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2D8HP
2016-05-31, 11:44 PM
Sometime before my twelfth birthday (I specifically remember that I was under the "for adults 12 years and up."limit) at some toy store in some shopping mall, I saw this:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QTIeBuLnD-A/UR_ToMA9-VI/AAAAAAAAAKA/q8g2RT4XY-s/s1600/holmes+box.jpg
Did I come home with it that day?
No.
:smallfrown:
Did I whine like a hungry puppy until it was mine?
Yes! Yes! and Yes!
I mean LOOK AT IT!
:smallbiggrin:
Such shear AWESOMICITY!, AWESOMOSITY! , and HELLA METAL BADASSADRY! created longings I could hardly understand!
A Wizard with a Magic Wand!
:smallsmile:
A warrior in armor with a longbow and sword!
:smallsmile: :smallsmile:
and,
A Dragon on a giant pile of treasure in a dungeon!
:smallbiggrin: :smallbiggrin: :smallbiggrin:
After I finally received the majestic 46 page rulebook (and read it straight through three times so I could "get it"), my little brother was the first victim player that I DM'd.
How I longed to be the player exploring the Dungeon myself (and really I still do)!
Sometime in 6th grade (so late 1978 or early 1979) a classmate saw me reading the "blue book" and invited me to a game of D&D that his teenage older brother was the DM of. The rules?
The three LBB's, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldrich Wizardry, God's Demigods and Heroes, the Arduin Grimouire's, All the World's Monster's, and the Monster Manual! (but no Chainmail or Swords and Spells, which I didn't see until the mid 1980's).
BEST GAME EVER!
The next RPG was "Villains and Vigilantes" and then it was off to the races!
How about for you?
What brought you to the hobby?

Ninja_Prawn
2016-06-01, 02:19 AM
I must have been 9 or 10 years old, and my parents bought a new PC for the house. It came with a bunch of free games, including this one:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d0/Baldur%27s_Gate_box.PNG/250px-Baldur%27s_Gate_box.PNG

I had no idea what I was playing but this 'character creation' deal was intriguing. It had me sold at "women of the Realms can excel in any area they wish, and are easily the equal of their male counterparts in every skill or respect."

From there, it took me about six years to figure out what THAC0 meant! :smallfrown: in my defense, I didn't have any manual or guidebook, and the internet wasn't really a thing you could use back then.

mig el pig
2016-06-01, 02:35 AM
Baldur's Gate or Diablo for me.

I'll never forget my confusion when better armor meant a lower armor value.
I did have a manual but it was so badly translated that 'alive' was used to talk about the 'undeath'.

hymer
2016-06-01, 02:38 AM
My parents were teachers at a boarding school before they retired, and they used to take a whole bunch of the kids on vacations to other countries as part of the job. I was too young to be left at home with my sisters (and, well, the cocktail of them and me was rather explosive and nothing to leave behind), so I had to be brought along. Ghastly experiences all around for me. But, one of their colleagues on a couple of those trips improvised some basic RPG using cards to substitute for dice, which he hadn't expected to need. Looking back, he really did badly at it by modern standards. :smallconfused: But I loved it. First experience had the players storming a small castle for no adequately explained reason, and I got caught trying to open the front gate.
Soon after, I stumbled across the Rules Cyclopedia in a toy shop I didn't usually frequent, and I bought it straight away. With that in hand, I started DMing seriously. The rest is history, as you might say.

https://dropthedice.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/roleplaying-cyclopedia.jpeg

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-01, 04:15 AM
I must have been 9 or 10 years old, and my parents bought a new PC for the house. It came with a bunch of free games, including this one:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d0/Baldur%27s_Gate_box.PNG/250px-Baldur%27s_Gate_box.PNG

I had no idea what I was playing but this 'character creation' deal was intriguing. It had me sold at "women of the Realms can excel in any area they wish, and are easily the equal of their male counterparts in every skill or respect."

From there, it took me about six years to figure out what THAC0 meant! :smallfrown: in my defense, I didn't have any manual or guidebook, and the internet wasn't really a thing you could use back then.

Ah, Baldur's Gate, my first introduction to D&D, but I wouldn't call it my first introduction to roleplaying (as I had no clue it was based on a tabletop game, I was like 6 (maybe 8) when I first played it). I still haven't got past act 1, due to a current lack of a PC and focusing on my studies, but some day I will reach Baldur's Gate and the plots therein!

My first real introduction was when, because we liked Baldur's Gate so much, my dad ran the old red box for me and my siblings. I still have fond memories of it and I swear that I'll get my own copy some day (because unfortunately my dad threw out all his old D&D stuff).

Mastikator
2016-06-01, 04:41 AM
A friend invited me to play in his game.
Boy were those games trainwrecks, but we were 16 and playing a homebrew game the DM made basically on the fly.

Ninja_Prawn
2016-06-01, 04:42 AM
I still haven't got past act 1

I can assure you, it is well worth it! The 'enhanced edition' on Steam is a good buy - it's had its problems, but most of the bugs are fixed now, and a lot of the negative reviews are politically motivated and not a fair reflection of the game.

For me, that was my first real Roleplaying Game (with capital letters). I got into Pokémon at about the same time and Final Fantasy a few years later, but I didn't play another western RPG for some time, and I only got back to TTRPGs very recently.

hifidelity2
2016-06-01, 05:13 AM
I discovered it at Uni

Actually 1 joined the RPG group as they held meeting in the student union on a Thursday and Friday night. Friday night was normally a band / club night and you had to pay to get in BUT if you were attending a society event then you could get in for free

I initially joined to save on the door fee but after attending a few Thursday sessions (to “prove” I was a member) I really enjoyed playing and the rest (30+ yrs later is history)

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-01, 05:49 AM
I can assure you, it is well worth it! The 'enhanced edition' on Steam is a good buy - it's had its problems, but most of the bugs are fixed now, and a lot of the negative reviews are politically motivated and not a fair reflection of the game.

I have the enhanced edition, I got to the mines in it and then my computer essentially broke and I haven't had a reason or the money to replace it. All I have to say is I need to work out who to have in my party, I want like 6 of the NPCs, including the hamster (oh, and the ranger he comes with).

Ninja_Prawn
2016-06-01, 06:13 AM
I have the enhanced edition, I got to the mines in it and then my computer essentially broke and I haven't had a reason or the money to replace it. All I have to say is I need to work out who to have in my party, I want like 6 of the NPCs, including the hamster (oh, and the ranger he comes with).

The trick is to run two games at the same time. I mean, Minsc is all well and good, but you do not want to miss out on a party of Dorn Il-Khan, Viconia, Xzar, Montaron, Kagain and a CE PC with the assassin class kit! It's all murder, all the time!

Dawgmoah
2016-06-01, 06:28 AM
The group of friends I grew up with were big into wargames. Squad Leader, Trireme, etc. When news of rpgs reached us I got selected as this "Dungeon Master" spot since I had read Lord of the Rings? We had played Chainmail a few times but it was not the paradigm shift going to the role playing game turned out to be. Many a night was what I guess is called a dungeon delve now. Party appeared at the entrance to the dungeon, fought and explored their way through the dungeon, and then waited for the next one. Then towns and things started appearing. A long and interesting evolution with some dead ends but still enjoyable for the most part.

