Your first introduction to D&D

[Whit]

2nd or 3rd grade 1976 or 1977 at recess a friend told us he played this new fantasy game with his 2 cousins the weekend before.
There were 5 of us. 3 guys, 2 gals who all lived on the same street. With no books he DMed us through a quick verbal dungeon which may have had encounters or not(can’t remember). But the thing I remember was a pearl on a daise surrounded by fire and getting it.
The guys were hooked and he bought the D&D. The girls, well they didn’t join.
What’s your first introduction?

[Blood of Gaea]

I watched a campaign run by my parents and a few of their friends, I was very young and the time, and I remember very little of what actually happened.

[Tiadoppler]

2011. First PnP experience: Out of curiosity, I dropped by to watch a big (8 tables that day) 4e LFR RPGA club and see what D&D was like. I got handed a pregen character sheet and was told to sit down.

[Armored Walrus]

Around sixth grade, so mid-80's, I saw the blue box basic D&D at a rummage sale and convinced my mom to buy it for me. I devoured the rules, grabbed some graph paper and mapped out a dungeon with maybe 3 rooms in it. Put a young white dragon in the last room. (yes, literally dungeons and dragons) Had some friends over to try it out, they made up some characters, bought a donkey, and plunged into the dungeon. The dragon killed everyone except the donkey. I had the donkey attack the dragon, it managed to kill the dragon, and then I told the group that a random cleric happened to come by and raise everyone from the dead.

We all got hooked immediately.

[Beelzebubba]

2nd or 3rd grade 1976 or 1977 at recess a friend told us he played this new fantasy game with his 2 cousins the weekend before.
...
What’s your first introduction?

Hah! I'm a bit later than you.

1978, Holmes Basic, a buddy got it for Hanukkah, we were both 9, and we played terrible terrible D&D for a few years before we found friends to expand the group and be somewhat less terrible.

[KorvinStarmast]

What’s your first introduction? Math class, 1975, high school. A couple of my friends were talking about their dwarves exploring a dungeon. I remembered the dwarves from LoTR books, and Moria. I asked them if that was a game about Moria and the answer was "yes, and no."
It was some weeks later that I finally went over to my friend's house and rolled up my first character, 3d6 in order. I ended up with a 16 Int. Magic User.
We had a memorable fight in a cavern with side passages with a horde of goblins. We had met a couple of other NPC dwarves, and they fought along side us because our dwarf character had talked them into it. I think we had six or seven PC's, depending on who showed up each time.
One of those NPC dwarves survived the battle, and his rolls/fighting had been awesome.
That NPC ended up being my older brother's PC when he joined us some months later.
I got hooked. The D&D bug bit hard.

[Wilb]

November 1994, a visiting cousin took his Black Box & Rules Cyclopedia to our home, we gathered all kids (6-13yo) in the family there and played for 5 hours.

Two years later, we were playing Ravenloft with a black map drawn by hand in a large scratchboard.

[Falcon X]

10th grade High School. My sister invited me into a Lord of the Rings RPG game (the one that came out right after the movies). Played a man of Gondor and had good times.
Somewhere in there we tried out a session or two of D&D. I played a monk. I remember being offput by the linear level structure vs the LOTR assigning XP where you wanted it.

Didn’t play for 4 years after that when my college buddies had been playing a game and asked if I wanted to DM because I was creative. I ended up running a Final Fantasy inspired mess with DM PCs and half the other first time DM mistakes. Good times.

[white lancer]

I had a friend in middle school who enjoyed designing his own versions of games, and one of them was a Middle-Earth TTRPG that he referred to as LOTRDAD. Wasn't all that similar mechanically to D&D, but it was obviously inspired by it and got me interested in that style of game. I was a huge Star Wars fan as well and received the D20 SWRPG handbook for Christmas, so we toyed around with that for a while before the friend who made LOTRDAD introduced me to full-on D&D (3.5) in high school, which of course was basically the same as the D20 Star Wars one. As a big Aragorn fan, I rolled up a Ranger, except mine was a Half-Elf LE follower of Hextor, and we went on a full murder-hobo campaign. That campaign eventually reached level 20 (my character multiclassing into Swordsage), although I missed a good chunk of it thanks to living out of town for college.

[BeefGood]

Late '70s. Can't remember what got me started.

3d6 in order.
You got that right. None of this best-three-of-four and put-your-scores-wherever-you-want nonsense.

[The_Jette]

October or November of 1996. My brother and I joined an older kid from the apartments we lived in to play a Spelljammer campaign. We were space pirates, and trying to build an armada to go after the Spelljammer. I was hooked. My brother decided that D&D was for nerds, and geeks, and never played, again.

[strangebloke]

Haha I'm such a kid compared to y'all.

