How did you discover D&D?

[Telesphoros]

How did you discover D&D?

For me it was the summer of '81' I think. We had just moved to South Florida a few years before and my uncle and I would drive out Sample Road as far as we could to go fishing. Back before there was a Sawgrass Expressway and a Sawgrass Mills. It was a little hike back to our fishing hole and at one point there was a little stone bridge we would cross. On this particular summer day there was the box top of the D&D Basic Set lying off to one side.

I must have studied that box cover art for hours while we fished, mesmerized. I was already a fantasy fanatic having read the Sword of Shannara and the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings books several times, and watched all the cheesy fantasy movies (think Hawk the Slayer) that would come on in the early am hours. By the end of the Summer I had gotten the Basic and Expert boxed sets and had run a couple of solo campaigns for anyone I could wrangle into sitting with me for a few hours. Keep on the Borderlands and Isle of Dread were run numerous times, sometimes just by myself with no players lol. Had to roll those dice.

Needless to say I was hooked and on my next birthday I got my mom to buy the AD&D 1st Edition DMG, PHB, Monster Manual, Dieties and Demigods, and the Fiend Folio, basically all the hardcovers they had at that time for AD&D. I started running my own homebrew world for a group in high school and then again in the Air Force for some other groups, tweaking some stuff with Second Edition rules (before they started going crazy and publishing a rulebook for anything and everything).

The rest as they say is history. Not as long as some of the grognards around here, but I still got some time invested. Thanks for reading.

[Hurske]

For me it was the second edition monster manual I found in the side of the road, with me being a growing young teen, and the book having a scantily clad succubus... I found D&D

[Naanomi]

My dad had an old ‘red box’ set in his belongings; when he died (I was just starting middle school) I inherited it and played a lot that next year

[ZorroGames]

Early 1970s.

War Game club in Rancho Cordova Library while in USAF.

Chainmail Fantasy war gaming and someone said, “Have you heard of the game called ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ they put out?”

Doomed...

[Mith]

In 2008, I got approached by a friend and was invited over to play D&D with her dad as the DM. I started with Basic there, with new friends adding 3.5 to the table and a brief foray into 4e (not our cup of tea). Bought into 5e, and have a different table to run a few campaigns, since my other table is currently uninterested.

[mgshamster]

It was 1990, and a friend came over with a brand new board game: Dungeon! (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1339/dungeon) We were ten years old.

We played that game many times, and would often talk about how there's an "advanced" version out there that was so complex your characters could do more than just see down a hallways to determine if there are monsters - they could hear and smell, too! We were in awe of such a game.

I don't remember when I transitioned from the board game to AD&D, but it was before I was a teenager. There was a local hobby shop about five miles away, and we'd ride our bikes to it and talk to the owners about the game. And eventually, either me or one of my friends got a copy of the 2nd Edition AD&D PHB. I've been playing it ever since. :)

[Speely]

A weird dude was playing Iron Maiden songs on an unplugged electric guitar while walking down the road in my neighborhood out in the sticks. I asked him what he was up to and he said "the acoustics are better out here," which was totally not true.

Then he asked if my friend and I wanted to play D&D. For some reason (I was a clueless kid) I said yes, and we proceeded to play via the red boxed set over the next couple weeks, on and off.

The DM (the weird guy) had his own NPC in the game who used a 30-sided die because it was his "destiny to kill Satan." My friend and I sort of sat around awkwardly not doing much while he engaged in his own sad power fantasy (apparently he just needed a crowd.)

After he impressed us by killing his own NPC, rather than being soured on rpgs, I told my friend "I bet we could do that a lot better. I am gonna ask for that game for xmas."

Been playing D&D since.

[CaptAl]

1989. It was summer, and right before my 9th birthday. I had been reading the Xanth novels and already had a healthy love for all things fantasy. My father took me into Nick's News in downtown Huntington West Virginia. They carried used comic books, and novels, and I was looking for the next Xanth novel. Instead I saw the red boxed set. I was immediately fascinated with the idea of playing a game with magic and dragons and being the hero from the books I loved to read.

I begged him to buy me that boxed set. He balked, as it was still pretty much the satanic panic era in that area. I cried. He bought it for my birthday.

Here I am, almost 30 years later. I'm still fascinated with playing a game with magic, and dragons. It's just that now I tell the stories instead of reading them.

[Mortis_Elrod]

I’m not sure what possessed me to do it but I think I picked up and started reading Servant of the Shard. I was already very aware of D&D and had played wow and runescape before. D&D peaked my interest and I asked a few of my friends if they wanted to try it. 2 weeks later I had 8 people making characters together, most of which were using 4e, and some of which were using 3.0 and 3.5. Then we brought out some dice and winged it with me as the DM. None of us really knew what we were doing but it was really fun. Idk the exact sequence of events but that session ended with the gnome village they were protecting from a goblinoid raid being sucked into a black hole. We started at level 5.

