What got you into roleplaying?

[TelemontTanthul]

Just a simple question. What was the defining moment when you decided "I like playing Dungeons and Dragons (or any other roleplaying game)?

I remember the first time I was asked to join DnD, I refused, because I didn't really want to get into it.

But then I caved into the pressure, and decided to attend a session.

The DM we had was awesome!

My character was a hostage, and was rescued by the party, only to be left on the side of the road because I was "Too suspicious."

I loved the fact that they had the power to choose that sort of stuff.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I got pulled into DnD's sweet sweet embrace.

[Yukitsu]

My uni had a D&D club. I lurked for over a year in the background, reading all the books as a fly in the wall. Once I got it all, figured out what the others were all about I jumped in. Been a regular optimizer since.

I was in the club to kill time because they met when I was waiting between my other club's activities and classes. Read books while I was there, and decided I like the game.

[Zaydos]

Me and my older brother would play HeroQuest (basically a dungeon crawl board game with a Game Master who would sometime make dungeons of his own) and my uncle gave my older brother his old Red Box and I've been gaming ever since.

[bosssmiley]

2000AD > Fighting Fantasy > HeroQuest > BECMI Red Box.

'Choose your own adventure' books and GW minis are terrible gateway drugs. :smallamused:

[AslanCross]

It started out as a plan to come up with new and interesting teaching devices. My colleagues were really good at developing these, so I wanted to come up with a cool new regular group activity for my classes. I wanted to look at existing rulesets so I looked around and remembered my previous exposure to D&D thanks to my uncle and some of my high school classmates who used to bring rulebooks to class.

Eventually the activity became something for our creative writing club instead.

[LurkerInPlayground]

Just a simple question. What was the defining moment when you decided "I like playing Dungeons and Dragons (or any other roleplaying game)?

I remember the first time I was asked to join DnD, I refused, because I didn't really want to get into it.

But then I caved into the pressure, and decided to attend a session.

The DM we had was awesome!

My character was a hostage, and was rescued by the party, only to be left on the side of the road because I was "Too suspicious."

I loved the fact that they had the power to choose that sort of stuff.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I got pulled into DnD's sweet sweet embrace.
Then my character died.

I then become unresponsive and depressed when my group shunned me for losing.

[Fhaolan]

My uncle gave me the blue-box Basic D&D for christmas when I was 8, 33 years ago. He was an art teacher at a community college that had a wargaming club who introduced him to the pre-Basic white-box edition.

[ondonaflash]

Well, there was this game, see, you may have heard of it, Baldur's Gate? So I started playing that game right? And it ****ing ruled. It was like the coolest game ever. I loved it. Then my dad handed me some books, and I started to read them. They were about this Elf who came from society of evil elves, but he rejected their vile ways and fled his home (which was underground, how cool is that?) and climbed to the surface, where people who saw him were suspicious of him because he looked like an evil elf.

And things just spun wildly out of control from there. Now I'm a DM, running two campaigns, and playing in a third. I've got a character in a Savage Worlds campaign, and I have Nikolai Tesla, AKA Captain Current ready for a Spirit of the Century game.

[Mongoose87]

Well, there was this game, see, you may have heard of it, Baldur's Gate? So I started playing that game right? And it ****ing ruled. It was like the coolest game ever. I loved it. Then my dad handed me some books, and I started to read them. They were about this Elf who came from society of evil elves, but he rejected their vile ways and fled his home (which was underground, how cool is that?) and climbed to the surface, where people who saw him were suspicious of him because he looked like an evil elf.

And things just spun wildly out of control from there. Now I'm a DM, running two campaigns, and playing in a third. I've got a character in a Savage Worlds campaign, and I have Nikolai Tesla, AKA Captain Current ready for a Spirit of the Century game.

I was an absolute Baldur's Gate II junkie. That's totally what got me in.

[penbed400]

My dad and his friends had been gaming since high school and so when I was really young when my dad went over to his DM's house to play he brought me and my sisters to play with everyone else's kids. So all of the kids would just play together while all of the grown ups went off and played Runequest. Around 6th grade the game really caught my eye and I spent less and less time playing with the other kids and more time sitting at the table watching them play and listening to the story. Their DM is really good. Been playing ever since and now I'm in 12th grade, I have my own gaming group but I always make time so that I can game with my dad :-)

[PId6]

This comic. Need I say more?

