distracting the West Coast Avengers while he tried to get ahold of a nuclear arsenal. The PCs, all OCs, allied with the Avengers W.C. to fight some of these robots. The PC tank got hit by the robot Abomination and launched 10 stories straight up. He couldn't fly, so he fell straight down, and got whacked down the street for a quarter mile. He got up, charged electricity into his warclub, and promptly charged back and smashed its head into its chest.
2) Rifts. We were a mish-mash merc team who ran into a group of bandits who had holed up on a farm. We came in pretending to be visiting family and started the fight. Our baby great horned dragon was masquerading as Grandma when she opened the doors to the barn and got a missile in the face. Next thing we see is a smoking crater and a naked Grannie lying there, quite confused over what had hit her in the snout. Also, that game had my Neo Human who loved old pre-Rifts wrestling. I successfully chokeslammed several CS troops, clotheslined one, killed one with a headbutt, and even performed the People's Elbow in a Predator. Good times.
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I am not hooked, I can quit anytime. :-)
Seriously, at college in 1980 I encountered a shy girl named Amy in three unrelated places: at church, in physics class, and in a D&D game in a campus dorm room. Church and roleplaying games were her favorite activities. We became best friends, so we shared those activities.
But when I graduated, moved to another city for graduate school, and married her, we became too busy raising children to seek out new gaming groups. So we did quit for seven years. Until the children were old enough to run their own characters!
Instead of a single point where we were hooked, we have a set of milestones: the first 2nd Edition D&D game with our two daughters, my younger daughter insisting that my wife run a game for her nine-year-old friends with the new 3rd Edition Starter box, the semi-annual game at a friend's house in New York on Thanksgiving, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Independence day that ran for years, roleplaying at The Family Game Store when it opened up only two blocks from our house in Savage, Maryland, and my first post in the Paizo forums.
My very first AD&D 1e game, September 1985. I was in college. I was asked to play the character of someone who couldn't make it to the game and I had no idea what to do, but I caught on pretty quickly. I ended up leading a party of three through an fortress made of ice filled with Hobgoblins and one very peaved white dragon. I've been hooked ever since.
Seriously, a homeless guy ran my first real campaign. (He lived in a shelter nearby and had a locker at the store for his books.) It was Battletech. We played ourselves and got to experience the end of the world. I went crazy. It was really fun though, because we were put in so many cool situations. The other players got to drive tanks and mechs, I got a pet Roomba who saved a character by alerting me to him during a disaster. So many cool stories made me crave this game. I even bought some scrubs at the secondhand store and came in character one night. (I was a scientist studying robot intelligence.)
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December 28th, 1980.
That's the day I read the D&D Basic rulebook + the module that came with it (Keep on the Borderlands).
I'd gotten the Basic set for Christmas.
We (mmyself, brother, & cousin) were all set to play that afternoon - but quickly realized that this wasn't just some board game. That at least one of us was going to have to read this entire book 1st....
Since technically it was MY book, guess who was elected to do that?
So a few days later I got around to reading it.
WOW! It was like throwing a bucket of gasoline on a fire!
Best Christmas present ever! Thanks Grandma!
(Grandma told us years later why she got us the game. She thought a game where you could play as knights & elves slaying dragons sounded fun. That she could relate to that more than she could to whatever a Darth Vader was....)
Dec.29th I became a Dungeon Master.
When I first learned how to play by teaching myself at 18 and ended up having to run the campaign. Designing the Dungeons, encounter fees, and world was fun but a LOT of work.
Later, playing my Grenadier Alchemist Archer, climbing over a Fortress wall to see a giant monster we couldn't identify, and then getting a critical hit on a nova bomb arrow. It was a fine red mist afterwards.
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For me, when I was about 8, I sat in on an AD&D game my older brother and his friends were playing. My brother wouldn't let me join, but after watching them, I found some 8-sided poker dice, and made an adventure that took my younger brother and a friend up one side of a mountain, and back down the other, fighting plenty of beasties along the way. We made up rules as we went, loosely based on what I could remember from the one game I had watched. I have been hooked ever since, moving from AD&D to 2nd edition, to 3rd and 3.5, and now with Pathfinder. Used to play some shadowrun, gurps, WoD, deadlands, and Palladium/Rifts, but lately, just PFRPG.
