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EccentricCircle
2014-09-19, 01:01 PM
So i've been learning fifth edition D&D, as I guess quite a lot of people here are currently doing. Looking at the starter set has got me comparing it to the starter set I started with when I first got interested in RPGs. I've been thinking about what makes a good starter set and how to explain things to new players.

So how did you first learn to play Roleplaying Games? Were you taught by someone else or did you pick up the books and go from there? I'm wondering which is more prevalent and how the various ways people learn the games influence their playing style.

I wasn't taught to play the game, but learned from the books, and this has left me with quite a chaotic good GMing style. I didn't start in a game where Rules and Written were law, so have always been more than happy to improvise and not get boged down in the books. But I can imagine it going the other way just as easily if someone is learning from scratch gets more reliant on the rules as a result.

So what is your story, and how has it led to where you are now?

Inevitability
2014-09-19, 02:04 PM
I am not sure, but I believe it all started here, with OOTS. I was looking around on TV Tropes when I came across this (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GiveAManAFish):


The Order of the Stick here (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0612.html). The title of that day's strip is, "Technically, the 'Fish' Version is a Subset of This One."
Belkar: 'Solve a man's problems with violence, help him for a day. Teach a man to solve his problems with violence, help him for a lifetime!'

So I took a look at the page (I know, I'm a horrible person) and became interested in the comic. A couple days later, I found out it was based on D&D. This led to me becoming interested in the game and teaching it to myself with the help of several online resources.

lytokk
2014-09-19, 02:11 PM
Learning how to play role playing games, or how to role play?

The technical bit about playing table top RPGs I learned from a DM. My first DM taught me a lot about the game. The technical details, and what a problem player is (ie: me). He introduced me to the game, and if I ever saw him again I'd thank him. Then the DM in me would well up and slap him in the face for all the house rules he drove into me citing those were the rules of the game. Still trying to sort them out.

How to role play is a little different. I learned how to role play when running in two separate games, on complete opposite ends of the alignment scale. I had a LG paladin in one game, and a CE ninja in another. The simple act of having to differentiate between the two characters' personalities and play them both in games got it ingrained in my mind about how to play alignments and how to play a role.
I suppose a second step to my learning to RP was in a NWN server. 4 different games per week, and I played the same LG fighter in each of them. It was no surprise when I became the highest level person on the server, which led to the retirement of said character. Playing that character that much really let me step into the personality of the character. Granted, it was the same exact personality as the LG paladin in the first part. Same name too.

OOOR, how to play an RPG, woulda been final fantasy 4/2 on my super nintendo. That one did a good job at resource management and such.

DontEatRawHagis
2014-09-19, 02:20 PM
I had the Red Dwarf RPG and a new friend of mine watched the same show and played DND and was like, that looks sweet.

Her and I GMed tandem and proceded to pick up a group of 8+ people. Now we are down to her, her husband, I, and 3-4 friends.

SimonMoon6
2014-09-19, 02:31 PM
I was around 12, so this must've been about 1981. An adult friend (a "big brother" from the organization "Big Brothers/Big Sisters") had been introduced to D&D, so he introduced "us" as well ("us" in this case being me and my sister). We went through module B1. I didn't understand everything. Heck, I couldn't even spell "chaotic" (as I had never encountered that word before). But I was hooked.

For my next birthday, I got the AD&D books, and I got my mom to make my birthday cake with an image of a beholder on it (though she gave it 13 eyestalks since I was turning 13).

Jay R
2014-09-19, 02:50 PM
My college roommate was a wargamer - mostly Napoleonics and WW2, which didn't really interest me. But then one day he brought home a copy of Metagaming's Stellar Conquest. This was different; this was science fiction. So I started playing it.

A couple of weeks later he brought home this weird new game called Dungeons and Dragons, composed of three small pamphlets and five dice. The dice interested me far more than the game; I knew what the platonic solids were. I played the game once, and wasn't all that impressed. But by the second game, we had the first game supplement (Greyhawk) which introduced paladins and thieves, and made the combat system playable.

Bulhakov
2014-09-19, 03:35 PM
The first small steps for me were the Talisman board game and the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The first big step was at summer camp after the first year of high school a friend tried to sell me the idea of fantasy rpg though with no rulebooks and a very simplified system similar to Warhammer. All I remember was that I played a dwarf, another friend an elf archer, and we got hired in a tavern to investigate a missing caravan.

draken50
2014-09-19, 04:02 PM
Started with Baldur's Gate. Then I played with a friend of a friend. Loved the imagination and the potential. All told I think I only played about 6 sessions, with like 3 different characters.