DigoDragon
2016-06-01, 07:06 AM
I started into RPGs in high school. A double-whammy in fact. One friend was into D&D and he introduced me to second edition. Around the same time another friend was buying imported Famicom JRPGs and he introduced me to games like Final Fantasy IV1 (which got a US release) and V (which didn't till muuuuch later). With D&D, my friend and I joined a small weekly group that met at a local arcade. Even learned some other systems like GURPS and Werewolf. Good times.

1Funny thing is that I actually did play the original NES Final Fantasy years before, but the game was weird and I never got far with it until after figuring out IV.

Gastronomie
2016-06-01, 09:35 AM
I loved the Cthulhu mythos since middle school, and when one of my friends told me about this "Call of the Cthulhu TRPG" in which you can actually be like the main character of a Lovecraftian tale (which generally means succumbing to madness and being killed by outer entities). I felt it seemed fun, and indeed I enjoyed it well.

I proceeded to become interested in Paranoia, killing each other with friends for fun.

Then, I found D&D's Monster Manual, and was absolutely fascinated by the lore and all the description it had. I love deep world-building, and that's what caught my attention. It also reminded me of the books I read as a child, like Deltora Quest and stuff (which were no doubt inspired by D&D anyways).

RazorChain
2016-06-01, 01:29 PM
I was 9 when my friends older brother decided to test Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay on us the willing victims. I remember when I came home and told my mom enthusiastically "Mom I chopped a man in half with an axe." Mom: "Yes dear". Yes the critical wound tables in WFR were pretty gruesome. From then on it was only downhill...at the age of 11 I finally acquired Ad&d 2nd ed. PHB and from there it just spiraled out of control, it was a pure addiction...an addiction to my own fantasy.

KillingAScarab
2016-06-01, 01:42 PM
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/70/Dragon_quest_battle_2.png


In late 1990, Nintendo Power gave free copies of Dragon Warrior to subscribers, including a 64-page "Explorer's Handbook" that has a full walkthrough of the game and additional backstory not mentioned in the original instruction booklet.

Not mentioned is the laminated card with a table which showed level progression for the descendent of Erdrick. This included when he gained more powerful spells (class abilities for a gish), expected equipment (not far from a Wealth by Level) and how many experience points were required. There were maps of the pixelated dungeons (grid-based), lists of the enemies encountered (Monster Manual) and even the world map.

http://www.woodus.com/den/gallery/graphics/dw1nes/maps_overworld/dw1-over1.jpg

Yeah, I traded laughs
In for charts and graphs

http://i.imgur.com/kmkJ0Me.gif

Amaril
2016-06-01, 01:53 PM
I must have been four or five when I walked into my dad's study one day and saw him playing Baldur's Gate. I failed my save against enchantment (pretty sure having been constantly read The Hobbit and various fairytales from the day I was born gave me a sizeable penalty), and once my dad explained what D&D was, there was no going back.

SuchADiceGuy
2016-06-01, 02:01 PM
I think I was 19 years old when I first started participating in chat-based roleplaying games with a few friends. There were no rules or anything like that--we just developed random scenarios and quests and just did whatever we felt like.

Around a year later, the group I was in broke up, and I was looking for something that could replace it. Eventually, I discovered Roll20, where I quickly found a listing for a Fate Core game. I've been playing tabletops ever since.

Knaight
2016-06-01, 02:11 PM
My mom played it back in college, and she mentioned her D&D games a couple of times when I was young - and while the games described sound like something that I would find unbelievably tedious now, at the time it sounded completely awesome. So, before I even had any rules at all I started trying to get games together, and did a fair amount of free form. Then I acquired D&D, did a bit with that, and quickly jumped ship to the industry at large (passing through a pretty terrible game that worked a bit better than D&D did for me first), eventually hitting Fudge and using it pretty heavily as my main game.

Stan
2016-06-01, 02:12 PM
At 10, I discovered that my dad had bought a couple of Avalon Hill wargames from somewhere. They were sitting in the closet, unpunched as he'd never done anything with them. I decided to figure them out and got my older brother to play. That worked ok but he decided he liked drugs better and it was hard to find opponents. I unknowingly longed for more (Computer games barely existed then and we had no computer.)

When I was in 7th grade, I heard some kids talking about a new game. It sounded like a mix of wargame, LOTR, Conan, and so many other things I was into. In short, unmitigated awesome. We didn't have a ton of money but I conned my mom into getting me a copy. That was Moldvay Basic. With the Erol Otus art, the (limited) customization, and the adventure, I knew this was the thing I'd been looking for and that I would be the all powerful DM. I got a few neighborhood kids to play through Keep on the Borderlands.

cobaltstarfire
2016-06-01, 02:15 PM
I think my first run in with role playing was in some chatrooms in middle school, then via IM, then with a friend in highschool via taking turns drawing/writing in a notebook. (we would usually have several characters each). It never worked as well with more than just two of us though...


I first got to play D&D my senior year of highschool, and also did some freeform playing in forums.


I actually kind of miss freeform role playing...I can't do it in real time, but it was fun to take turns writing/drawing together with one other person.

Jay R
2016-06-02, 06:40 PM
In high school, I was in the chess club. Some members liked the Avalon Hill and SPI wargames, but I couldn't6 see the point. I hadn't mastered chess yet - why would I want to start a game with more complicated rules?

In my junior year in college (1975), my roommate was deeply into wargaming. I listened, to be polite, but never got interested, until he brought home a copy of Metagaming's Stellar Conquest. This was different - this was science fiction. I had to play it. And I enjoyed it.

Then he brought home a small white box with three pamphlets called Dungeons and Dragons, and that seemed exciting. I played it once, and the idea seemed cool, but the rules didn't work well. But within a week he also had the brand new first supplement, called Greyhawk. Now the game played well.

I rolled up a natural paladin, and never looked back.

Belac93
2016-06-02, 06:51 PM
My dad got me a copy when I was 9, and played a couple games with me and my younger brother. Then I pretty much just looked at the pictures and read the fluff for a couple years, and then decided to actually teach myself to play.

oxybe
2016-06-02, 07:38 PM
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/FF1_USA_boxart.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/84/Dragon_Warrior.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Legend_of_zelda_cover_%28with_cartridge%29_gold.pn g

Of those three, only the middle one I managed to buy for myself, the others were at family/friends.

From there I played a lot of other console & videogame RPGs until a friend came in with a ragged copy of 2nd ed his uncle brought him.

Note that this was ~'97 when we both two dumb french speaking kids in middle school given those 2nd ed books. I swear we made up more of the rules then played with the official ones. I still find those books horribly written and I'm now in my 30s :smalltongue:

About 4-5 years later I played 3.0 when another friend got them and it made much more sense. Partially because the books were better edited, partially because I was a year or two of from graduating and had a better grasp of English at that point.

Once I graduated I took a few years off RPing in college, moved to a town with FLGS and been gaming with the same core group since... we've been together for what... almost 10 years now?