Fast forward a few years and now I never come to a board game without knowing more rules than the DM for fear of letting black holes happen. Doesn’t matter if ya D&D or not.

[WalterO’dim]

Great stories! I played AD&D with my friends in the late 80s and early 90s...and now I play 5e with my son.

[mgshamster]

A weird dude was playing Iron Maiden

Woah. What a cool/wierd story. Bravo to you, sir, for walking away with a positive attitude.

[KorvinStarmast]

Some friends in high school who I used to play soccer with, and who I used to play war games with (Avalon Hill, SPI, et al) had started playing D&D and finally talked me into joining the game.
Doomed.
1975.

[Mr_Fixler]

I spent the night at a friend's house in '99 who had just gotten some 2e books for his birthday. He, his brother, and I had no idea what we were doing but had loads of fun.

I played a 1st level elven wizard (because elves get +2 to everything) and killed a Deathknight by biting it.

[mephnick]

Woah. What a cool/wierd story.

I thought a weird dude playing Iron Maiden is how everyone came to learn about DnD in the 80's and 90's. Truly the heralds of Gygax.


EDIT: My story I guess. My weird metalhead friend introduced us to AD&D in 1995, played a bit, then dug up Moldvay Basic somewhere and played that for a few years until we begrudgingly switched to 3.0 and 3.5 at some point. My love for the game is definitely attached to Basic D&D, which is why I'm so grumpy about people using D&D as some Game of Thrones story simulator instead of a dungeoncrawl system like it's meant to be godammit.

[Vessyra]

One of my friends and I drifted apart for awhile. I decided to kindle that friendship, and discovered that during the interim, he had fell in with with a crowd playing something called "dungeons and dragons".

Recently, thanks to a few tv shows, I had gotten tiny tidbits about D&D, not enough to know about it but still enough to pique my curiosity. So I joined up and, after discovering that they only met up every few months, my friend and I got working on our own group.

Funny story about my first character, however: I thought that constitution was useful for holding your breath and nothing else, so I played a 3.5 elf and dumped con. Somehow, against all odds, and his belief that elven clerics should fight in melee, he's still alive. Barely. Even after that 7-point con drain.

I'm actually fairly new compared to all the other stories, considering that this only happened in 2016

[Kane0]

Watching my dad playing Baldur's gate, pretty much sitting on his lap. I remember flicking through his monster manual long before i could read half the words just for the pictures.
I'd later go on to amaze my friends at school with stories of dice that weren't cubes and the concept 'adult make believe' with proper rules and where your imaginary friend was written down and had their own little figurine so everybody playing knew everything they needed to know about them.
It was a simpler time.

[dehro]

I was in a summer camp in France, back in '94. Two of the camp leaders pulled out the game and organised a gaming group.
Our party consisted in 2 Spanish guys, one who was half American/half Thai, a guy from the Emirates, an Italian girl and myself.

once I got home I had my mum buy the black box..aD&D, second edition.. and then proceded to not find anyone to play with for ages. By the time I got a regular gaming group going, we were playing 3.5.
I still have the box

[DMThac0]

My twin brother and I were digging through some old boxes after we moved into our new house. We were 8 years old when we found this blue box with fancy writing on it that said Dungeons & Dragons on it. Bored, and grounded, we dug in and started playing around with the rules. It's been a long and harrowing road with many editions and sessions behind us. My brother had a game shop, and now I'm heading into the streaming video world..D&D has been with us our entire lives.

[Anonymouswizard]

Well, the first computer game I played was Baldur's Gate, but that's not really got me into D&D.

That was my dad seeing that all four of his children enjoyed BG and running a couple of sessions of the old Basic Set. I'm still annoyed I ended up as a Cleric (even though I wouldn't mind these days), but we picked classes from youngest to oldest, my first and second choices were taken, and I didn't want to play a thief.

I mean even to this day magicians are my first pick in any game.

For that reason many of the things that people think are a bit weird about Basic I find perfectly fine and would like to see more of. Archetype based classes especially, playing an 'elf' makes a lot more sense to me than playing an 'elven wizard' or 'elven warrior', and if you didn't want a magic using elf they'd published a Warrior Elf class, just play that! I'm still annoyed that my dad got rid of his BECM sets, and plan to buy the Rules Cylopedia when I can justify it.

[dehro]

I mean even to this day magicians are my first pick in any game.


Whoda thunk it? :smalltongue:

[Sjappo]

A cousin of a then friend of mine owned Het Oog des Meesters. The Dutch translation of the German Das Swartze Auge. A TTRPG, obviously. Summer of 87 I think. Hooked.

He bought a red box DnD set some time later but we didn't like it.

Come 1990, I started University and found some friends who played AD&D 2nd edition. Played a lot. Two, three times a week for hours on end. DM-ed some. Played some Mage, Vampire.