[Temet Nosce]

Freeform actually. I didn't like D&D originally, but eventually 3e caught me.

[Thajocoth]

Friends/co-workers "We're starting up a D&D game. You wanna play?" "Sure, I'll try it."

Same thing for Snowboarding about half a year later... Same group too... It was, for both, just that no one had previously suggested them. Though, I don't think I'd've stuck with an older edition had that been my first XP...

[BobVosh]

My friend got some Rifts books as a present from his grandma. That is where the urge came from.

Ironically I played BG2 but that didn't get me into D&D.

[Thurbane]

I was always into sci-fi and fantasy, but the thing that really got me interested were the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. Shortly after that, I joined a D&D group at my school. :smallbiggrin:

[Raltar]

Well, I started playing video game RPGs(mostly from Japan) and eventually made my way up to a game called Baldur's Gate. Then I started writing really bad stories, which eventually led me to a group that also wrote stories and eventually it spawned into actually playing DnD over message boards and IMs. The rest is history.

[toasty]

Deep, deep, down? The internet and Lord of the Rings.

More specifically? I joined a WoW fanclub (never actually played WoW) and started doing Free-Form RPing based off of WoW, later in life, after that site had shut-down/died I discovered Warhammer 40,000 via Dawn of War. That led to 40k, which led to the Black Library, which led to Black Industries (no defunct) which had a 40kRPG in the hoops (Dark Heresy). I had heard of WFRP but it didn't seem that interesting... but after reading the Black Industries boards about the absolutely crazy stuff that happened in some people's game I broke down and bought those books.

When DnD 4E came out I decided to try DnD, more out of curosity than anything. its a decent system, but not my favorite. My favorite is Fireborn.

[Akal Saris]

I actually started RPing before I even knew it existed.

Back when I was 8, I loved the Pick-Your-Path adventure books, so I grabbed my best friends and told them that we'd do a Star Trek one together (even then, I was a nerd...). So I'd tell them what was going on, and give them 2-3 choices to pick from. They'd choose 1, then I'd give them another 2-3 choices, and so on.

Then when I was 10, I was at camp and the counselors were playing D&D (2E). One of them let me read the monster manual, and I was completely entranced - I still remember the picture of the Doppelganger staring back at me. I spent practically every free moment I had for the whole week of that camp reading that monster manual.

Then when I came back home, I convinced my friends to play "D&D", which was really just freeform fantasy play-acting with a d6 as an arbitrator. When I moved to a different city a few years later, that led to me actually buying the 2E books and learning D&D, and my campaigns gradually morphed over 2-3 years from completely freeform to semi-freeform (no combat rounds, but using dice for AOE spells, thief skills, and spell resistance) and then after the switch to 3E I began to run standard D&D games.

Edit: the crazy thing is that one of my players has been my friend since I was 8, and has been a PC of mine for nearly 17 years now, from elementary school through grad school! Here's to you, Alix!

[Weimann]

I always did like fantasy books, and I had heard the term role-playing game floating around in the background for some time. I think it took all the way up to 7th or 8th grade before me and some friends pulled together and bought a sourcebook.

It was Drakar & Demoner 6e (a game that I think are mostly represented in the Scandinavian countries), and we played it for a while. Some things were awesome, and some were less awesome. One fun thing was that no one had any expectations on the other characters. I mean, none at all. Me, for example, was a cowardly thief obsessed with money, who's first action in battle was usually to run the hell away and hide (which, to this day, I consider the correct MO for a theif). Another player had a character who was built with about 2 ranks of everything, which resulted in him failing almost all of his rolls that were not directly related to combat (which is admittedly was kind of focused at).

We stopped after a while, and since then I've not played anything with regularity.

[karnokoto]

It was something my boyfriend (now fiancee) and his friends were into, and I was a fantasy nut long before I met him. I'd heard of it before, I just didn't know anyone that did it.
So now we play every weekend!
Its great stuff, I love it. Everyone has a very unique way they play, and our group is especially diverse. Lots of fun :D
We've been playing for about 5 years together now. Wouldn't trade those saturdays for anything :)

[Blacky the Blackball]

At the age of 11 (back in 1980) my friends and I used to draw lairs for villains - complete with death traps (usually involving "quick drying cement" and shark pools).

It became a game for one of us to draw a lair and the others to take turns sending imaginary secret agents into it and try to get to the villain without falling in any of the traps. We would see who could get to the villain while losing the fewest agents.