Heard about dnd all throughout my childhood and teenage years and was very interested, but I lived in a secluded community and so it was never on the table. Anyway, 2011, I get to college, I make some nerdy friends, and I bring up DND.

"Any of you know how I can get in on that?"
"No, no, always interested, never had the chance to try it."
"Yeah, same here, sorry."

A musclebound football player in raybans and a wifebeater peels away from a passing herd of footbal players and points his index finger at us. "You nerds wanna play dnd?" He jerks his thumb back. "Sign up in my room. I'm talking 3.5, hardcore." He then walks away.

He was a horrible DM. Railroading, invincible drow npcs, always had a 15th level DMPC to hold our hand when he didn't want us to die, and invincible level 15 enemies when he wanted us to fail. He would glare at us while we made bluff checks and if we stuttered (ooc) he'd mark it as an auto-fail regardless of the die roll. He would get annoyed and mean whenever we got excited over something. Any victory would be immediately followed by some overpowered enemy.

And we loved it and we've been hooked ever since.

[Potato_Priest]

I was part of my high school's newspaper, and a D&D club was starting up at the school. I needed a story, so I decided to attend the first session and then write about it. Even though we only had one PHB and spent the entire 2 hours just making characters for everyone, I was hooked, and showed up every session thereafter.

[sithlordnergal]

Hmmm, maybe 2009 or 2010. I started with 3.5 as a human Cleric, and we played at this place called the Intel Computer Clubhouse. The very first session we were sneaking into a thieve's guild to steal some crown back.

Being our first session, the party split up. I was stuck with a very unintelligent fighter. The fighter and I found the crown in the middle of a wide open hall with no guards. Despite it being my first time playing, I had alarm bells going off that this was a trap. However, the fighter ignored my warnings, and dragged my character right down the middle...into a trap hole. We were dropped into a room that "had a very odd scent". One knowledge check later and I knew the room we were in was filled with flammable gas. Despite me telling him, the fighter insisted on lighting a torch, blowing us both up.

It was wonderfully fun x3

[Laserlight]

At age 16, so that must have been 1979, I traveled from Virginia to a wargame con in Cherry Hill NJ. In the evening, after I'd played the real "games", I happened upon a table where there was no board, no counters, "You want in? Choose one of these characters". I tried to assassinate one of the other party members, because I was a 16 year old so obviously that would be really cool; when I got caught, I made a false oath on the God of Oaths and ceased to exist. Later on, the remaining PCs were captured by demons and placed on a griddle. One smart guy sword "By the God of Oaths, I don't exist!"...and the DM ruled that he disappeared, but then he was keeping the oath so he reappeared, but now he'd violating it so he disappears again. Angels came and rescued the rest of the party but this guy got told "The bad news is that, since you disappear every instant, nobody remembers you long enough to retrieve you. The good news is, you only spend half of eternity roasting alive."
After that I tagged along with the group, saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the first time at 3am, and somehow made it back to the bus station in time to head home. Where no one at all had heard of D&D, nor wanted to. Bought the AD&D books and did solo generate-your-dungeon-as-you-play stuff until I got to college.

[Moredhel24]

Not Dnd but in the early 2000's when i was about 11 or 12, came across my dad's GURPS Basic Set can't remember if it was 1st or 2nd edition. asked him about it and he helped my siblings and I create some characters and run the CHYOA that was in the back of the book. Have been hooked sense

Remember the book having a lot of handwritten notes and edits in his handwritting to modify it to his old group's playstyle. Mostly dealing with character creation, the rules in the book were point buy based and he's much more of a roller which is where i get it from.

unfortunately i lost the book. Couple of my favorite rules were the ones to determine carrying capacity ( varying levels: none, light, medium, heavy, extra heavy but cant remember formulas) and learning spells (higher level spells required learning lower level ones; ex: to learn fireball you 1st had to have learned shape fire.

[2D8HP]

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 48 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!

I soon got the AD&D PHB, and then the DMG, and by the mid 80's I had many more RPG's (and still keep being them, much to the detriment of my storage needs).

To illustrate, the scene:
A dank almost crypt like basement/garage during the waning years of the Carter Administration, two pre-teens and three teenagers surround a ping pong table, that has books, papers, dice, pizza and sodas on it
Teen DM (my best friends older brother): You turn the corner, and 20' away you see the door shown on the map.
Teen player (who thinks he's all that because he's been playing longer than me with the LBB's, but does he have the new PHB and DMG? No! So who's really the "Advanced" one huh!): With the lantern still tied to the ten foot pole, I slowly proceed forward observing if they are any drafts from unexpected places. You (looks at me) check the floor with the other pole.
Me (pre-teen): Oh man it's late, are we every getting into the treasure room today!
Teen player: You've got to check for traps!
Me: I run up and force the door open!
DM: Blarg the fighter falls through the floor onto the spikes below.
*rolls dice*
Your character is dead.
Teen player: Dude you got smoked!
Me: Look at my next character. I rolled a 15 for Strength.
DM: Really?
Me: Yeah, Derek totally witnessed me rolling it up!
DM: Did he?
Derek (my best friend, another pre-teen who invited me to the game): Are you gonna eat that slice of pizza?
Me: No.
Derek: Yeah I totally saw it.
*munch*
DM: *groan*:smallwink:

In memory of my best friend, Derek Lindstrom Whaley, who in 6th grade saw me reading the blue book and invited me to play D&D at his house - R.I.P.