Once I moved, I got the 3.5 books, but it took a while to start. I eventually formed a group and tried to dm... and ran a crap game for a few sessions. Rinse and repeat with a few familiar faces from time to time, but mostly different players. Each game I'd go to run would be just a bit better than the last but still short lived. Made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I'm sure I'll make plenty more, but I think I've found my feet as a GM.

Velaryon
2014-09-19, 04:03 PM
For my next birthday, I got the AD&D books, and I got my mom to make my birthday cake with an image of a beholder on it (though she gave it 13 eyestalks since I was turning 13).

That's awesome! You don't have a picture of the cake by any chance, do you?

My very first exposure to the idea of roleplaying was a little insert booklet of Vampire: the Masquerade that came with an issue of InQuest magazine I bought for the price guide on Magic cards back in 1997. I was 14 or so at the time, and for various reasons I never got to really try the game out (beyond a one-night session with myself and a friend where we mostly did lots of combat anyway).

I didn't really get into roleplaying games until college, when some new friends I had made were talking about starting a game and I asked if I could join. 3e was pretty new at the time, and several of the players were AD&D vets, so they mixed up rules a lot of the time. I was encouraged to come up with my character concept first and not worry about the rules until I knew what I wanted to play, while being gently warned away from spellcasters because they might be too complex for someone first starting the game. I liked the idea of a swordsman who fought based on speed and agility, and what I ended up with was a mostly non-functional half-elf Fighter with the Spring Attack feat chain, crummy stats, and who needed an artifact granting him regeneration 5 in order to survive any fight with a monster of about CR 5 or higher.

From them I got a lot of rules variants and misunderstandings that it took me years to learn weren't the way the game is actually played. Some of the bigger rules they either changed or simply got wrong were:

1. Rogues can only sneak attack once per round (some of them still think this).
2. Critical fumbles on attacks are a normal part of the rules.
3. If you start taking levels in a prestige class, you have to complete the class before you can take levels in anything else (no idea where they got this from).
4. You can get bonus XP for good roleplaying, but not if you roll your social skills. Literally, the DM took asking to roll your Diplomacy skill to mean that you weren't roleplaying and he would not listen if you tried to tell him you were trying to roleplay and roll your skill.

It took me years to break some of the bad habits they bred into me. It was still a fun game though.

Jordan Cat
2014-09-19, 04:25 PM
D&D was something I knew about from general pop culture osmosis, and would have liked to play if anyone around was into that kinda thing.

Then I found OOTS and that increased my wish to play very much :smallsmile: Looking around the forum led me to Pathfinder, which then told me about Pathfinder Society, which I learned had a group at my Local Gaming Shop that I never knew about.

Been playing almost a year now. A lot less then most folks here, but I've been enjoying it immensely.

Rainman3769
2014-09-19, 04:59 PM
It was the summer of 1997, I was 13 and my grandma had bought me and my cousins this "weird" board game she saw while out shopping called "Hero Quest" We LOVED all the miniatures and set pieces and how one of us got to play against the other two. We played that game daily for weeks, it comepletely dominated that summer for us and we still talk about how much fun it was to this day.

A few years later one of my friends wanted us all to give that weird nerd game, Dungeons and Dragons, a try. I took one look at the art style of the 3.0 PHB and my wonderful memories of Hero Quest came rushing back. Without another word I said I was in. Been playing on and off ever since.

sktarq
2014-09-20, 01:42 PM
My 7th Birthday. A friend had heard of DnD, even watched a game....so we started "playing" right there and then. Only later did we discover dice (we used "pick a number" and however far it was from the number in the DM's head was your roll) and rules etc. This was late in the "1e" rules. Actually using the books for more than just inspiration waited for 2e.

LibraryOgre
2014-09-20, 03:44 PM
My first couple games blur in my memory, where I'm not sure which was which. We played at the house of my Senior Patrol Leader, Andy Nuxoll, on Yong-san Base, Seoul, South Korea. This would be about '89 or '90. I don't remember most of the other players, just my brother, Mike, and Andy's younger brother, Luke.

I was given two characters... a fighter and a magic-user. I cannot tell you for certain which edition it was. In one adventure (I suspect it was my first), we were fighting xvarts in a large cave, and my magic-user's sleep spell knocked out more of our party than it did the xvarts due to poor placement. I learned from that.

In what I believe was my second game, we were going through a dungeon of some sort... there were frequent doors, and it became a bit of a joke that EVERY TIME we opened a door, a flying dagger would attack and immediately get smacked down.

After that, my mom found my character sheets and forbade me to play. Didn't play again until we got to Louisiana and could play non-D&D RPGs, and effectively hide the D&D stuff. Soon thereafter, I started designing games, mostly using the ubiquitous d6s and based on After the Bomb or similar stuff.