Then one day I saw a school friend drawing a D&D dungeon during break-time - and since it looked remarkably like what we were doing I asked him about it. A couple of days later I played D&D (Holmes Basic) for the first time with him running the game.

I was instantly hooked, and managed to persuade my parents to buy me the newly released Moldvay Basic set.

And I've never looked back...

[Superglucose]

At the point where we managed to drag my horse underwater to slip into the enemy's kingdom unnoticed, I realized that I liked that game.

At the point where we broke out of the same prison three times, then got paid about a hundred platinum for killing ourselves, that's when I realized I loved that game.

Unfortunately, that GM thought he was terrible (I have NO IDEA why, he was amazing) so he stopped GMing. He was 13 and is still the best GM I've ever had by far.

Then again, i think we all tend to think we're a terrible GM until everyone's like "WHY DID YOU QUIT YOUR GAME?!"

My second favorite GM is a guy who'd let us roll knowledge checks on anything.

"Spot check to examine the bunny in detail."

"It has two ears, a tail, and hops."

"Knowledge religion to see what kind of use it has?"

"Yeah, sure." *while dice is rolling* "IT'S A [censored] BUNNY!"

[starwoof]

My friend Christoff bought the dnd 3.0 starter box dealie when we were about 11. I was Tordek, because I loved the dorfs from The Hobbit. I killed four goblins, braved the trap, and took the chest full of gold. I also took the unicorn's horn, if I remember correctly.

Then I was hooked.

[Kobold-Bard]

Girl dressed as a peasant woman, talking like a pirate and wielding a wooden sword.

She was the President of the Uni RPG Society that I am now running into the ground. Good times were had, Sephiroth was killed, York Minster was accidentally blown up when my Mage misaimed his bazooka.

Good times.

[Jimbob]

When my Dad came into my life at 7 years old I would hear them on a Sunday laughing and talking about killing monsters and treasure. so 3 years later I "borrowed" my Dads AD&D book got together with a few of my mates and have never looked back, and now sadly that group split up and im now one of that lot that laugh on a Sunday.

[cloneof]

Well ever sense I had learned English and started to stream the Internet I heard refrences and such towards it.

For years I would look from a distance as other people were talking or playing it, in a small town with around 10 000 there was a hardly a book shop that would sell the manuals.

Then, over two years ago, I had the change to buy all the core books relating to 3.5 and I bought them.

And now that I finally got OSRIC printed few days ago, I can play D&D like I have always imagined it to be :smallbiggrin:.

[Foryn Gilnith]

Warcraft 3 -> Custom Games -> RP -> Games Club -> D&D

[Sliver]

A few years ago I got hooked on MtG but the person I played with didn't know the rules really so he made them up as we played (so he would win most of the time anything new came up) so I went to my hero.. the INTERNET..
There, joining mIRC one asked me if I would like to try D&D.. and so.. I said YES. The DM was awesome, I had no idea about how to play and didn't have the rulebook so I made, in some site (some role playing house or something) an elven sorcerer that had mage armor and magic missle, and used only MM.. And didn't know he can make a 5ft step.. and went to negatives on the only 2 battles he had, and died on the third.. IT WAS AWESOME.
I didn't know what RPing is, and the DM gave XP for RPing mostly, and after the first game, having almost the least XP compared to the others, I said to myself "NUH HUH" or something like that, and started doing w/e the player with highest XP gain did.. RP!!

Then the campaign broke up cuz people didn't have time and I was left to cry myself to sleep every sunday, the time that was reserved for D&D..

[Yuki Akuma]

Planescape: Torment.

[Glass Mouse]

I think I've always liked making up characters and stories. And I've always been a fantasy geek (I think children are this naturally - I mean, who else will firmly believe in talking animals? - only, adults tend to grow up).

My tween years were spent making up 30 plastic cat characters and playing them out along with my friend (yes, this was when all the other kids started going to parties). Totally improv, and we'd make the most elaborate plots (kinda taking shifts being the GM).

Then I started writing fantasy stories and novels.

One day, six years ago, another friend of mine asked if I'd like to join this D&D thing that I had never heard about, but he had played since kindergarden (wonder why he asked me :smalltongue:). Sure, no problem, sounded like fun.

I hated my first character, but I put so much work into her that it would've been a shame to walk away.