We graduated to 3E, 3.5. we skipped 4E. Groups died, merged, died again. Now I'm playing 5E, switching the DM chair with 3 per others.

So, that's 30 years. Wow.

[MilkmanDanimal]

Probably sometime in 1980 or 1981; was staying up at some friend's cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota, and his older brother insisted we play D&D. It was AD&D, and they made me an Elven F/MU/T, who I played for quite a while until we fought our way through the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and were all murdered in our sleep by the party thief who wanted to steal our stuff (35+ years later, and I'm still annoyed).

I wound up pestering my parents constantly, and got the Monster Manual first, then PHB and DMG. Also wound up getting both the Basic and Expert sets and being thoroughly confused by the differences in the rules between those and AD&D.

[Anonymouswizard]

Whoda thunk it? :smalltongue:

I know, what a totally unexpected plot twist!

To be honest, I've grown tired with D&D wizards in the past couple of years, and would generally rather use a bard or sorcerer these days. After having played a couple of campaigns where magicians had much narrower powersets, and even a much lesser ability to cast for a sustained period of time in one case (having to generate your spell slots makes casting 10+ spells in a row really hard, I think my character cast about three 'actual' spells in the entire game, I relied more on my secondary powers). So while I think sorcerers should get a handful more spells, topping out at 20ish spells known appeals to me more than having 40+ spells in my book and picking the most appropriate ones. Even though my current character's backstory has them being taught in a mages' guild I'm thinking of going Lore Bard with the Sage background over Wizard with Charlatan (the game still hasn't started).

Being a wizard at low levels is fine, but if the game's going to go beyond about 9th level then I'd much rather pick a class with a less broad toolkit. It's why I'm also unlikely to play Clerics and Druids these days.

But yeah, over ten years playing and I still head straight for the spellcasters no matter the game. Unless it's science fiction, in which case I'll tend to go for a technical character (doesn't matter if the party already has one, we can focus on different areas). I was once the only noncombatant character in a party, focusing on electronics and hacking, and the GM turned out to be completely unprepared for what a very unethical droid is capabe of.

[Galactkaktus]

By playing other systems.

[Tawmis]

A weird dude was playing Iron Maiden songs on an unplugged electric guitar while walking down the road in my neighborhood out in the sticks. I asked him what he was up to and he said "the acoustics are better out here," which was totally not true.

Then he asked if my friend and I wanted to play D&D. For some reason (I was a clueless kid) I said yes, and we proceeded to play via the red boxed set over the next couple weeks, on and off.

The DM (the weird guy) had his own NPC in the game who used a 30-sided die because it was his "destiny to kill Satan." My friend and I sort of sat around awkwardly not doing much while he engaged in his own sad power fantasy (apparently he just needed a crowd.)

After he impressed us by killing his own NPC, rather than being soured on rpgs, I told my friend "I bet we could do that a lot better. I am gonna ask for that game for xmas."

Been playing D&D since.

I was wondering why you guys never came back to play again. I really liked my NPC...


Just kidding. But man that was a fantastic story.

For me, I was in the 4th grade, and my friend Sean at the time brought his ancient Player's Handbook. Explained that it was a part of this game. I sought it out and bought the monster manual. With just those two, we played D&D because we didn't have the DMG, so knew the general gist of how the dice worked based off those two books (for attacking monsters) - which, when you're in the 4th grade, you're not looking for those epic sized story lines anyway. In the 5th grade, I got the DMG, and had been hooked with first and second edition forever.

I disliked 4th Edition (played it at work), but never bought any of the books. It's the first D&D setting I didn't buy. Bought 5th Edition when it came out, and it was like falling in love all over again.

Though I know I could still more - there's still things I am not a 100% on.

[Flashy]

In 2009 a friend introduced me to a webcomic with a name I can’t quite remember...

[Chalkarts]

1990(?)
I had a friend who was in her late 20s when I was in high school.
She had a couple books, taught a couple of us to play and I stopped growing up at exactly that moment.

[Sjappo]

1990(?)
... and I stopped growing up at exactly that moment.

O man, that is so true.

[JakOfAllTirades]

It was either 1980 or 81. And it's been so long I can't remember exactly when or how I got started. Maybe I'm getting old....

[Brightersidegam]

I was pretty much born into it. My mom and dad met paying d&d back in the late 70's, and it's been in the family since. I've been around d&d and playing d&d since before I could read, hearing my dad's stories, playing with my family and my brothers friend. And have played pretty much all my life.

