What got you into roleplaying?

[TelemontTanthul]

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

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

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

The DM we had was awesome!

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

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

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

[Yukitsu]

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

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

[Zaydos]

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

[bosssmiley]

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

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

[AslanCross]

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

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

[LurkerInPlayground]

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

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

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

The DM we had was awesome!

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

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

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

Then my character died.

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

[Fhaolan]

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

[ondonaflash]

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

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

[Mongoose87]

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

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

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

[penbed400]

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

[PId6]

This comic. Need I say more?

[Temet Nosce]

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

[Thajocoth]

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

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

[BobVosh]

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

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

[Thurbane]

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

[Raltar]

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

[toasty]

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

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

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

[Akal Saris]

I actually started RPing before I even knew it existed.

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

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

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

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

[Weimann]

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

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

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

[karnokoto]

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

[Blacky the Blackball]

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

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

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

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

And I've never looked back...

[Superglucose]

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

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

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

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

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

"Spot check to examine the bunny in detail."

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

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

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

[starwoof]

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

Then I was hooked.

[Kobold-Bard]

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

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

Good times.

[Jimbob]

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

[cloneof]

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

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

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

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

[Foryn Gilnith]

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

[Sliver]

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

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

[Yuki Akuma]

Planescape: Torment.

[Glass Mouse]

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

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

Then I started writing fantasy stories and novels.

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

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

Today, I'm the GM