Today, I'm the GM :smallbiggrin:

[Gamgee]

I was originally never going to play such a silly and dumb game, but my friend convinced me to play one session with him him.

And by god was it the worse ****ing session in the history of the planet.

I was playing a dwarven Cleric named something Bronzeforge or whatnot. It's been many moons. None the less the stoner DM was narrating a story rather than letting us play. The most exciting thing that happened was we fought a SINGLE giant spider....

A memorable quote: "Yea.... you guys are walking through a forest... and you see some more giant spiders... but... they get shot by arrows... from nowhere... oh... and no there are elves... you might want to... you know... talk to them... I'm... kind of cold... let me go get a blanket...."

That's the last I ever seen of him, and I can only hope he met his demise with some sort of blanket related monster. Basically I seen how good of a premise the game was, but this one sucked. So I asked my friend if all his games had been like this, and he said most of his games were like this. So I vowed to show him a true game of DnD.

I don't think I have ever played a session in real life as a player since. Maybe once, but it also sucked because of a new DM.

[valadil]

I was a total loser in middle school. When it first started up I had exactly one friend. At lunch we'd sit at the empty seats at various tables, getting glared at by the regulars at those tables. The next day we'd move on and sit with people who hadn't publicly hated us yet. One day we sat with people who were roleplaying. It was a homebrewed system, vaguely inspired by MERP but with robots. I don't know if there were any rules or if the GM was just making everything up as he went. Not only were these people nice to us, they invited us to play. Needless to say, I never left that table. 14ish years later and that GM is gonna be best man at my wedding next spring :-)

[Tyndmyr]

I was bored, honestly. Thats what growing up in the midwest does...so, I played my first game, second ed. In retrospect, it was a pretty horrible game, as my dwarven warrior spent half the session locked in a box, and the other half attacking an illusion that all the elves automatically got to ignore.

It was enough though...I got suckered in, and now own an obscene amount of 3.x books(my favorite edition), as well as a few other systems. Overall, my pick for best game is 7th Sea, but D&D 3.x is a close second, and since it's more popular, I play it more. It's been a pretty fun ride overall.

[AtwasAwamps]

Wow. Holy crap. That question takes me back.

I must have been…damn…when did super Nintendo come out, hold on…yeah, I was about 10. I was a dork, I loved video games and would play Nintendo at my cousin’s house and SNES at my friends house constantly. Knowing this, but not realizing that I had to own games to make use of this book, my mother bought me a book of SNES ULTIMATE SECRETS (::fanfare::)

Well, until I actually got my own system, this book was the coolest thing ever to me…and featured Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Final Fantasy 2/4j. I looked at those and thought “Lame, and besides, how could I control so many characters at once?! That’s crazy talk.” Then one day I read those chapters.

HOLY BAT MUFFINS. They were guides to the game…told in a semi-narrative. It was awesome. There were swords. Dragons. Goblins. Evil Kings. Crazy Mofo berserk dragoons. There was even a deadly spoon. The concept made me fall in love with the world of sword and sorcery and I began hunting down console RPGs and playing them.

Then I got AOL. Oh, AOL. What a heathen hive of scum…with strange opportunities. I managed to find myself in the “Red Dragon Inn”, attracted by the word “Dragon”. This started a long (and embarrassing!) journey into the world of freeform chatroom RPs. Eventually, I ditched AOL, tossing it to the heathen heap it belongs in (with some fond memories of friends) and didn’t RP for…hrm. Must have been years. Was back mostly playing video games again.

Now, in the background of all this, I had heard of D&D, but didn’t like the idea. How dare you limit my roleplay via dice? How dare you try to quantify my awesome-quotient? So I wrote it off as something that I would not enjoy.

I continued to do this for more than a decade. I wrote DnD off completely s something not worth my time. I wrote dice-based systems in general off. I played freeform PbP games and even ran a few (I am still particularly proud of my Megaman X storyline. Storm Eagle will kick your butt. He was everyone’s favorite NPC. Well, no. The Mettool with tourrette’s that was a former PC before the player had to quit was. But still.) . I wrote stories. I moved on.

Then, about six months ago, my friend called me up and said “Hey have you seen D&D 4E? They made everything so simple!” A little rooting around revealed that they had indeed. I rolled up some characters. We were going to start a game.

Never happened.

…Then, thanks to a post on these forums indicating I had an itch to play, I found a site that connected gamers together via posting a profile.