[DonLouigi]

I am, as they say, a late bloom as I did not get into it for quite some time, and even then, the digital medium played a huge role; also, I have the feeling I am younger than most here. In my teenage days I had played the Kotor video games and those were my first contact with the rules of D&D, but of course I was not remotely "playing D&D" in any reasonable sense.
I also got into freeform chat RPGs played via IRC clients, first no fixed rule set or dice rolls, just a bunch of players and a DM going on missions as crew of a Federation Starfleet Vessel. Later I got into one, where we played inhabitants of a vaguely medieval fantasy town going about their (sometimes rather adventurous) lives. That one had a rules system devised by one of the website creators, but the whole concept was still a far off from tabletop rpgs with arranged Sessions and so on.

I had heard rumors and stories of this woundrous realm called 'Pen & Paper Roleplaying Games', but none of my circle of acquaintances seemed to have any inkling as to how to get into that mysterious land of adventures, nor any interest for it; at that time I did not have any idea about communities playing these games online.
Then, I was already in university, someone I had met on a minecraft server offered to master a D&D4 campaign over roll20. I got the rules, I created a character, and it was wildly fun. The year was 2014 and a whole new world begun to unfold. I got directed to a forum full of people playing online; Dungeons&Dragons, Pathfinder, The Dark Eye, Splittermond, Fate, all those wondrous things began to suck me in. The hours I have sunk (and am still sinking) into this hobby beggar description. But still no actual tabletop.
Then, one-and-a-half years back, I realized, the only way I would get a group of friends around a table for this would be if I was the one behind the screen. But I was still reluctant to try, I did not have confidence in my ability to plan ahead, balance encounters and improvise; it took two friends of mine to talk me into doing it. And so I picked up I got a premade adventure called The Mad Manor of Astabar - which, by the way, I wholeheartedly endorse - and simply started. My group still seems content with me.

[Laserlight]

Wow, a lifer! Thinking back it is kinda crazy how many couples there are that met while playing D&D.

My Monday night group includes a couple that got married recently. They didn't meet at D&D, but they asked me to perform the ceremony because I am their DM.


As for me, I went to a wargame con in Cherry Hill NJ when I was 16, so that must have been the summer of 79. I played things like Avalon Hill's D-Day (and got severely trounced) and Squad Leader. Late in the evening, I was wandering around, spectating at one table and another, and someone invited me to join in this weird game that didn't have battalions or tanks or aircraft or, really, what the heck are you all doing? And afterwards we went to someone's apartment and watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail till four in the morning.

[Tawmis]

My Monday night group includes a couple that got married recently. They didn't meet at D&D, but they asked me to perform the ceremony because I am their DM.


That's cool! So in my group, my best friend (who I've known FOREVER) - his daughter got married last year, and they asked me to do get them married (both her and her fiance/now husband) play in my D&D group... and when we play, and do attacks, I always ask, "Does (whatever my attack roll is) meet or exceed your armor class?" (So like, "Does 20 meet or exceed your armor class?")

So when I did the wedding, I said, "Sami, does your love meet or exceed Jake's love for you?" Then turned to Jake and asked, "Jake, does your love meet or exceed Sami's love for you?"

Neither one of them knew I was going to say it - but they both immediately knew the reference. Was very epic.

It's insanely difficult not to tear up, when you're marrying off a woman, who feels like she's your own daughter. There were a few times I had to pause and try to recover.

[Darth Ultron]

As a kid I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and read each lots of times. But still would quickly need a new book. Then some other companies, like TSR, did some books of their own. And in the back of the book was an add: ''If you liked this book, try this game" and add for D&D, of course.

Soon enough I took my saved money to Waldenbooks, and bought my first D&D book....

Then I got to be the one friend who got everyone else to play the ''new game''

[Montesquieu P.]

I walked into 'my' game store in Minneapolis (the one I went to when I wanted to buy a new boardgame), mid-summer in 1975. I'd spent 35 days working (6 on, 6 off, 7 days a week) as a deckhand on a tug shoving barges up and down the Mississippi, completing a bit over 1 full trip. I said "Hi," to the owner-and-friend. He replied, "Oh good. We need a cleric. Sit down at the table." Four hours later I got up, completely confused about what I had experienced. (Falling into a pit? Breathed on by a dragon? Healing people? And finally, dying -- probably stupidly, since I didn't know enough to run away?) I also knew I really, really HAD to experience this more. That fall, with a brand-new box set I put an ad in the college newspaper announcing a Saturday evening session of D&D. Some of those first players are still my close friends; and I met the woman who became (over 10 years later) my wife, that way. There's gaps in the decades since, but now I'm in a 5E campaign, sharing the DM'ing with the other 3 players. And it's been a lot of fun, letting the one 'newbie' (who's at least 20 years younger and never played D&D before this campaign) share all the great mistakes -- "Hey, let's split up! We can do more damage!" "Oh, it'll be no trouble. There's only one monster and four of us!" "Nah. We don't need to check for any traps." Yep, good memories all.

[Tawmis]

As a kid I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and read each lots of times. But still would quickly need a new book. Then some other companies, like TSR, did some books of their own. And in the back of the book was an add: ''If you liked this book, try this game" and add for D&D, of course.