TurboGhast
2016-06-02, 07:44 PM
The first time I played a tabletop RPG, it was the 4e adventure inside the DMG. The character of the party met each other by walking into a bar and saying "Ow" at the same exact time.

themaque
2016-06-02, 07:57 PM
I was a geeky theater kid and movie buff. A couple of friends introduced me to 2nd ed D&D revised books had just come out. for something to do on weekends. I was horrible, could never remember which die did what. But I liked telling stories and acting out my characters.

Still game on occasion with a few people from that group. One of them introduced me to this forum.

Thrudd
2016-06-02, 08:03 PM
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QTIeBuLnD-A/UR_ToMA9-VI/AAAAAAAAAKA/q8g2RT4XY-s/s1600/holmes+box.jpg


That box was the same one I found in my parents' bookcase, probably ten years after you found it in the store. When I was around ten, and having finished reading Lord of the Rings, I actually started paying attention to what my dad had in the bookcase, and Lo and Behold! They never mentioned it, never actually had played it, but bought it around the time I was born with the intent to play with some neighbors of theirs. I opened the box, with new, crisp green character sheets and untouched rules booklet and dungeon module B2, Keep on the Borderlands. Nothing sounded like more fun, and I immediately recruited anyone I could to try playing, starting with the neighbor kids my mom babysat after school and my little sister.

Eventually, I got some school friends to start playing with me, and found out that one friend's older brother and other friend's cousins used to play D&D, too. We inherited some of the 1e AD&D books from them, found a couple more at yard sales, and evolved from Basic to AD&D.

AMFV
2016-06-02, 11:05 PM
It was actually my father and MERP when I was around eight or nine, or maybe even a little younger. I've been interested in the hobby ever since.

hymer
2016-06-03, 02:43 AM
It was actually my father and MERP when I was around eight or nine, or maybe even a little younger. I've been interested in the hobby ever since.

Did he tone down the crit descriptions for you? :smallyuk:

Arkhios
2016-06-03, 02:52 AM
Diablo 2 was the first game I ever owned for any videogame platform, so most likely that. Although, I recall playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 at a friend, but I'm unsure if it was before or after I was lost in the world of Sanctuary. Later, I got introduced to D&D via Icewind Dale (I know, I know, it's strange that I didn't know of Baldur's Gate yet at that time) which I happened to see at a store once. It was on sale for very cheap so I bought it. Oh my god was it awesome! (Still is. Unfortunately I can't play it because Windows 10 seems to be incompatible with my ("enhanced") version)
Though I must admit that when a friend introduced me to tabletop D&D later, I didn't at first realize it was the same game as Icewind Dale :D

Yora
2016-06-03, 06:24 AM
http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060623224436/forgottenrealms/images/0/09/Baldur%27s_Gate_box.jpg

It was saturday in summer, and I was really terribly bored. So I flipped through old game magazines to look for a new game I might buy. I had never read the review of Baldur's Gate that was in one of them (or any RPG reviews), but the high rating caught my curiosity. And reading the whole thing made it sound quite interesting. With nothing better to do and some money to spare, I got on my bike, drove into town... and here I am. :smalltongue:

BWR
2016-06-03, 06:35 AM
The Dungeons and Dragons Game (1991 box set). That cover art is frickin' amazing.
The DM was introduced to RPGs by his older brother and wanted to play. I was an instant convert. We quickly got hold of the RC, and 2e a few years later.

KillingAScarab
2016-06-03, 07:02 AM
There are quite a few people who started with Baldur's Gate. I envy you for the impression that CG opening must have made, but I don't envy your need to grasp THAC0.

Yora
2016-06-03, 07:46 AM
No, that's the great thing about it: When you play AD&D as a videogame you don't have to make any of those calculations. Just pick weapons and armor with the biggest plusses. Though it's indeed a bit confusing that a +2 sword has -2 on attack, but that's something you just roll with.

Quertus
2016-06-03, 07:48 AM
Would you believe... Bible Bus?

I saw some of my classmates rolling dice and scribbling down notes while we were on the Bible Bus at school. Afterward, I asked them what they had been doing, and they introduced me to D&D.

It was awesome.

Having neither books nor money, I quickly discovered the value, to put it in more modern terms, of putting ranks in profession: scribe.

If I hadn't already been introduced to D&D, I probably would have found it when they came out with D&D flash cards. All the cool pictures and random stats - what better way could there be to spend my allowance?

So, I guess the real answer is, I got introduced to D&D... by dice.

Ninja_Prawn
2016-06-03, 08:03 AM
No, that's the great thing about it: When you play AD&D as a videogame you don't have to make any of those calculations. Just pick weapons and armor with the biggest plusses. Though it's indeed a bit confusing that a +2 sword has -2 on attack, but that's something you just roll with.

The thing that got me was that some weapons had +X to-hit, and others had -X to THAC0. I think the Composite Longbow of Marksmanship had both at the same time!

I didn't realise having high THAC0 was bad until I read the description of the Potion of Heroism, which lowers your THAC0 by 20% (or whatever). As someone who'd never played D&D before, I feel like they could have handled that better. Incidentally, the Enhanced Edition has made some attempts to address this, which I quite like.

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-03, 08:14 AM
There are quite a few people who started with Baldur's Gate. I envy you for the impression that CG opening must have made, but I don't envy your need to grasp THAC0.

Nah, at the age I was I just picked the weapons the sounded cool. Later on I started working out how to pick the most damaging weapons, but by the time I realised I needed to grasp THAC0 I just had to realise it was just reverse BAB.

EDIT: I should mention that I never got to the magic weapons, but at the point I was playing most often I semi-religiously played mages.


Would you believe... Bible Bus?

Let me think of my group at university:
-One member was raised Catholic, one raised Anglican (high church), I'm low-church Anglican, and one member is at least culturally Jewish. And that's all I'll say about our religious beliefs, thank you very much.
-We all hang out at the university Chaplaincy, except for the GM who has a job somewhere else (although he comes to the Chaplaincy occasionally when on campus).
-One of the Chaplains has in several cases overheard us discussing our games, including some really weird things such as the dwarf-hold being gassed (that wasn't us!) and we haven't been bible-bashed yet...

So in answer to your question, yes :smalltongue:


I saw some of my classmates rolling dice and scribbling down notes while we were on the Bible Bus at school. Afterward, I asked them what they had been doing, and they introduced me to D&D.

It was awesome.

Having neither books nor money, I quickly discovered the value, to put it in more modern terms, of putting ranks in profession: scribe.

In the modern day I've discovered profession (typist) is extremely useful when nobody else can be bothered to buy the book. Oh how I love games which provide pdfs, it allows me to print out the character creation sections and quickly create cheat-sheets. I'm now starting to drift towards simpler games because it's just easier to run with a single book at the table if I'm not running Anima or GURPS.

hymer
2016-06-03, 08:14 AM
There are quite a few people who started with Baldur's Gate. I envy you for the impression that CG opening must have made, but I don't envy your need to grasp THAC0.