Guess what I did last week? That’s right! I played my first. Ever. Game of D&D. Starting at Level 4. In DnD 3.5 (I require a lot of help just yet ><) I have a +1 tower shield and helped win the fight with an intimidate check on the last survivor with the DM looking at me funny going “I don’t think you can actually make this one.” BAM. Surrender bucko.

Second session ever tonight. I bought my own dice last week. I am so excited. Couldn’t be happier.

[hamlet]

Managed, somehow, to get my hands on copies of the 1st Edition PHB, DMG, and MM and said "yeah, this if for me."

Been at it ever since.

[Eldariel]

*shrug* Happened at my friend's place on a birthday, they were playing an RPG and I asked if I could join in. Looked like fun, was fun. Been playing since. I don't even know what system they used; never played with 'em again as that particular friend lived quite far away, but it got me into RPGs with my other friends.

[The Big Dice]

It started with Narnia, pretty much the first books I ever read for pleasure. Then came The Hobbit and LotR. Then, when I was 12, back in 1984 my dad got me the blue box D&D set. The one with Keep on the Borderlands and a sheet of "chits" instead of dice. Many saturday afternoons sat round a kitchen table with a few friends and not really understanding things like the hit charts followed on.

Then came the Red Box and all the other coloured ones I regularly wish I still had them. . . Then it was Call of Chthulhu at high school. A teacher started up a D&D club at lunchtimes where we played things like AD&D. Then at college I was introduced to GURPS and realised that it didn't have to be roaming round tunnels kicking in doors and killing things to take their stuff or fleeing in terror from some slimy blob we didn't have a hope of standing up to, let alone fighting.

[Indon]

Oh, man.

Friends in high school pulled me into Magic, then eventually AD&D.

The first particularly memorable campaign I was ever in was a freeform game based on Dragonball Z which I ran for 6-8 people. It was marvelous, and probably what got me started on the path towards gaming for life.

[Knaight]

My Mom mentioned playing D&D, and when I tried to get details out, I got some description of a typical session. It sounded really fun, so I bought the books. And proceeded to follow their advice, including the DMGs, on preparation and stuff. Eventually I felt I was prepared enough to run a game, did, and didn't like the system. Still, I still liked the concept, so I looked for a better game to run it. I found some terrible rules light game (build for legend of zelda simulation), but it was a step up, and I had some fun sessions. Then I bumped into Fudge, and was quickly hooked as a GM. I'm better at winging stuff than preparation, and soon enough I found that out, and was somewhere beyond hooked, as Fudge let me do that, and it was generic and let me use pretty much any setting, which I like home brewing. So now I'm way in, and helping get stuff out that will eventually be published.

[Flying Dutchman]

Well, I guess it was watching the hobbit(the cartoon one) with one of my friends when i was little. In junior high i picked it up at the library, Sence junior high kids could finaly use the HS library. 8 hours later, I decided I should read the entrire LOTR series, although it took me about 6 monthes to make it through the first few chapters of fellowship( WTF were you thinking tolken) after that i breezed through the others, then the Shanara books, then more and more stuff. I was also in theater my senior year, and always was a bit of a ham.

In college i met Hams, my future roomate and He was in a campaign with some of the guys at school. I dropped in on a session or two, And LOVED IT, So i spent my sundays watching him and the guys play, They ended up all dieing to a crazy clay golem, so when they all made new chars the DM asked if i wanted in. Been a regular player with them ever sence.

[Ravens_cry]

I have been roleplaying ever since I played Clue and Monopoly. But I joined up into more official role playing for one simple reason.
Loneliness.
I was living on my own, I had no friends, and my only contact with the outside world was family and the Internet. I knew I had to get out of the house more, so I mustered my courage and went down to the local gaming store and asked the guy at the desk about any role playing game groups. Just my luck there was, and it was meeting that Sunday in the store.
I haven't looked back since.

[Kaiyanwang]

The Basic Red Box of my neighbour.

[Rhiannon87]

Hmm. I've liked fantasy/sci-fi since I was a kid, once I got past the historical fiction obsession of ages 9-10. I started getting into generally geekier interests, fantasy books and Lord of the Rings, and at some point one of my friends said "hey, you should come play D&D, I think you'd really like it."