Ah, yes, the ENDLESS QUEST books... the first six were staples in that series...

1 Dungeon of Dread
2 Mountain of Mirrors
3 Pillars of Pentegarn
4 Return to Brookmere
5 Revolt of the Dwarves
6 Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons

I have almost all of them up to like the 22nd or 23rd book, to this very day...

[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.

[Legendairy]

Amazing thread! Amazing stories! I dig when these threads come about.

I grew up listening to my older brother tell stories about his character “Blaze” that had a sunsword. When I was about 7 or 8 a friend of ours metalhead uncle (very similar to my brother) ran a game for my friend, his older female cousin, and myself. We ran like two sessions. I was always a fan of fantasy and had read the choose your own adventure books. After those few sessions we moved away and for years me and my cousin with similar interests started making our own rpg games using playing cards and papers cut up in hats for armor and magic and whatnot....lol good ol days.

In the early nineties maybe mid 95 or so one of my sisters friends saw us making our own and asked if we played dnd, we said no and I said I did once he gave us the old box sets of ODD, we found a third who wanted to run the game and been hooked ever since, I was about 12.

Bit off topic. I have met some of my closest life long friends from getting invited to play dnd. I was at Jersey Mike’s sub shop in Fayetteville NC I had just come home from Iraq, that very same cousin was visiting from California, we were talking about World of Warcraft (we both had top 100 world rated raiding toons) and the guy making our sandwich asked how long we played and then asked if he could ask a fantasy question about another game. His question started with “I’m playing a paladin and I am having a moral delimma....” and ended with “Want to come play with us tomorrow night?”
We still have a Monday night table top game and I run on roll20 on Saturdays.

I love the game and honestly it saved me from a lot of bad stuff on the weekends. I started drinking early and fighting a lot around the same age, I played dnd instead of being out and being a criminal, I was afforded great opportunities that some of my friends weren’t because I chose to play a fun fantasy game than do some bad things.

[Sariel Vailo]

Ok sooo i discovered it because my local hobby shop was doing a small game with the begining five E module. I had heard about the game and played if i hadnt moved id have liked to stay,apart of this group.

[Cormac Mac Art]

An advertisement in Marvel's 'The Savage Sword of Conan. In late 75' or early 76'.

[Anonymouswizard]

also, I have the feeling I am younger than most here

Join the club, I spent years trying to appear older than I actually am on here. These days I admit I'm 24, even if I no longer show my date of birth and age on my profile. Although the internet had little to do with me getting into D&D, as I explained earlier in the thread.

[holywhippet]

I'm pretty sure the first time I really ran into it was playing the first "gold box" game - Pools of Radiance on the Commodore 64. It was fun, but so confusing at first since I didn't understand why the game had so many different varieties of weapons let alone what THAC0 meant. My first actual experience playing was on a school trip when one of the players had the High Clerists tower module from Dragonlance.

It wasn't until years later that I joined an actual group playing 3rd edition.

[Callin]

I saw commercials for the Board Game WAAAY back in my early teens maybe tweens. Then in High School I had friends who played. I finally convinced them to let me play so in Sept of 98 I played my first game and I still remember it to this day. Callin Tryluck and his Half Brother (my real brothers first Character) Calis was hired to be guards for a Caravan. It was attacked by a Wyvern and I followed it back to its lair and we killed it and I got a Longsword of Blue Dragon Slaying. Fun times.

[Scots Dragon]

Sort of slowly and eventually, through Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights, as well as the various novels that shared the 'Forgotten Realms' logo at the top, and being interested enough in those to start looking more and more into the background material. Eventually I discovered the System Reference Document, and it was only a skip and hop from how interesting the rules looked to actually just getting the game in full with my first stop being the utterly gorgeous Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book for D&D 3e.

[Knaight]

My mom played D&D back in college, my dad read Lord of the Rings to me when I was six (or more accurately read about the first half of Fellowship of the Rings, at which point I read the rest). Fantasy had its hooks in me by then, and I ended up hearing my mom's stories as a kid enough to think that D&D would be just the coolest thing. Then I got into freeform for years, starting at age eight or so GMing for my younger brother (not that I knew the term, as far as I was concerned it was "The Talky Game", and I invented it, later to be renamed "Um" by people a bit more competent at naming). That spread around my elementary school, I got a lot of practice GMing, but at the end of the day it wasn't D&D.

Cut to a few years later. I'm eleven, and my family is about to go to Thailand. It's a very long flight, so as a treat for me and my brother my parents stop in at a little local game store, where we could each get one Gameboy game, within a certain budget. There on a little tiny shelf, mixed in among game guides for the video games, were used copies of the 3.0 and 3.5 manuals, for cheap. So I then had to convince my parents that instead of a videogame they should buy 900 pages of books, for marginally over the assigned budget.