I don't envy them "You must gather your party before venturing forth", and the time spent waiting for characters to cross a screen being longer than the load times. Or that they stop for a moment every time you tell them to go somewhere. Or that entering the equipment screen ends the pause on combat. Or that you can switch between weapons easily, but not between weapon-and-shield and a bow, say. Or the random chance quests.
Oh, I bought the game. Played it, too. But I can't play it for long without getting a headache.

AMFV
2016-06-03, 08:20 AM
Did he tone down the crit descriptions for you? :smallyuk:

I don't believe he did. I don't recall if that was or wasn't the case. I do remember reading through all of them myself when I was eleven or so. I thought that they were amazingly hilarious and/or awesome. Particularly the tables you had to crit twice to get to.

Cluedrew
2016-06-03, 08:27 AM
That would have been grade... 9 or 10, when we spent half a year going through a campaign and system someone make up on grid-paper. It was terribly balanced and didn't have much story. In fact its only real redeeming feature is that it was played with friends, and some times that is all it needed. Actually it probably would have been the dungeon crawl like board games that created that campaign, but I don't remember those very well.

My first meeting with a official system was at summer camp. This is when I discovered what RPG stood for and joined the "role-playing club". That game did not get very far, but it was fun.

After that it was a year or two before I got into a role-playing forum (free form). Somehow I ended up as the moderator of my first role-play on it, which was the only on going story on it. That went on for about three years before it died completely. Still some heart-break there.

Now I just go through life bumping into other role-players on occasion and playing games where possible.

Stan
2016-06-03, 08:51 AM
There are quite a few people who started with Baldur's Gate. I envy you for the impression that CG opening must have made, but I don't envy your need to grasp THAC0.

Lucky for me, I came to BG late and knew D&D by then.

At the time it came out, Thac0 felt wonderfully simple. It meant we could ditch having a separate to-hit chart for every class. The charts didn't follow an equation so you'd just try to memorize the numbers for a few of the common ACs for your class and level. I don't miss Thac0 at all though. BAB and ascending AC are so much easier to deal with.

wumpus
2016-06-03, 01:40 PM
I remember playing monopoly with a kid and his brother was playing either 0.3e or 0.6e (I know he had the monster manual, maybe the players handbook, but the DMG hadn't been published). It wasn't that much later that I was playing the basic red box (1981, Moldvay) edition with a different set of kids.

I was young then, so mostly hack and slash. Very little "role playing".

Typewriter
2016-06-03, 01:47 PM
I had the stereotypical troubled childhood that many people have, and I made my first real friend at the age of 16 in high school. He played D&D with a bunch of his friends who didn't like me (I was sort of an anti-social spaz) but I worked on myself and got in good with them with his help and they invited me to play 3E. It took me years before I got 'good' at the game, but it gave me an excuse to leave my house for 2-3 days a week. D&D 3E probably saved my life. From there I grew to love the games, playing a character, and eventually building a world as DM.

CharonsHelper
2016-06-03, 01:54 PM
There are quite a few people who started with Baldur's Gate. I envy you for the impression that CG opening must have made, but I don't envy your need to grasp THAC0.

Yeah - another person who played BG without really getting THATCO and having issues with it. (Though I played BGII before I came back for the first one. In hindsight I'm glad; I would have gotten annoyed by dying 40 times before hitting level 3.)

I did get that a character have +s to a weapon meant that's what they should use, but I ended up being so annoyed by the system that I finally went back and made my character a monk so that I didn't need to worry about weapons for MY character at least.

SirBellias
2016-06-03, 02:10 PM
My cousin ran games for us when we got together over the holidays. I was horrible, because I was young and stupid, but I'm certain 10+ years of playing and running games made me a much more personable kind of young and stupid.

Yora
2016-06-03, 02:12 PM
Let me think of my group at university:
-One member was raised Catholic, one raised Anglican (high church), I'm low-church Anglican, and one member is at least culturally Jewish. And that's all I'll say about our religious beliefs, thank you very much.
-We all hang out at the university Chaplaincy, except for the GM who has a job somewhere else (although he comes to the Chaplaincy occasionally when on campus).
-One of the Chaplains has in several cases overheard us discussing our games, including some really weird things such as the dwarf-hold being gassed (that wasn't us!) and we haven't been bible-bashed yet...

So in answer to your question, yes :smalltongue:

Speaking of which, I was actually introduced to fantasy dungeon crawling (through a Britsh tile-based game The Sorcerer's Cave) by my mom, who back then was still a theology student. She (and my dad) also read us The Hobbit and other fantasy books for children, and got us to watch Star Trek every day from a pretty early age. And all my parents friends my mom knows from university are the same type and into a lot of fantasy and sci-fi stuff.
They are not all party-pooping witch hunters.

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-03, 02:18 PM
Speaking of which, I was actually introduced to fantasy dungeon crawling (through a Britsh tile-based game The Sorcerer's Cave) by my mom, who back then was still a theology student. She (and my dad) also read us The Hobbit and other fantasy books for children, and got us to watch Star Trek every day from a pretty early age. And all my parents friends my mom knows from university are the same type and into a lot of fantasy and sci-fi stuff.
They are not all party-pooping witch hunters.

Theology students are competing with circus performers to see who can be the biggest group of complete nerds possible. It's a close race, but they've overtaken physicists and now it's down to whichever set has more time to watch Star Trek.

Also, my university chaplaincy has a quote from Gandalf on one wall and has bunnies in regularly, because d'aww look at the cute little bunny wabbits! Plus it's like the only place on campus you can play chess, religious places are nerd safe havens, as long as you avoid a few churches.

Also, in my experience priests couldn't give two ****s about what you pretend to do for fun, as long as you don't go around summoning actual demons or killing real people. It's just a few overly loud ones while the rest get back to reading their Tolkien.

CharonsHelper
2016-06-03, 02:31 PM
Also, in my experience priests couldn't give two ****s about what you pretend to do for fun, as long as you don't go around summoning actual demons or killing real people. It's just a few overly loud ones while the rest get back to reading their Tolkien.

Yeah - generally the few 'Christians' who have major issues with D&D/RPGs should be considered in the same vein as Westburrow Baptists. They're just the crazies who try to hijack The Bible for justification of their craziness, and are a tiny tiny % of the whole.

I did some research once: the whole D&D=evil thing started by a (rather obviously stupid rather than just mislead) lady whose son committed suicide for totally unrelated reasons and she wanted something to blame besides herself. (Obviously stupid because in an interview, she declared that she estimated that a town was 10% Satan worshippers because she estimated 5% of the adults were Satan worshippers, and 5% of the teenagers were, and that made 10%.)

I've known a few reasonable Christians who were a bit wary of D&D, but that's mostly just because they skimmed an article or two by the crazies back in the day and didn't have any other knowledge of it.

Tentreto
2016-06-03, 02:49 PM
Two things introduced me to RPG's.
The first was the 'Fighting Fantasy' series, a set of British gamebooks which involved a hodgepodge of RPG quests and themes, with my first being 'Forest of Doom', and the best being 'Howl of the Werewolf'. Seriously, someone should do a module of it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/Ff1wizard.jpgThis is the 25th anniversary series- not the original. I'm too young for that.
The one that got the older me into it was Kikoskia's recordings of Paranoia, CofC and Burning Wheel. Without those, I would certainly be more a pure video gamer.