My original group sucked, but even then I could see the potential for roleplay. Second group was marginally better. Then I got to college, lived without D&D for nearly a year (sob!), and then got invited to join a group that had lots of long-time players and really frickin' solid roleplayers. And now here I am, three years into one game, DMing my own game, and helping my boyfriend build a campaign setting so he can start running his game soon.

[Lost Demiurge]

Local hardware store called Throckmorton's, back in the 1980's. For reasons never really explained, it had an RPG and board game rack. Had a whole lot of neat stuff on it... Bunch of Avalon Hill bookshelf games, mainly. They were perpetually on sale, too.

Oh lord, the stuff that was on that rack... Dragon Pass, Lords of Creation, a whole bunch of AD&D manuals...

And red box D&D. THAT was where it really clicked, with that little solo adventure at the beginning. The nameless mullet fighter with the weird helm, and Aleena the cute cleric that died, and that bastard Bargle...

Then reading some more, and feeling my 11-year-old eyes getting really, really big as I realized just what you could DO with this stuff, and a little paperwork.

21 years later, I've never looked back once.

[Paulus]

Anything with Dragons.

I could go on an on about how I started as a Gamer (Atari was my first system) and how I am a huge monster fantasy fan (I was watching Godzilla before kindergarden, ALL of them.) or I could go on and on about imagination and Acting (professional actor) and so on and so forth blah blah. But.

Really. It's that simple.

Dragons.

[Talyn]

My father, God bless him, is a geek. He's only a little bit of a geek, but he used to be MUCH more of one (my mother has made him much cooler in 30 years of marriage, haha).

So, because my dad was a geek, we had multiple computers in the house when I was growing up. (I was born in 1984, so that was unusal. I'm pretty sure I was the only kid in school with three working computers in the house in1993!) Also, my father is a fairly avid computer gamer, a habit which I pick up early. Some of my earliest memories are booting up the old Pirates! game from a 5 1/4 inch floppy and terrorizing the Spanish main, or trying to figure out the final boss in Commander Keen!

So, I'm about six years old, and my dad gets this new computer game from a friend of his at work called Quest for Glory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Glory_I:_So_You_Want_To_Be_A_Hero). And, since I was a little nerdling, I would sit next to him and watch him play it. It was INCREDIBLE! You could be a fighter, a magic user, or a thief! You could roam around and fight monsters (and take their stuff!), and talk to people, and get magic items to help you solve puzzles... before long I was playing it when he wasn't home, and I had drawn maps of the world, and had come up with an elaborate story as to why I was trying to save this town.

So my father, realizing how much I loved this game, got me "The Hobbit." Or, I should say, pulled out his much beloved and dog-eared cop from wherever he had stored it. It was great! (Though hard to read, as I was about six or seven - I needed some help with the more complicated words.)

I finish it, and I want MORE. Lord of the Rings is too long and complicated for me at the time, but my father gets his hands on the Dragonlance book series, and, more importantly, another book which I cannot remember the name of.

(Wow, that's frustrating.)

But it's about a band of college students who play a game with a strange older professor, a game where they pretend to be barbarians and dwarves and wizards, until one day, during a game session, they mysteriously fall asleep and wake up in the Fantasy World - as their characters!

I mention to my father how cool I think that game is - in fact, I tried to reinvent the game from the description in the books, as a weird board game/card game hybrid - and how I wish there was a game like that in the real world.

My father, with a little gleam in his eye, tells me there is such a game, and it's called "Dungeons and Dragons." Please, please, please, I'll be good for the rest of my life, can I have it? For my 8th birthday, he got me the AD&D Starter Set. That Christmas, I got the Player's Handbook and the Monster Manual.

I quickly roped my friends into playing. By middle school, I had already DM'd two entire campaigns. Even now, in my second year of lawschool, I have two games at my apartment per week - one I DM, one which I play in.

Thanks, Dad.

[John Campbell]

It was the summer of 1982. I was seven. We were at my grandmother's for the summer, and I wandered into the back room one day to find one of the other summer kids, who stayed down the road a ways, describing to my older brother how the giant toad had wrapped its tongue around him and was dragging him into its mouth.

"Cut its tongue off!" I cried.

"Shut up! That's what I was gonna do!" my brother said. "I cut its tongue off!"

So they rolled some dice, and my brother did, indeed, cut the giant toad's tongue off.

"I wanna play!" I said. "Can I play next?"

"No, you're too young," my brother told me, from his lofty heights of almost eleven.