It wasn't exactly hard to do.

I jumped ship away from GMing D&D to other systems pretty quickly, keeping an eye on new editions as they came out, with the occasional D&D game as a player, plus some optimization side stuff. Still, D&D is the only reason I knew those existed.

[Blacky the Blackball]

When I was a kid in the later '70s, my friends and I used to enjoy drawing space battles and dinosaurs and all the usual stuff. One of our favourites, though, was to design supervillain lairs full of guard posts and shark tanks and "quick drying cement" traps and that sort of thing. Somehow this developed into a game which we imaginatively called "the map game" where one of us would draw a fiendish lair - there had to be at least one way through to the villain's inner sanctum - and the rest of us would take it in turns to pretend to be the secret agent. The person whose map it was would describe what we saw and we'd say what we did. Agent after agent would fall to the traps, but through trial and error one of us would eventually defeat the map by getting an agent all the way through. It would then be their turn to draw a map for the others to play through.

Fast forward a year or two until I was in secondary school in 1980. One of my new classmates was drawing a map on squared paper during break, and it looked a bit like the map game so I asked him about it. He said it was for a game called Dungeons and Dragons and asked if I wanted to go back to his house and play it.

I did -there were three players with a PC each and half a dozen henchmen. We entered a dungeon and fought/explored our way through defeating many goblins, and the idea that a map game could have combat mechanics was new and exciting to me. The game finished with us meeting a dragon and fleeing for our lives while it breathed on the henchmen and ate them.

I was instantly hooked, and asked my parents to get me the game for my upcoming eleventh birthday - and I've been playing RPGs ever since.

[AureusFulgens]

Step One: The Forgotten Realms books.

I have no idea how exactly I came across them, but I picked up a lot of random things at the library when I was in elementary school. I read through a surprising number of R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt books without ever realizing that they had a connection to a tabletop game. (I was vaguely aware that D&D was a thing, but not really.) When I started writing fantasy in fourth grade, things from the books I'd read tended to creep in, and, sure enough, elves had an underground variety called drow. Terms like "Prime Material Plane," "astral form," and "tanar'ri" slipped into the back of my head, long after I stopped giving the books much thought.

Step Two: The Internet is a thing.

I followed a long bean trail to finally find myself... here. The trail, in its entirety, consisted of: I read Lord of the Rings in elementary and middle school. When I was done with them, my dad the librarian picked up The Silmarillion for me, and I read that too, maybe in sixth grade. I started getting curious about language and wandered onto Wikipedia looking for information. That led to a generic interest in language (and a major in applied linguistics that I never finished). Then I found myself on the Wikipedia page for constructed languages, which in turn led me to Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit. From there, I joined the Conlanger Bulletin Board briefly, and lurked on the Zompist bboard. At some point, a post on worldbuilding in one of those forums referenced the TV Tropes article on "A Wizard Did It." I found myself doing TV Tropes for a long time (I say like it's a drug, and frankly, it is). And, of course, a lot of TV Tropes page images come from... Order of the Stick, which I started reading.

That was still two or three years before I even touched D&D, but after binge-reading from 1 to 920 in about a month, I had extensive D&D knowledge. I knew all eleven classes and all six ability scores, I knew that spells had levels and tenth level was "epic," I knew that an attack roll only succeeded if it beat your Armor Class, I knew what a saving throw was... and I supplemented that with some Wikipedia reading to help get the jokes better. So I knew the game about as well as your average bystander who's never even thought about playing it can.

Step Three: Dakota.

I lived on a tight-knit floor in my dorm freshman year of college, and a bunch of us still lived together the following year. Well, a couple days into sophomore year, my friend Dakota mentions that he wants to run D&D, and I'm kinda like "eh... sounds like a big time investment." But the second time he brings it up, I decide sure, why not. I have the image of O-Chul and Lien in my head, and of Michael Carpenter from the Dresden Files, and a few other archetypes, so I'm like "hell yeah I'm going to play a paladin."

That Saturday is the first session, and I still haven't built a character, so in the morning I get onto the library catalog, realize that the public libraries have D&D books but the nearest Player's Handbook is in Pikesville twenty minutes away. So I did what any sensible person would do, and drove over there and picked it up, along with a copy of the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Guide for kicks. Spent the afternoon figuring out how to build a character, and did it more or less spot-on correctly with aid from a guide on this forum and another guide on the old Wizards of the Coast forums. It helped that the newly-minted 5th Edition was essentially a simplified version of the 3.5e that Order of the Stick runs on, so I had basic familiarity and didn't need to learn too much more. I also picked up a fondness for a folk singer named Heather Dale in the process (go look up a song called "Joan" if you're curious why).

That campaign started three years ago this fall. We just finished in May, with the same party as we played with in the fifth session. It was kinda long, but I did enjoy it.