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-03, 03:10 PM
Two things introduced me to RPG's.
The first was the 'Fighting Fantasy' series, a set of British gamebooks which involved a hodgepodge of RPG quests and themes, with my first being 'Forest of Doom', and the best being 'Howl of the Werewolf'. Seriously, someone should do a module of it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/25/Ff1wizard.jpgThis is the 25th anniversary series- not the original. I'm too young for that.
The one that got the older me into it was Kikoskia's recordings of Paranoia, CofC and Burning Wheel. Without those, I would certainly be more a pure video gamer.

Oh my god, I remember those! I always died due to a bad luck roll or not picking the correct spells or something stupid like that.

MrNobody
2016-06-04, 04:28 AM
What introduced me to RPG, you ask... the answer is: a very very very annoying friend!

We were sixteen or so, and this friend of mine started playing AD&D with one of his neighbour: for weeks everything he was able to talk about when we went out together was this strange game in which you pretend to be an hero and go around saving kingdoms and such... ALL THE TIME.
He talked and talked and talked, he seemed obsessed, also saying that we MUST have tried the game... it was something one cannot live without!!!!
After weeks of this we all could no longer stand him talking about this game and said:
:smallfurious: FINE, WE GIVE IT A SHOT BUT YOU STOP TALKING ABOUT IT!:smallfurious:

A couple of months later all the group was talking about RPG and i even started DMing: ten years later i'm still the DM of that group.

I have a great debt with this friend of mine for introducing me to RPG.

2D8HP
2016-06-04, 01:23 PM
In high school, In my junior year in college (1975), my roommate was deeply into wargaming. I listened, to be polite, but never got interested, until he brought home a copy of Metagaming's Stellar Conquest. This was different - this was science fiction. I had to play it. And I enjoyed it.

Then he brought home a small white box with three pamphlets called Dungeons and Dragons, and that seemed exciting. I played it once, and the idea seemed cool, but the rules didn't work well. But within a week he also had the brand new first supplement, called Greyhawk. Now the game played well.

I rolled up a natural paladin, and never looked back.Just wow.
Thank you!
Because of you and your like the hobby that has brought so many, so much joy extends to more than a handful of folks in Arneson's and Gygax's rec rooms.
It would be an honor to buy you a round and shake your hand.
I bow to you sir!

RyumaruMG
2016-06-04, 03:15 PM
My father owns an expansive collection of the AD&D 2nd Edition books. I grew up with those around as reading material. He also played everything CRPG, particularly Baldur's Gate, and I just got absorbed by the settings and characters.

There were several afternoons where I just spent hours in the garage reading all of the Player's Option books off of his bookshelf.

Braininthejar2
2016-06-04, 03:21 PM
"The Eye of Yrheddes", a beginners RPG system with a single adventure, written by Andrzej Sapkowski (the author of the Witcher)

http://static.intelimedia.pl/sub/Oko-Yrrhedesa-1-Wydanie-_bn19223.jpg

Then came Crystals of Time (a Polish D&D clone infamous for the maths involved) followed by Warhammer, D&D and finally World of Darkness.

No-Kill Cleric
2016-06-04, 05:59 PM
I just knew D&D existed in the culture, which as I grew into my nerdiness I wanted to become a part of.

I rented the D&D 3.5 players handbook when I got to college, fascinated.

I made a friend at my summer job who was looking for a backup player. He taught me how to use a character sheet.

I would up playing Pathfinder when one of his main players had a schedule conflict.

I've been loving it ever since.

Also the guy who got me into RPGs and I have been together for almost a year, and I couldn't be happier.

5a Violista
2016-06-04, 06:38 PM
My grandma's SNES was what first introduced me to RPGs. I'd stay at her house for days on end and when nobody else wanted to play outside with me (they all wanted to play 007 on the N64), I ended up wandering into the room with the SNES. I eventually got tired of playing Donkey Kong Country, Primal Rage, some Mario games, and Time Slip so I started going through the drawers and cabinets looking for other games. Chrono Trigger, which is an RPG, was in there.

Actually, though, now that I think about it: I was making up my own roleplaying games all the time to play with my brothers, ranging from princesses-and-dragons to fairies to futuristic shooter ones...I don't think this counts, though, since pretty much every child does this.

...
If we're talking about tabletop RPGs, then it was the Order of the Stick itself that introduced me to it. Story: Our family's computer was in the basement, and I noticed my older brother was frequently on it reading comic strips, but he would always tab away, close the window, or cover up the address bar and "Giant in the Playground" title before sticking his tongue out at me. But the comic had colorful stick figures, and that was SO COOL! No matter what I said, he wouldn't tell me the name of the comic. This went on for, like, a couple months. Finally, when he was away at band I sneaked down to the computer and somehow figured out how to search the history. I found the comic, and started reading it, and there were RPG jokes that I didn't get all over but I was determined to read it until it got funny. Eventually, once I caught up with the comics I checked out the Forum and joined, and eventually ventured into the free form roleplaying subforum here and started "tabletop" roleplaying.

KillingAScarab
2016-06-05, 10:41 AM
"The Eye of Yrheddes", a beginners RPG system with a single adventure, written by Andrzej Sapkowski (the author of the Witcher)

http://static.intelimedia.pl/sub/Oko-Yrrhedesa-1-Wydanie-_bn19223.jpgInteresting. Thanks for that info.


My grandma's SNES was what first introduced me to RPGs.
...
I eventually got tired of playing Donkey Kong Country, Primal Rage, some Mario games, and Time Slip so I started going through the drawers and cabinets looking for other games. Chrono Trigger, which is an RPG, was in there.:smalleek:
*tries to contain feelings about Chrono Trigger*
Why, yes, Chrono Trigger is a very good...
R-66Y
That is my name, but
you can call me
anything (http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR00988)
...
So much for that.
:smallbiggrin:
(Seriously, Chrono Trigger is an amazing Japanese RPG I would recommend to nearly anyone.)

Scathain
2016-06-05, 10:54 AM
(Younger player here, so don't expect anything earlier than the late 90's)

No friends at a college far, far, from home led to me actually TALKING to my roommate. One day I asked him what his plans for the weekend were (as I had none) and he enthusiastically replied that he was attending the tabletop games club of our school.
A quick write up of a necromancer, and a lengthy rant about how 3.X was FAR superior to 4e, and I was addicted to dungeons and dragons.

TBH, other than obvious Diablo 2 and other RPG origins, it wasn't until the Elder Scrolls series that I fully realized what an open world game could accomplish, so I set my games to that bar. Needless to say, I was quite disappointed until I realized that D&D could do all that and more.

EccentricCircle
2016-06-05, 04:31 PM
My first exposure to roleplaying games is a bit hard to pin down, as it was more of an evolution from the kind of gaming that all kids do.

Throughout primary school my friends and I used to play lots of sci fi games. The sort where you run around the playground pretending to be on a space ship. I was into world building from an early age, and loved drawing maps and designing space ships. Our games soon developed into a very elaborate shared setting, with complex interplanetary conflicts, space exploration and so on.