But then a few months later, we were back home, and my brother had talked our parents into getting him his own copy of the Moldvay red box. And he didn't have anyone at home to play it with. So he decided that maybe I wasn't too young after all, and let me roll my 3d6 in order. The first set came up an 18, and shortly thereafter, my Neutral Fighter sallied forth to the Keep on the Borderlands.

[Thane of Fife]

I got a TSR board game - Dragonquest, or maybe Dragon Quest - when I was five. It was sort of an introduction to Basic D&D kind of things - no gold pieces, just treasure cards, race-as-class, etc. It had a little leaflet about D&D in it. I don't remember which happened first, but I know that that game led to me reading the Hobbit as well as buying a copy of the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual.

Ah, good times.

[Akal Saris]

That's a pretty awesome story Talyn =)

[The Orange Zergling]

I went to my friendly local gaming store one day (I had liked other things they carried like board games and miniatures) and found Dungeon Crawlin' Fools and picked it up because I thought the art was cute. Through it I discovered D&D and eventually picked up the PHB and it just kinda snowballed from there.

[NeoVid]

In a big writing project I was part of years ago, everyone else involved ended up statting out the characters they were writing. That started up a big discussion about a lot of RPGs, and I quickly latched on to the basic concept behind Mage... "So, I can do anything I can think of that's in my character's power level?

Oh, this thing? It's my Talisman of Bullet Deflection."

And even though it was years before I could find people to play with, forcing me to get my gaming covered by minis and cards, I never stopped being interested.

[Rhiannon87]

Crowning Story of Heartwarming

Awwwww. That's almost enough to make me want to have kids so I can teach them the way of D&D.

[Sploosh]

My friend tried to convert me to it a few years ago when he discovered I do a bit of programming and played MMOs but it didn't fly as soon as I heard him (a normal friend up unil then) talking in "elvish."

Then I watched The Gamers and The Gamers 2....

I have since made 12 people watch those movies (usually the 2nd one first, since I find people relate to it better as non players) and I have recruited..12 people.

I suggest you watch it if you haven't yet, but I warn you that it'll never leave your system once you do.

[Amador]

Some friends needed another player, so I got into it. It was fun, dice and books came for my birthday and fun has never stopped.

[JeenLeen]

I had played console games and even what I suppose was rather freeform LARP and tabletop with friends during elementary school (although we knew neither term).

When in college, my girlfriend and her siblings played Vampire: The Masquerade LARP and I attended one session. Later we and her brother played a Street Fighter pen-and-paper game and, later still, BESM.

My friends and I couldn't afford the books for a system, so I crafted my own. It was pretty sloppy and abusable, but we learned some good principles. We tried BESM, but it went poorly, so we went back to self-designed systems. We've developed probably about three systems amongst ourselves--each improving on the last.

Then, one of our friends played D&D 3.5 in the Navy, so when he got out, we got the books and started to play. The game got too optimization-heavy and too low on RP, so we dropped it and, after a short time on Paranoia, started and are still on a game of Mage: The Ascension.

Our DM is making his own system at the moment.

[Ormur]

I did a lot of roleplaying when I was a kid, with Lego's and stuffed animals and such. I've always made up worlds and characters as I daydream but I didn't think of actually roleplaying anything anymore, let alone according to some system, after I grew up.

When I was a teenager I got a local Icelandic roleplaying game based on Nordic myths and paganism as a birthday present but I always figured I'd need to find an experienced GM to play it properly. I once tried to run a game myself and it was very boring, I hardly knew the system and didn't have anything prepared so I was just leading the players through random places having them do random things.

I didn't think about roleplaying games for years until my friend, who's friends played D&D, asked me if I'd like to play it. I was reluctant since I didn't consider myself that nerdy but eventually he convinced me and another friend of ours who had never played D&D to be in his campaign. I didn't take it seriously at first and I didn't think it could be more fun than Risk but boy was I wrong. A year later we're still playing the original campaign and we're now level 13 fighting for the continued existence of the material plane. I couldn't get enough so I started my own campaign and I've been introduced to other D&D players in other campaigns.