How I started DMing is a whole 'nother story, which I almost typed out, but I think I'll stop here.

[Twigwit]

Was given the 3.5 starter set when I was 10, took me a full year to fully understand the PHB but I got it down eventually. The game ticked all the right boxes for a heavy reader introvert kid, so I fell in love with it instantly.

[furby076]

On this particular summer day there was the box top of the D&D Basic Set lying off to one side.
.

Lying there? as in someone left it there, or were people playing?

For me it was 1991 or 92. I was in 10th grade and a classmate (new transfer from the local catholic school) invited me to play this game. He heard i liked games like Final Fantasy. I rolled up a level 5 ranger, and we were playing the FInders Stone. The DM gave each of us a wish (don't recall why) and I wanted a belt of strength. He made me pick which belt and had to roll the 2nd edition percentile. I was cautious so picked cloud giant strength, but rolled a 98 (drat, storm giant). That group died fast, and then a few months late got invited to the group from the local comic book store and played with them and after that a different group until I went to college.

The "different group" was run by the store manager of the comic shop (at the top a principal on sabattical). We played until I finished high school, and i came back a couple times during my freshman year to join his game as a guest star. We lost contact, but about 20 years later got in touch again. Now I am playing with him and his life long friends :)

[Maelynn]

Early '00, Neverwinter Nights.

I've always loved playing RPGs. So when a friend encouraged me to try out NWN, I eagerly borrowed his copy and sat down with the rulebook (back when videogames still came with a decent rulebook). It took me a while to plow through all of it and familiarise myself with the mechanics, but soon enough I was enjoying the game.

Not long after I was discussing the game with another friend and he asked me if I played D&D then. He was surprised when I told him I only vaguely heard about it, and informed me that NWN is basically D&D 3.0. It immediately piqued my interest: being able to play NWN with friends at a table sounded awesome!

So, I got myself a 3.5 copy and searched for people in my vicinity I could play with. As a student in a fairly large city, it didn't take me long to find a group and officially enter the world of pnp D&D.

Been loving it ever since. Went from 3.5 to 4.0 to currently 5.0. A few weeks ago I even took the plunge as DM. ^_^

[Anonymouswizard]

I've always loved playing RPGs. So when a friend encouraged me to try out NWN, I eagerly borrowed his copy and sat down with the rulebook (back when videogames still came with a decent rulebook). It took me a while to plow through all of it and familiarise myself with the mechanics, but soon enough I was enjoying the game.

I have to admit that I hate the current trend of releasing computer games (or video games, but I strangely didn't hear that term until the mid noughties, so I'll stick with what I know) with manuals. These days you're lucky if you get a list of the basic controls, I remember back in the PS2 era manuals would give short bios for the major characters, explain the controls, and sometimes briefly discuss the actual mechanics. I remember the NWN1+2 manuals being pretty good about outlining the 3.X rules, and I remember that Baldur's Gate came with a manual that essentially gave a simplified version of the 2e rules and the rules of every single spell in the game.

Even if you're not a weirdo like me who enjoys reading the manual before you play a game, they can still be useful. I once came back to a game, started playing, realised it had a slightly weird control scheme, and then stopped playing ten minutes later because I couldn't just check the manual. In-game tutorials also tend to be absolutely terrible, sometimes even for basic mechanics (do you know how long it took me to work out how the map in Lego Batman 2 works? Almost two solid hours, and that game came with a real manual), and that's if the designers don't expect you to just know all the mechanics from other games.

As a weird anecdote, one of the first games I played on the PS2 was Jak and Daxter. I couldn't work out how to move, because the manual had gone missing and I was used to the PS1 where most games let you move with the d-pad. Sure, many games had the option to use the analog stick for movement, but I wasn't used to using it as I had grown up with d-pads for movement.

[dehro]

stuff.

You remind me of this

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yKIiUsbOO24

[furby076]

No one else was out there at the time but my uncle and myself. Civilization basically ends out there and the Florida Everglades begins. Or used to anyway until they built it all up.

I've often speculated how the box top got there. Was there a gaming group that tried playing out there? Did the box top float on a canal feeder from somewhere else, or a storm blow it there? It was a little waterlogged. Or maybe a Great Old One placed it there just for me to find...

I know what happened. A level 1 chaos wizard cast "summon monster I" hoping to get a creature to save them from the gators, and instad got you...misfire. He and his group died in the swamp. You could have had his wizard book :)

[Waterdeep Merch]

I've always been a huge nerd face, and I grew up cutting my teeth on video games throughout the late 80's and 90's. When 2e was in vogue, I always looked at D&D and all the computer games based on it as the 'adult' games, the games for Real Gamers, always capitalized. Stuff that was over my little baby Mario-loving head.