Krazzman
2014-09-20, 05:50 PM
First year in doing my A-Levels.
Had chemic class in another school due to shared schoolrooms.
The the son of a customer of my parents solarium sitting there.
Talk to him and add him on ICQ.
Talk and write some more.
Get invited to game.
See guy I knew distantly from tae-kwon-do there.
Play shadow run.
Next weekend meeting again.
Playing dnd.
Never really got pointers or advice. Got called power gamer a lot.

Yeah that's about it for me.

GoblinGilmartin
2014-09-21, 04:49 AM
I originally thought my intro to roleplaying happened in early highschool. I simply wanted to learn how to play. I downloaded the books and read through with my best friend. We played just the two of us, me dming and GMPCing (even back then I realized it wouldn't be fair if my gmpc could solve everything by himself). Our first session ever is now referred to as "The Kool-Aid Man Game". It involved a monk, a stone wall, and Enlarge Person.

After thinking about it for a while, my real introduction happened in elementary school. A friend of mine was really into the Deltora Quest Books, and at the time I didn't even know that they existed, but on the bus home after school he would run me through a sort of CYOA with myself in the main character's shoes. I still remember how much it engaged my imagination at the time.

mythmonster2
2014-09-21, 04:52 AM
My circle of friends in middle school played AD&D and invited me to play in one of their dad's campaign, based on LotR. However, it was very much a murderhobo and railroady game, but none of us really cared at the time. I really started roleplaying in late high school and early college, when I found other groups.

Sajiri
2014-09-21, 05:03 AM
I am still learning I think :p I already knew about D&D and such since I loved playing Baldur's Gate when I was 11 or so and it first came out, but it wasnt until 3? 4? years ago when I was living overseas with my now husband that I actually started looking into the tabletop game. I was at home one day bored while he was at work and started going through his d&d books on the shelf trying to entertain myself. I was really only opening it up to look at the pictures, but ended up reading it for the next few hours until he got home. Then each day he went to work I'd pick up one of his books and just read it all day until he got back.

Was maybe another year though before I actually got to play in a game, reading about playing and actually playing are very different things

SimonMoon6
2014-09-21, 01:16 PM
That's awesome! You don't have a picture of the cake by any chance, do you?

I do somewhere... unfortunately, I just moved, so it's somewhere in a box... in a room full of nothing but boxes. And I'm not sure exactly where it is, even if everything was unpacked.



After that, my mom found my character sheets and forbade me to play. Didn't play again until we got to Louisiana and could play non-D&D RPGs, and effectively hide the D&D stuff.

Ooh, ooh, I've got a "forbidden to play" story too!

I was in high school. My mom had already been somewhat wary of D&D after all the bad press it had. Then, my mom joined a cult. Seriously. And one of the priests (who became her only friend in the world) was convinced that there were many things wrong with D&D. His kids had the AD&D (1st edition since that's all there was then) books, but he had taken a black marker to the books and scratched through anything vaguely heretical, like all the demon and devil entries in the Monster Manual and so forth.

So, they had a special sit-down time with me where they tried to convince me that D&D was bad. But I was a sensible person and could counter their arguments. I even mentioned that what they were suggesting was tantamount to a book-burning, and the priest's wife laughed at the idea of a book burning, though concerned about the bad press that might bring.

So, regardless, I was "banned" from playing D&D. But... I could talk to my friends over the phone, and we could "sort of" play D&D that way. And then I went to college and she had no control over what I did after that.

Nagash
2014-09-21, 01:29 PM
My stepdad tought me to play when I was 8ish, like 23 years ago.

I had been assigned to read the lord of the rings and mentioned to him that I was really liking it even though it wasnt what i usually read and he said that if i liked that I might like this game he played every week. So I gave it a try. It was a very adult game, Rated at least R, lol but I loved it and it got me hooked so I started running my own games for my friends in the neighborhood

Earthwalker
2014-09-22, 08:28 AM
Reading this thread I have found it much more entertaining pretending the posts are speachs from people in a support group.

Kind of like

"Yeah Talisman was my gate way board game. It was good for a while but I just needed a bigger hit and so I soon started buying DnD books"

"My friends and family tried to get me to stop but I just couldn't give it up."

"I got into pathfinder from a pusher at my local game shop, it was good at first, they let me play for free. But then I soon needed to buy some books so I knew how it worked. As the weeks went by I needed more and more books."

Any way my first experiance with role playing was in college and playing 1e DnD. OMG I was such a rubbish GM. Soon I bought some modules and that helped give me some idea how things could go. Then soon after that switched to RuneQuest. I think I started playing properly at university, where I didn't have to GM and learned how it could be done correctly.

Oddly now I am back to running Shadowrun and DnD with Runequest no longer used.

Jay R
2014-09-22, 01:54 PM
Reading this thread I have found it much more entertaining pretending the posts are speachs from people in a support group.