[Thurbane]

When my Dad came into my life at 7 years old I would hear them on a Sunday laughing and talking about killing monsters and treasure. so 3 years later I "borrowed" my Dads AD&D book got together with a few of my mates and have never looked back, and now sadly that group split up and im now one of that lot that laugh on a Sunday.
We regularly play round at a friends place, who has three young children (Boy 7, boy 4 and girl 4). The eldest boy seems really interested in our games, so I'm fairly certain there will be RPGs in his future. If we're still playing when he's a bit older (we run a Beer n' Pretzels type game) - which we fully intend to - I'm predicting he'll be joining us. :smallsmile:

[Masaioh]

One of my classmates in highschool explained the game to me, and it sounded awesome. He ran a couple tutorial sessions for me, and then we recruited his other friends and started a FR campaign.

[amaranth69]

My mom played D&D with her friends every Friday night as far back as I can remember. Around 1983 they started letting me sit at the table, rolling dice and helping play their characters when they were away from the table getting snacks, restroom, etc. Then March 10th 1984 (my 7th birthday) my uncle let me play one of his old characters on a short adventure. The first character I rolled up was an elven magic user with 3 hp. Since then I have played Advanced, 2nd ed, 3.5 ed, and now 4th ed. And now I am planning my first trip to Gen Con next year. My friends tell me that only after the pilgrimage to the holiest of geek events may I call myself a gamer geek. LOL

[Korivan]

I was an absolute Baldur's Gate II junkie. That's totally what got me in.

Oh ya. A friend let me borrow his copy back when I was still in Junior High. A couple weeks later, had my own and the expansion. Though no matter how good they made games back then, none of them beat the solid experience of looking back at what your group did at the table. Too many stories, most of them good.

[Kaldrin]

I'll be honest with you. I played D&D in junior high, but I didn't role-play until I was in high school.

But I started with D&D basic in the red box when I came over to my friend's place and they were all standing around the pool table rolling these really strange looking dice. Being a little strange myself I decided it was worth investigating further.

[Vortling]

I blame OotS and other D&D related webcomics for that one day that myself and a bunch of friends decided to crack open the srd and make characters for what turned out to be an exceptionally short lived campaign. However I was hooked by that point.

[Greymane]

I got into Tabletop gaming after playing Neverwinter Nights, actually. I was kinda young at the time. Eventually made some friends shortly after that that played a little bit of D&D, and it's all history from there.

It's got to be the best hobby there is. No, that's not an opinion, it's a simple truth. :smallamused:

[Dragor]

One of my friends brought his D&D books into our tutor period at school. Friend one was fascinated by the maths. Friend two was entranced by the complexity of the game. I was entranced...

By the pretty pictures.

I fell in love with the art and decided I'd play the game too. We got our Biology in on it, who was a closet D&D player himself (albeit 2Ed) and had some of the most fun I've ever had playing D&D, when I didn't know who was overpowered or underpowered and was blissfully ignorant of the concept of 'builds'.

Not that I can build a decent character now, but whatever. :smalltongue:

[TelemontTanthul]

haha, usually I envisioned people joining an RPG game via a simple convo.

Person 1: Wanna play DnD?

Person 2: Sure, why not?

But I can see that there are a LOT of different ways that people have found this amazing game.

[Trodon]

Well, I was about 7 my big brother got the 3.5 starter set from his friends and he told me to come to play a game, first ever D&D game I played I was Regdar a human fighter with a great sword ah that was fun. So in short my big brother man I miss playing D&D with him.

[gallagher]

Well, I was about 7 my big brother got the 3.5 starter set from his friends and he told me to come to play a game, first ever D&D game I played I was Regdar a human fighter with a great sword ah that was fun. So in short my big brother man I miss playing D&D with him.
believe it or not, it was my girlfriend

Edit: i just realized that that sounds dirty, because i am being completely honest. she got me into RPGs

[The Mute Bard]

I was invited to play a D&D game by my cousin. It was a Ravenloft campaign, and my character was introduced in by attacking the party. :smallbiggrin: I surrendered so they wouldn't kill me, but not until after I was reduced to 2 hit points.:smalltongue:

[Dingle]

These forums.

[Kiero]

I was given Red Box D&D for my 12th birthday, right after starting secondary school. In the New Year term I brought it in with me, got some friends together, and the following weekend we played our first session. We all learned how to play together.

[gdiddy]

What initially introduced me to the idea? Planescape: Torment

What got me into the hobby?

My friend invited me over to drink, but hadn't finished DMing. I was being an impatient ass. He said to play an NPC. I still play that NPC in that campaign sometimes.