Then I met a friend my age who actually played D&D, and I always thought he was way more mature than me sitting here acting like Final Fantasy was some kind of roleplaying game. He detailed all these adventures he went on, all the ways he solved problems and did these crazy things, and I was floored. He explained all these worlds, like Greyhawk, Krynn, Athas, and it amazed me. I was too shy to try and get in on these games, so he tried coaching me on how to play, and soon how to DM.

Around when I was getting up the nerve to try entering a game, 3e hit. I got the PHB and MM, adamant that I was going to play this time. But I moved away from my friend, and none of the kids around me played D&D. So eventually I decided that I had to stick myself out there and DM it myself.

My first experience was a total nightmare. I said 'yes' to everything, everyone went completely off the rails and PvP was all over the place. I had exactly two PC's left after the first game I ever tried, and I felt pretty bad about it. I slunk away, wondering why my game wasn't anything like what my old friend had talked about.

I didn't try again for a few years. I played some of the old 2e-based computer games like Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate, and then it was Neverwinter Nights and the dawn of 3.5 and conversations with my old friend that started pointing to where I went wrong. A different friend invited me to be a player with a group of strangers, the thing I'd always wanted. I made the edgiest of edgelord rogues imaginable, but quickly settled into a snarky swashbuckler. If finally all clicked. I was having all those adventures I'd dreamed of. I was getting it!

That DM committed suicide before the end of the campaign. It was pretty devastating. No one was in a good mood after that, and we all drifted apart. I shied away from D&D for a time because of it.

Then I learned that my original players, the ones that went completely off the rails, the ones that made me think I was a terrible DM, had always wondered why I had never run anything else. They'd had fun. They enjoyed how weird and zany the world I ad libbed ended up. They liked how I made up rules on the fly and managed to be super permissible.

I hesitated, in memory of my old DM. It felt weird, trying to be like him. But some more coaching from the friend that first got me into all this, the excitement from all the players gathering around, and my new understanding and appreciation for the game finally all coalesced into my first real, complete campaign. I can't begin to tell you what I felt during the whole thing. The happiness at creating what I'd always wanted. The melancholy in remembering the DM that finally showed me the way. The pride I took in all the excitement my players had. I've primarily been a DM ever since, and a lot of those original players come back year after year for each new campaign I devise. Some end early due to schedules or just plain petering out because I hadn't really thought through my setting, some last for several years. Some of my players have gone on to DM themselves, and in a weird twist, some of them then set their games in worlds I'd created and had them play in myself. It was neat roaming my own worlds.

In a lot of ways, D&D is how I grew up. In a weird way, it really was the adult game for Real Gamers that I'd always imagined it was.

[KorvinStarmast]

Neat story
Wow, what a story. Glad you've fallen in love with GMing. The good ones usually do.

[Aaron Underhand]

I'd been wargaming since I was about 10, Think I was fifteen when a student on vacation turn up at what was then the "Purbeck Brotherhood of Ancients" - an old hand he was welcomed in, and proceeded to run a D&D session in the pub, which from memory included us all dropping LSD in character (which he clearly had plenty of personal experience of, from the descriptions). We were using a gestenered (yes...) copy of the original white books. Once at Uni my degree took second place to epic gaming sessions, and some of those people I still play with now - 40 years later.... half of one group I ran at uni are now dead, and several of the current gaming group weren't born when I started... I now also game with my son's university friends... not many pastimes will give you that sort of intergenerational relationships...

[Zalabim]

I can tell you all how I almost discovered D&D. It was elementary school, 1st or 2nd grade. I could have been no older than 8. I was reading books in the school library when I found my first choose your own adventure book. Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, by Rose Estes. I remember it well because 1) I loved it so much I went looking for other books like it, and 2) the school library took a student's interest in reading to be a sign of the apocalypse and tried to purge all their fantasy novels. All my future reading had to come from the city library. Fortunately my parents were not insane, so we eventually wound up at a sort of book store looking for more Dungeons and Dragons books, but all we could find was for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. As a very serious child, I was not 12 or older, and I was not looking to jump right into Advanced material, so we left empty-handed. This would be about 1990. I wouldn't get an actual D&D book until I had a job and could buy my own, starting with 3rd edition, but I'd play a lot of D&D video games going back as far as Order of the Griffin. Thanks to the internet, I now know that book I loved is the same age as I am.

[Avigor]

Not sure of exactly when, my dad told me stories when I was a kid. My first RPG was actually the Palladium Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, albeit I barely played any at all with my dad; I should still have the book in a box somewhere in storage. IIRC I got a chance to play the old DOS Dungeon Hack game (which I barely touched) and had access to Pool of Radiance (which my dad played a lot but I never actually played); my first full computerized D&D adventure was Neverwinter Nights. Somehow I didn't get to play proper pnp with a group until I was like 20, and the first group I played with was using 2e rules with THAC0, at least at first.

[dehro]

Joe Dever and his Lone Wolf were probably my gateways into d&d