December 28th, 1980.
That's the day I read the D&D Basic rulebook + the module that came with it (Keep on the Borderlands).I'd gotten the Basic set for Christmas.
We (mmyself, brother, & cousin) were all set to play that afternoon - but quickly realized that this wasn't just some board game. That at least one of us was going to have to read this entire book 1st....
Since technically it was MY book, guess who was elected to do that?So a few days later I got around to reading it.
WOW! It was like throwing a bucket of gasoline on a fire!
Best Christmas present ever! Thanks Grandma!(Grandma told us years later why she got us the game. She thought a game where you could play as knights & elves slaying dragons sounded fun. That she could relate to that more than she could to whatever a Darth Vader was....)
Dec.29th I became a Dungeon Master.
I had exactly the same experience; Moldvay Red Box?
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It was Christmas 1990, and my Grandmother, may she rest in peace, bought me the black box, the moment I cut the tape and started reading the rule book, I was hooked, and never looked back. Thanks Grams, and we miss you!
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Good memories from so many different corners. Gotta love it
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My sister received one of the boxes as a present. It was the one with "into the unknown" under Port Town. She played one game with her friends at the time. Her goblin character was taken out by a giant mosquito in the first few minutes of the game. She was so turned off, she gave the box to me. After a few months playing it solitaire, mostly wrong, I started looking for a group of people to play.
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Probably when the local college game had a guest GM, my squad leader at the time, who promptly tried to turn the three paladins in the party into blackguards. Of the three, only my paladin of freedom resisted the compulsion, punching the dream entity offering the temptation in the face. We then proceeded to go down swinging against the two newly turned party members and the troop of spider-riding goblins. It was such a twist to the status quo the regular GM had been maintaining that I knew I had to find or become the kind of GM that could surprise the party that way.
When I was 11 years old, I got the Moldvay D&D Basic set. At first, I felt overwhelmed. There were so many rules, seemingly unrelated to each other. There were all those monster statistics, which meant nothing to me. At one point, I decided "I'll just finish reading the rulebook, and then I'm putting this away. No way will I ever play this!"
And then, at the very end of the book, there was sample dialog of the DM and players, demonstrating a play session.
I said "Oh! Is that all role playing is? You just tell the DM what you want your character to do, and your character does it! Simple!"
The moment I comprehended that, I was hooked. I had always enjoyed telling stories, especially of the fantastic variety, and this was a wonderful way to do it interactively.
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I actually got my hook online, and long before I learned about D&D or any other actual gaming system.
In the latter years of high school, I got really involved in online roleplaying forums. Specifically, those catering towards video game characters or fanmade spinoffs thereof. I'd gotten introduced in-depth to console JRPGs in my junior-high years and become a massive fan of, among other things, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. So when I found groups online playing characters from or based off these games and others, I was eager and quick to get involved. From there it was only a matter of time before I got comfortable coming up with more original ideas for characters, settings, and stories.
Then I went to college. My roommate at the time was a guy named Christian who was involved as a player and occasional DM on a multiplayer server and persistent world for a game called Neverwinter Nights. After watching him play a little and even getting to try by playing on his computer using his game (though I had to register my own account and user ID), I splurged on the game for myself as part of picking up a new computer after the one I owned bit the dust.
Then I got another new friend - my eventual future sister-in-law, known as Ebon-Fyre here on Paizo - hooked on the game, and more importantly on the community of players on the server. And she and Christian introduced me to the game that NWN was based on.
And the rest is history....
1974.
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This thread helps me feel all warm and fuzzy, and less like I am getting older, what more could I ask for.
Looks like at the moment, Dr. Deth has won the, "most likely to have carved his own dice" award. ;)
The humble d4 is to blame.