Then we moved to secondary school, and you were no longer allowed to play games in the playground (Well the teachers didn't care, but kids who think they are more grown up than you because they have less fun can make your life a living hell).

I wanted to keep my games going, and keep telling stories in that world, but it became much more of a theater of the mind thing. As a result the stories became far more political and strategic. We got permission to use one of the classrooms at lunch times, and would spread out large star maps, and orchestrate vast military operations.

At primary school our characters had largely been the crew of the same ship, which happened to be the shape of the playground. Now we were promoted to admirals, and diplomats, each representing our own faction within this galaxy spanning alliance. We all had our own flagships and would make up mission reports and the like, then at break times we'd hold meetings and discuss plans, fight space battles and go on expeditions.

We ended up with a large group playing this, some of whom were into the diplomacy style game, and some of whom wanted to do more direct action. Some people in our group were more into fantasy than sci fi, So talk of doing a fantasy game got more frequent. I was actually writing a fantasy novel in my spare time, so doing a lot of world building for that.

The idea of starting a D&D campaign came up a few times, but we weren't certain whether we'd do it in the same style as our sci fi gaming, whether we'd use my fantasy setting or make a blank slate etc. I had a copy of the D&D red box, which my parents had bought many years before. I'd tried to play it as a kid, but hadn't got further than playing through the solo adventure, and when we looked at it as a group we never quite figured it out.

Then I picked up a copy of Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which more or less convinced me to give D&D another try.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/25/Ff1wizard.jpg/150px-Ff1wizard.jpg

I was soon buying every Fighting Fantasy book I could get my hands on and for those who haven't played them they are kind of like a choose your own adventure book with simple RPG mechanics. They were written by the founders of games workshop to be an introductory RPG experience, and for me they definitely worked.

Reading those gave me a pretty good grounding in D&D and made me want to start creating my own adventures. 3.5 edition had not long come out, so I was given the 3.0 starter set for my birthday, and the players handbook and monster manual for Christmas a few weeks later.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61fZvYVLEtL.jpg

We started a rotating DM game, where we each had a character, and each took a turn DMing. I quickly started DMing more than the others and the games became set in my fantasy world. At the time we never really thought about finding a system for the sci fi games, which continued with a different set of players and eventually became more of a play by post roleplaying thing.

Years later the play by post stuff lost momentum, by this time I was an experienced DM who had played a lot of systems and was regularly creating settings for my games. So I decided to make a system specifically for my Sci fi setting.

We've been playtesting on and off for a few years now and I'm pretty happy with what i've created. I'm currently preparing the latest version, and a campaign which will run through next year. I estimate this to be around the 20th anniversary of the first games we played (which must have been around 1996-1997 although the exact origins are lost in the mists of time). The setting has evolved massively in the last twenty years, but I'm pleased to say that the foundation my ten year old self laid was solid enough that it is still very much recognisable.

Dire Roc
2016-06-05, 06:09 PM
I first saw the concept of D&D in an episode of Dexter's Laboratory. I liked the idea and funny shaped dice but didn't see much more of it for a while. When I was eleven my best friend brought a 3.5 Monster Manual to school and I looked at it during lunch. I flipped to a random page and read the entry for a chaos beast and thought it sounded interesting. We already did a lot of free form RP around the playground and when playing at each others houses, so it didn't seem too crazy.

A year or two later I had the chance to join in a game his dad was running and rolled up a halfling rogue. My mother was a bit worried at first due to her only exposure to D&D being the moral panics of the nineties, but figured since it was my best friend I could give it a try. After I had so much fun she didn't question things again. Our DM was an AD&D player it was an odd mix of 3.5 and AD&D mechanics, but I had fun. I didn't find another game to join for a while but I was into webcomics which in turn led me to Order of the Stick, where I learned most of what I know about the actual mechanics of D&D 3.5. I tried out other editions and systems with my cousins and some other friends and made my way to lurking on these very forums for years.

In college I joined a short lived Pathfinder game and later recruited my now regular play group. We mostly play Pathfinder but I've been working on encouraging more system diversity with Shadowrun; Blade of the Iron Throne; Mutants and Masterminds; Warrior, Rogue, and Mage; Monsters and Other Childish Things and so on.

The Glyphstone
2016-06-05, 06:14 PM
http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060623224436/forgottenrealms/images/0/09/Baldur%27s_Gate_box.jpg


Same here.

Kyberwulf
2016-06-05, 08:03 PM
I would say, Games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, and Zelda. All had a huge effect on me, and got me into the fantasy Genre. I don't consider them RPGs per se. What got me into D&D, was a preachers wife.

lol. She was talking to me and my cousins about how we should never play the game. Because it was about devil worship, and sacrificing babies. I don't know why I picked up after she made us promise to never play it. I think it was just a curiosity of just how bad it was. Turns out it wasn't bad at all.

oxybe
2016-06-05, 08:16 PM
I would say, Games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, and Zelda. All had a huge effect on me, and got me into the fantasy Genre. I don't consider them RPGs per se. What got me into D&D, was a preachers wife.

lol. She was talking to me and my cousins about how we should never play the game. Because it was about devil worship, and sacrificing babies. I don't know why I picked up after she made us promise to never play it. I think it was just a curiosity of just how bad it was. Turns out it wasn't bad at all.

You must have gotten a 2nd hand copy of the book. Original printings come with a tear-away pentagram placemat and instructions for your first baby-sacrificing ritual to Baphomet.

Common mistake, really.

Madbox
2016-06-07, 02:14 AM
When I was a little kid, I lived in the mountains with my mom and grandparents. There weren't any kids that lived near enough to play with on a regular basis, most of my social interaction was at school. Even when I moved in with my dad and stepmom who lived in a more suburban area, I just preferred doing my own thing. So I played lots of video games. Pokémon, Legend of Zelda, Morrowind and Oblivion, Final Fantasy, you know the drill.

So then high school hit. And with it came a bad math teacher my freshman year. He wasn't a bad teacher in general, just at math (he was actually a PE teacher, but they needed a math teacher :smallsigh:). So I was behind in math, which had me bored in those higher level classes. We had these fancy graphing calculators for our work, and they had a programming function. I started goofing around with it, and made a few simple games. Since a text-based rpg is pretty easy to program, I wound up making one. This got me thinking about how those crpgs worked in a new way, since the algorithms for things like attack accuracy and power, defensive capabilities, etc, had to be reverse engineered from what I knew.

Eventually I graduated, and moved to a new town. I knew of D&D, and had wanted to play for some time. Lo and behold, this new town had a card shop that ran Adventurer's League. It was pretty easy to pick up, after having had a bit of experience with the mechanical end of rpgs and having a dozen veterans to correct any mistakes.

Mr Blobby
2016-06-07, 03:35 AM
Hmm...

Without making an essay from it, think my decent into madness went like this...