[Armored Walrus]

^^^

That's the one I started with.

[Caelic]

December 13, 1980. My eighth birthday. It was a present from my uncle, and I don't think he quite grasped how important it would turn out to be.

I was that kid--the one with the extremely high IQ who was also very high on the autism spectrum. It's a frustrating place to find yourself, because you're aware that you're not fitting in socially, but you don't know why. In a lot of ways, it's like being color-blind; you know there are shades of color you can't see, but knowing it doesn't change the fact that you can't see them. In my case, I was color-blind to shades of social nuance. I knew I was going to say and do things that others would find off-putting and annoying, but I didn't know which things.

It was like I'd gone to use the bathroom, and while I was out of the room, someone came along and passed out the "Rulebook for Social Interaction." Everybody got a copy except for me.

But then, along came D&D, and all of a sudden, I HAD a copy of the rules. They were written down; I could read them, I could master them, and (in the limited context of the game) I could function as well as or better than anyone.

And the funny thing about roleplaying socially adept, confident characters is that, eventually, some of it rubs off, and it stops being roleplaying. Now, I'm never going to be a social butterfly, but I like to think I've gone from "weird and off-putting" to "harmlessly eccentric" in the eyes of most of the people who know me.

D&D didn't save my life, but it made it a hell of a lot more bearable.

[RazorChain]

I actually first played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, this was in '87 and my friend had an older brother who ran a few sessions for us to hone his GMing skills. I remember my first session, I came home and told mom excitedly how I had chopped a guy in half. Those of you that have played WFRP know the critical wound tables are really vivid :)

This was followed by some roleplaying drought as me and my friend didn't have any books so we designed our own fantasy board games instead where we either explored dungeons or raised armies to fight monsters to aquire gold to hire more men to fight bigger monsters.

Then my brother started running a BECMI game while we were spending the summer at our grandparents. He was running a game for 3 friends and they needed a healer so I got to join as a cleric, I have never been happier playing a cleric, a class I haven't played since. This was the summer of '89 and when I got back from my grandparents I wanted to run my own game but my brother didn't want to give me access to the books so I just made up my own game based on the rules of D&D from memory. I was a horrible DM running a game for horrible players.....but we got better. Me and my brother then decided to invest in AD&D 2nd edition which was brand new.....and now I got access to all those DM secrets my brother had tried to hide from me. In those times DM's had access to forbidden knowledge that mere players didn't :smallbiggrin:

I ran and played AD&D 2nd ed. in the golden era of the 90's until Wizard of the Coast showed up and destroyed everything with Magic the gathering. Instead of meeting people to roleplay at the local gaming shop, all the tables were used for collectible card games. Luckily it only took 2 decades for roleplay to resurgence where I hail from.

[bc56]

So, one of my friends invited me over to play the game. He was using his dad's old ad&d books, and he had a simple dungeon written up with some wererats in sewers. I played a party of 4: a paladin, a ranger, a rogue, and somebody else, who I can't remember. He gave out ridiculously OP loot to my level 1 party, like a +2 Dragon Slayer for my ranger, Guantlet of Ogre Power for the paladin, and some kind of crossbow with increased range for the rogue. I had a blast, but it was several years before I got books of my own, and those were 5e. I still play d&d with him, but now I DM, and we use 5e. We have a good laugh every now and then over how badly we did at playing the game that first time. I don't think I ever had a character use a class or race feature. They were all just fighters.

[KorvinStarmast]

We have a good laugh every now and then over how badly we did at playing the game that first time. But it was fun, eh? That's why we all kept coming back. :smallsmile:

[oxybe]

The year: '97ish.

The players: A bunch of French-Canadian tweens.

The game: Second-hand AD&D 2nd ed books my friend's out-of-town uncle dropped in his lap. In English.

Oh gods were we lost and confused.

[Darth Ultron]

Back in the 80's the Flea Markets were flooded with small novels, mostly reprinting lots of the magazines from decades before. I read all I could as the price was right for me as a kid: about ten cents per book. I read lots of sci fi and fantasy, but would always run out of ''new'' books to read. Then one day, I saw a Choose your own Adventure Book....and it was amazing: you could read the book a couple times and get a different story each time(er, sort of). I read them up quick, so needed more. And right at that time Ye Old TSR put out their own Choose your own Adventure Books. So I read those too...and in the back of the books was an add ''if you like this book, you should try this game(D&D)''. So I did.....