My first introduction to games at school was watching other people play at a table next to me. Normally I would be too shy to say or do anything, but I just could not work out how the d4 was read, and curiosity overcame my shyness. I was press-ganged into creating a character. 2 weeks later I was GMing a simple dungeon crawl after borrowing someones 1e DMG. Sometime in that 2 weeks I became hooked.
That was 1985-ish.
Ultima 5
I played the game a little bit as a very small child, I wasn't good at it and didn't get far (my dad had notebooks of notes for the game), but I was enthralled. I convinced the neighbor kids to essentially LARP in the woods with me using the game manual as our guide for what we could do.
Years later, when I was finally introduced to AD&D, it was a natural fit.
Seeing that I was interested in fantasy, one of my friend's older brother took us LARPing. Then we started a tabletop game, which was introduced to me as "like live-action roleplay, but without the live-action". Yeah, I was hooked...
'81? '82?
Right about thenish; the incredibly kind, patient geek teens who lived across the street from my grandmother's house let me play in their game (I was 8 or 9) -- Gamma World. From then I branched out into the old Red and Blue boxes, got the AD&D Players' Handbook for my tenth birthday.
But that first Gamma World game; man. It was like starring in an awesome science fiction movie: trying to rebuild from postapocalypse scraps of old technology... and the strange powers granted by the working of radiation to man, animal, and plant alike. We decided to lead a migration, and find a place to hole up and rebuild a society. Never did find a place to call home, but we did manage to become a nomad people, with an ever-improving standard of living for our tribe. So that's a win.
It was great. And has stood me well for entertainment and social entree the rest of my life.
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2002: first played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind on a friend's Xbox. A little while later, I picked up a copy of the D&D 3.0 Player's Handbook and carried it around my new school for months like a dork, hoping that someone would notice and invite me to a game.
Within a year or so, my gambit paid off, and I became a card-carrying supernerd with a subscription to Dragon shortly thereafter. I've since become a closeted nerd, but I still really wish Dragon would come back into print.
It was the early 80's. We started the boxed set of D&D. My friend had a different version of that game. I forgot what it was called D&D Elementals??? I'm not sure. It came in a similar box. I don't remember any specific group or any specific module.
That was the beginning in those days, so we were into other things like Ultima and Might & Magic on our Commodore computers or reading fantasy and science fiction books.
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Although I was in my teens when D&D was first born, I didn't know anyone who played until I was well into (chronological) adulthood.
In the early '90s I started dating someone who had been playing D&D and other tabletop RPGs since the '70s. My Significant Other went to a friend's home every Sunday to play, though at that time they were playing RuneQuest instead of D&D. One day I asked if I could go along and watch. My SO called the host/GM to ask if it would be alright to bring a guest, and the GM suggested we arrive early and roll up a character for me so I could do more than just spectate. I've been hooked on fantasy RPGs ever since.
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It was 1981 on my summer break from school
Our dad brought home a game called Dungeons and Dragons no board no pieces just 2 books a crayon and some funny looking dice.
A few days later I sat down with my dad and older brother and rolled up my first character a fighter my brother did a cleric .
So our first game we went through about 4 rooms of a dungeon and then where killed just after my brother said the immortal line
"Look it just 6 orcs how hard can they be"
I was hooked from day one few weeks later back at school I got my best friend in to it and 35 years later me my friend and my dad still play every Friday. good times still
It started with Dragon Warrior on the NES and Super Final Fantasy 2 (FFIV) and 3 (FFVI) on the Super NES. A few trips through Hyrule with Link and I started reading Fantasy novels. Years later my dad gets me started on Science Fiction classics and I had fell in love with the genre and how many different worlds you could briefly visit between the pages of a book or the bits of a program. Half way through middle school I am introduced to D&D by a friend, I picked up 3.5 a little while later and started creating worlds of my own.
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1974. Summer. July. One of my friends picked up a copy of D&D. Described it as "like the Chainmail fantasy appendix" (which we were already playing in miniatures). Great I thought. Played it, and it was better than that. YOU were in the game. Hooked immediately. By August me and my brother had our own copy. *sigh* So much time to play with... I'm surprised I graduated from high school :)