Sonic 1 [1993] Wow, this is a 'computer game', eh?
Theme Park [1994]. Little kid, played it on cousin's Amiga. First discovery of a game which needed brain as well as fast fingers.
Zelda, a Link to the Past [1996] Came with a hand-me-down SNES. Wow, a story!
Fallout 1/2 [2002] The value version. I got it free when I bought Civ II and I think Theme Hospital.
Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic 1/2 [2004] Played 1 at friends, then got it myself. Then got 2 myself.
Elder Scrolls 3 - Morrowind [2006] Got it in a job-lot of 50+ PC games for Ł10. It sucked me in, and most importantly broke the 'fantasy is stupid' mental block.
Neverwinter Nights 2 [2007]. Bought it because Obsidian made KOTOR 2...
Arcanum [2008]. For Troika was from the ashes of Interplay [Fallout]
Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines [2009]. Damn Troika again...

And then pdfs with the titles 'Clanbook Gangrel' and the like started appearing on my computer...

Interestingly, I actually repeatedly encountered Warhammer, D&D etc as a kid. But it just never took me back then. I preferred stuff like books...

Honourable mentions also go to old 'choose your own adventure' books.

Phoenixguard09
2016-06-07, 05:31 AM
I read and watched Lord of the Rings at young age which started the fantasy obsession.

I then got very much into Warhammer, at first through the LotR SBG, and the Fantasy and dabbled 40k.

At school, I created and ran some freeform RPG's, thinking that I had come up with something completely new and unique. (We didn't have internet at that stage. It hadn't come to Greenbank.) Then I discovered D&D and found out what it was, and was initially disappointed to find that Gygax had well and truly beaten me to it.

Now, 12 or so years after that first RPG I created, I'm still making homebrews and running games for my friends.

KillingAScarab
2016-06-07, 09:48 AM
Honourable mentions also go to old 'choose your own adventure' books.Since that salamander didn't turn out to be what you thought it was, you have died. Start again at the beginning.

Shadowgate was also very much this, with time limits imposed by how long your torches last. If only CYOA books had death music.

goto124
2016-06-07, 09:54 AM
Since that salamander didn't turn out to be what you thought it was, you have died. Start again at the beginning.

Choose between two completely made-up words! One will cause you to be stuck in a dungeon, the other will get you be worshiped by the entire town! No, you don't get any clues as to what the words mean.

Do you climb down the mountain, or start your helicopter again? If you choose the latter, the noise of the helicopter triggers an avalanche, leading to a game over. You have to climb down.

I bookmarked pages and did the paper equivalent of loading my last save point, though I didn't think of it like that at the time. Ah, childhood, even I back then figured how boring it was to start all over again and repeat the very pages I already read about 5 times before.

LordFluffy
2016-06-07, 10:34 AM
A babysitter and AD&D when I was 10.

He's a monk now.

CharonsHelper
2016-06-07, 10:47 AM
A babysitter and AD&D when I was 10.

He's a monk now.

The babysitter, or his character?

MrZJunior
2016-06-07, 10:50 AM
In college some of my friends were talking about something called LARPing, they made it sound like the greatest thing ever, and they were right! My character died in the second session I was in so I badgered one of the GMs into letting me become the voices in another character's head. I almost talked him into setting the Zeppelin everyone was in on fire. Good times.

goto124
2016-06-07, 10:51 AM
A babysitter and AD&D when I was 10.

He's a monk now.


A babysitter and AD&D when I was 10.

He's a monk now.

:durkon:: Nice dodge.
Waitress: Ninja (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0312.html).

(6th panel.)

JAL_1138
2016-06-07, 11:21 AM
What introduced me? To the concept of RPGs, PC and console videogames like Ultima and Final Fantasy, although I didn't know the connection to tabletop games at the time. The "don't play D&D because it's TEH SATAN" nonsense the various parents and religious folk in my podunk backwater town said. The Dragonlance novels, which the locals hadn't figured out were D&D tie-in products. The stories people (quietly) told about their tabletop experiences, which definitely proved it wasn't T3H SATAN and made me want to play.

What got me actually started, when I was a kid in the 90s, one of my cousins ran a solo game for me in 2e AD&D while he was in for the summer. Sadly, my memory's terrible and I was fairly young at the time, so I honestly can't recall much about it other than that it was set in Krynn because he was a big Dragonlance fan at the time, and I'd read some of the books, enough to know a bit about the setting. I do recall he started me off higher than first level so I wouldn't die constantly, and gave me some NPC allies. It was expressly a tutorial rather than a proper game, mostly serving to get me used to the idea of tabletop gaming and help me learn the rules. But that was still the first time I ever rolled a d20.

EDIT: I found a local group shortly thereafter. The DM for that group ran a lot of 1e material he converted (by scribbling a THAC0 into stat blocks in modules or just using the versions in the 2e Monstrous Compendiums), as well as keeping up with newer stuff, like Planescape when it came out years later.

ALSO EDIT: Same cousin introduced me to Shadowrun and WEG d6 Star Wars.

ALSO ALSO EDIT: Okay, so I'm not that old of an old coot, but it sure feels like it when I've got a decade or so on current college students, and there are registered voters who were born after TSR got bought by WotC. And what I don't have in old, I make up for in coot.

Kitten Champion
2016-06-07, 12:03 PM
The first RPG I played was probably Chrono Trigger for the Super Famicom - though Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma were there too. My father wasn't/isn't into RPGs, so they were the exception in his collection. Later, when I got a PS2 and a Nintendo DS, I found a pretty wide library of JRPGs waiting for me and inevitably they would come to consume most of my gaming time and budget.

As to the Table Top, a few years ago I was asked whether I'd like to come along by an acquaintance claiming it would probably be of interest to me. I said I don't really like finicky games with huge manuals and lots of things to keep track of, to which he responded that I could just watch as a spectator for a while and that there would be cats present that I presumably could cuddle. So I went, and after watching that session I was more or less comfortable with the thought of participating so long as I didn't have to spend any actual money and the cats remain in extant. The terms were agreed to by all, I was lent a Pathfinder Handbook and was walked through some of the intricacies of the game to the point that I could play without feeling clueless or needlessly disruptive.

I started GMing about four months later, and started participating with another group so that I'm probably playing at least 2 twice a week.

Anonymouswizard
2016-06-07, 12:29 PM
ALSO ALSO EDIT: Okay, so I'm not that old of an old coot, but it sure feels like it when I've got a decade or so on current college students, and there are registered voters who were born after TSR got bought by WotC. And what I don't have in old, I make up for in coot.

I hear you, I'm really too young to be a gonard, I'm in my early 20s for Pelor's sake, but whenever I meet people just starting D&D I feel the urge to go 'back in my day we had to talk to the big bad of the adventure and character creation took fifteen hours where you could end up with a useless character at the end of it.' I also have this very strange tendency to prefer either games as old as I am (AD&D2e is older than me, as is RuneQuest), or modern games like Fate, with only a handful of the ones I actually grew up with appealing to me. This ends up a lot of the time with me in a group where I'm the only one who complains for one reason or another (the horrible dice for the new Star Wars games, the restricted character creation in D&D 5e...), except for one group where creating everybody's characters still takes three hours (for various reasons you do not want to build your character before session 1, starting with boredom).