[Knaight]

I have three first introductions - hearing about D&D, reading D&D, and then eventually playing D&D. It's a bit of a long story.

My first introduction was my mom telling stories of playing D&D back when she was in college, when I saw still a really small kid - call it 1998 or so. I was already into reading in a big way, and already attracted to the fantasy genre in particular compliments of my dad reading The Hobbit to me when I was maybe four, and D&D just sounded so fascinating. Absent actual D&D books though I started with freeform roleplay - which I'd never heard of, but independently came up with and named "The Talky Game", to be later renamed by someone with better branding sense to "Um". I did this for a few years with my brother, my friends, and my brother's friends, and it became a really big thing a bit after I left.

Fast forward to 2005. My family is going to Thailand for a year, so as a treat my parents take me and my brother to the local used videogame store to buy a gameboy game for each of us, for the plane ride. They have a tiny rack of other games, and on them I see the 3.0 PHB and 3.5 DMG, both steeply discounted. I talk my parents into getting those for me instead of a videogame*, devour them both on the plane, then get way into character creation and making intricate and overly detailed (things like naming every single NPC in a village) settings, inspired by the DMG advice. I never actually run D&D during this period, as the DMG advice for detail has been taken too much to heart and I never reach that level of prep.

Eventually (2006 or so) it occurs to me that there might be other RPGs out there, so I look around for these. I find some garbage Legend of Zelda fan RPG that was a bit more loose than D&D, play it for a while, then find Fudge, which is still my favorite system. This got my foot in the door for RPGs proper, and I run a lot of games for a lot of people for a while. A few years later (2009, probably) one of my Fudge players invites me to a D&D game his dad is running. That was the first D&D game I'd actually played, despite already being a bit involved in the theory side.

D&D never really stuck with me as a system, and to this day I keep abreast of it more because it's the lingua franca for RPG players than because I actually like it, although I did get optimistic temporarily as new editions came out. I've played a few intermittent sessions of it. RPGs as a whole stuck with me very well.

*"Hey can I get 650 pages of dense text instead of a videogame" is probably the single easiest thing to talk a parent into as a young kid.

[kivzirrum]

I first discovered D&D through the computer game Baldur’s Gate. I found the game at a store for $15, and I had heard of it, but all I knew of it was that the titular location was the name of a chapter in an RA Salvatore book (blech... 11-year-old me had horrible taste in literature). It was only after buying the game and reading the instruction manual that I understood that the thing connecting the books I’d been reading and the game was D&D.

The reason I’d purchased Baldur’s Gate was because the box had promised you could make your own character—choose to be a fighter or a mage, good or evil, all sorts of things. The idea that there was a fantasy game with even more freedom to “roleplay” your character was too much—I got some friends into Baldur’s Gate, and once they were hooked on the idea, we bought the books. 3rd Edition was brand new, so we got that and spent the next three years playing constantly.

Then in high school all my friends got into Exalted and no one wanted to play D&D anymore. That was the Dark Age for me.

[thompur]

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 48 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!

I soon got the AD&D PHB, and then the DMG, and by the mid 80's I had many more RPG's (and still keep being them, much to the detriment of my storage needs).

To illustrate, the scene:
A dank almost crypt like basement/garage during the waning years of the Carter Administration, two pre-teens and three teenagers surround a ping pong table, that has books, papers, dice, pizza and sodas on it
Teen DM (my best friends older brother): You turn the corner, and 20' away you see the door shown on the map.
Teen player (who thinks he's all that because he's been playing longer than me with the LBB's, but does he have the new PHB and DMG? No! So who's really the "Advanced" one huh!): With the lantern still tied to the ten foot pole, I slowly proceed forward observing if they are any drafts from unexpected places. You (looks at me) check the floor with the other pole.
Me (pre-teen): Oh man it's late, are we every getting into the treasure room today!
Teen player: You've got to check for traps!
Me: I run up and force the door open!
DM: Blarg the fighter falls through the floor onto the spikes below.
*rolls dice*
Your character is dead.
Teen player: Dude you got smoked!
Me: Look at my next character. I rolled a 15 for Strength.
DM: Really?
Me: Yeah, Derek totally witnessed me rolling it up!
DM: Did he?
Derek (my best friend, another pre-teen who invited me to the game): Are you gonna eat that slice of pizza?
Me: No.
Derek: Yeah I totally saw it.
*munch*
DM: *groan*:smallwink:

In memory of my best friend, Derek Lindstrom Whaley, who in 6th grade saw me reading the blue book and invited me to play D&D at his house - R.I.P.

Yep, that's the book my sister brought home from college. The Summer of '76. I was 14, going into 9th grade.