It also means that I'll argue with people older than me that classes are horribly restricting, although there are some classed games that I like they are generally looser. The side effect of a university friend introducing me to Unknown Armies, where the system just works much more fluently than any edition of D&D (I also have a liking for d%).

EDIT: cats are always a plus when it comes to RPGs, and I seem to be the person everyone in the group expects to buy the rulebook (probably because I already own so many, I love running games).

2D8HP
2016-06-07, 01:04 PM
What got me actually started, when I was a kid in the 90s, one of my cousins ran a solo game for me in 2e AD&D while he was in for the summer. Sadly, my memory's terrible and I was fairly young at the time, so I honestly can't recall much about it other than that it was set in Krynn because he was a big Dragonlance fan at the time, and I'd read some of the books, enough to know a bit about the setting. I do recall he started me off higher than first level so I wouldn't die constantly, and gave me some NPC allies. It was expressly a tutorial rather than a proper game, mostly serving to get me used to the idea of tabletop gaming and help me learn the rules. But that was still the first time I ever rolled a d20.
I found a local group shortly thereafter. The DM for that group ran a lot of 1e material he converted (by scribbling a THAC0 into stat blocks in modules or just using the versions in the 2e Monstrous Compendiums), as well as keeping up with newer stuff, like Planescape when it came out years later.
Same cousin introduced me to Shadowrun and WEG d6 Star Wars.
Okay, so I'm not that old of an old coot, but it sure feels like it when I've got a decade or so on current college students, and there are registered voters who were born after TSR got bought by WotC. And what I don't have in old, I make up for in coot.


I hear you, I'm really too young to be a gonard, I'm in my early 20s for Pelor's sake, but whenever I meet people just starting D&D I feel the urge to go 'back in my day we had to talk to the big bad of the adventure and character creation took fifteen hours where you could end up with a useless character at the end of it.' I also have this very strange tendency to prefer either games as old as I am (AD&D2e is older than me, as is RuneQuest), or modern games like Fate, with only a handful of the ones I actually grew up with appealing to me.Congratulations guys! "Cooting" is one of the chief recompense's joys of getting older! Getting "Coot" right usual takes years of practice so ease into it (dagnabbit). :smallwink:
I remember some 1e "modules" (as we called them) as being filled with Awesomocity!! (Que es "Vault of the Drow"), and from what I've heard 2e was a great game!
Unlike many other (lame) RPG's I've played, both Runequest and Shadowrun are standouts in that they were close to being the fun/cool of 70's D&D, so awesome!
I am fascinated that so many have listed video games and reading OOTS as "starts" cool!

JAL_1138
2016-06-07, 01:34 PM
Video games being an intro isn't terribly unusual, I don't think--even back in the day. Ultima III came out in 1983, same year as Mentzer BECMI kicked off with Red Box, and TSR was producing and/or licensing D&D games all through the '80s and '90s. Granted, PC gaming back in those days was a lot more rare, expensive, and complicated than now. Then on the NES, Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior at the time) and Final Fantasy came out in the US in '89 and '90, respectively.

Kaiju Claws
2016-06-07, 08:02 PM
Godzilla brought me into the TTRPG fold. :)

For most of my life, I played video games, read fantasy books, and all sorts of standard nerd fare, but the reason I got into all of it can be traced back to my first time watching Godzilla, King of the Monsters! as a 5 year old boy. From there came Star Wars, Tolkien, you name it. Godzilla was the key and the gate to all of the fantastical things that I love today.

To be specific, it was the old D20 section of Toho Kingdom that did it. I was perusing the site as I was/am want to do when I stumbled upon some homebrewed stats for Godzilla in 3.5. I had no idea what half of the numbers meant, but the lore of it, the stance of Godzilla as a god with worshippers and a world where this was normal fascinated me. I designed my first rpg character based on that page, Job Tanakh, cleric of Godzilla. But without any friends who played or knowledge of internet roleplaying groups, I simply polished his story for years and dreamed of one day playing him.

The thought of playing that character is what inspired me to sit in on a one shot TTRPG in college almost 5 years ago. That game, an adventure based on Diablo 2 in 3.5, never made it to the second session but I wanted more. Inspired, I got some friends together and started running my own Call of Cthulhu game (culminating in a year long playthrough of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth). Since then I have actually got to play my Godzilla worshipping character in a Pathfinder campaign and have continued my Keeper/GM/DM streak by taking the reigns from my old DM (now player). To my utter joy, I now run a monthly game of Pathfinder for 7 players, with no signs of slowing down, in a gameworld that has grown into something I could have once only dreamed about. Looking back on it all, I don't think it could have turned out any better.

Cluedrew
2016-06-09, 03:50 PM
Job Tanakh, cleric of Godzilla.Welcome to infinity.

Kaiju Claws
2016-06-09, 09:27 PM
Welcome to infinity.

I feel like I'm missing something here. Are we talking about the infinite possibilities of roleplaying? The unending games and adventures? Or DM-ing forever? I just don't know... :P

Cluedrew
2016-06-10, 07:29 AM
To Kaiju Claws: The first two apply. Actually so does your last statement about confusion because I'm not sure exactly what it means, it just seemed appropriate.

Kaiju Claws
2016-06-10, 08:17 AM
To Kaiju Claws: The first two apply. Actually so does your last statement about confusion because I'm not sure exactly what it means, it just seemed appropriate.

Thank you Cluedrew. I will take it. :smallbiggrin:

Kol Korran
2016-06-10, 01:14 PM
I was quite young (Age 9-10 I think?) When a neighbor of mine showed me these two booklets. (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fc0oerQCkNM/T9FZjJu69FI/AAAAAAAAAZ0/11u0Fxud55A/s1600/DSCN2530.JPG)

I started reading the player's booklet, were you were a warrior, fought a big snake, then agoblin, then you met this cleric which healed you, and then fought Bargle the evil wizard, and later on explored a small dungeon yourself.

In that dungeon there was a rust monster, who ate everything I had. I felt like such a failure threw away the booklet, and mopped, not wanting to play. The neighbor, who was but a year older than me, sat with me, and said something I remember to this day- "You will fight, you will be defeated. But you only really lose if you stop fighting. Not everything is easy. Keep fighting." I kept playing till this day.

He introduced me to the game, to compassion, to fight after failing. He recently passed away, about 4 months ago, after a long hard struggle with illness. I wrote about him a short while ago (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?478709-For-a-friend-of-mine&highlight=friend+heart+kid) (A bit sad, not related to the thread. I don't mean to put anyone's spirits down).

This thread made me remember him, yet in a very fond and loving way. It's the people that play this hobby, that made it what it is for me today, and why I keep coming back to it. :smallsmile:

Gnome de plume
2016-10-07, 05:27 AM
Death Knights of Krynn. My cool friend had it on his computer in stunning EGA graphics.
I wanted it so bad, but by the time my family got a computer it had vanished. It took me three years to track it down, and I wouldn't get off it until I had found every quest.

(Ahhh tearful reminisce)

vasilidor
2016-10-07, 06:28 AM
My parents started playing before I was born. while they have dropped out of the hobby, they still have all of their stuff. And sometimes I can talk them into playing again.