"Hi. I'm Jay, and I'm a role-player."

Seto
2014-09-24, 09:06 AM
I got into roleplaying when I was twelve, on an Internet PbP full-rp (no crunch) Naruto-based forum.

One of my friends introduced me (and other friends) to Tabletop RPgames (namely D&D 3.5) three years and a half ago, because he liked it, wanted to teach us and we were interested. Then I found the manuals online and did a lot of reading, while continuing to have sessions with them.

Amphetryon
2014-09-24, 09:09 AM
"Hi. I'm Jay, and I'm a role-player."

*everyone, in unison* "Hi, Jay."

YossarianLives
2014-09-25, 09:15 AM
It all started about 6 years ago when I was house-sitting for a friend. It was 2008 so I suppose 4e had just come out. I knew nothing about d&d at the time. Anyway I read through there collection of 4e books. I mostly looked at the pictures and flavour text. However I suddenly had urge to play d&d. To go on a ADVENTURE! It was about 2 years before I actually found a group to play with (I play with the same one to this day) When we started out we had NO idea how to play. Thinking back it was actually really hilarious how little we knew. We all made characters using ths character generator. http://www.pathguy.com/cg35.htm We basically messed around had some fun and tried to figure out how spells worked.

We had a lot of fun:smallsmile:

About a year ago we actually read through the SRD and now know how to play.

calam
2014-09-29, 09:29 AM
I always liked roleplaying videogames games as well as card games like Magic: the gathering so you can say that I was already on that path. My dad even tried to encourage me into getting into it but I somehow thought that I could somehow become more geeky and socially awkward than someone who plays Magic in the cafeteria.

My sister got into the game first but at that point I still didn't want to play although it got me curious. I started reading about it (which is how I found Order of the Stick). By the time I started playing Neverwinter nights 2 I knew it was too late for me and decided to jump into D&D for real.

I first started playing D&D as a Dungeon Master despite that I never played a tabletop game before. This went as successfully as someone who never roleplayed before and the campaign crashed and burned pretty quickly. It's been about four years since then, I was the DM a couple more times but I only got to be a player last Summer

Mastikator
2014-09-30, 06:45 AM
I was 16 and a friend of mine invited the gang to play, we said "sure" and our circle of friends became a gaming group.

WrathMage
2014-09-30, 07:05 AM
The first small steps for me were the Talisman board game and the Choose Your Own Adventure books.


Ah see these are the two tools which got me into RPGs too! I used to borrow a lot of Choose Your Own Adveture books from the library and loved them.
Then later when I was 13 I got hold of the Star Wars roleplaying game (West End Games D6) in about 1994, and went from there, running it mostly rather than playing. I eventually moved on to VtM, and D&D right about the time 3.0 debuted. Still plugging away running stuff 20 years later, and hope to be for at least 20 years more.

Forrestfire
2014-09-30, 11:49 AM
When 3.0 came out, my dad saw the starter box (the orange one) and decided to pick it up and introduce me and my siblings to D&D. We all enjoyed it, and I ended up spending most or all of my birthday and Christmas money on D&D books, spending lots of time reading them cover to cover, and eventually taking part in forum discussions. Fourteen years later, my exposure to the game has shaped my life, my media preferences, and a lot of my exposure to various other nerdy things.

While I didn't have a group to play with most of the time, I made a lot of characters when I was little, to the point where sometimes I still find old sheets stashed away in moving boxes or cabinets.

DireSickFish
2014-09-30, 12:00 PM
D&D for me started with BG2. I remember sitting on the floor of the wallmart reading the box over and over absolutely enthralled. Then I read fantasy books which lead me to R.A. Salvatore. I mentioned him to a kid in one of my classes in high school and swiftly got invited to play/host a game of D&D. I played a druid with a snake animal companion named Bob. We both died to an Umbarhulk.

Before all that I played some Hero Quest. I had a cousin who knew about RPG's and we'd play some sessions up north or in car rides. We used playing cards for randomization and the spell cards from Hero Quest as the spell casting power. It's weird to me now that my first RPG's were all home-brew free form stuff.

Wytwyld
2014-09-30, 01:57 PM
My dad taught us first edition when brother (5), sister (3) and I (7) were kids, with our mom playing to give some guidance as to how to play.

Fun times, but we quickly had to move to an easier system. We ended up playing Hero's Quest.

LibraryOgre
2014-09-30, 02:04 PM
Hero Quest was great fun, though we quickly started adding house rules.

YossarianLives
2014-09-30, 06:33 PM
Hero Quest was great fun, though we quickly started adding house rules.

Wow! I didn't think anyone else had actually played that.

LibraryOgre
2014-09-30, 09:56 PM
Wow! I didn't think anyone else had actually played that.

Yeah. I recognize how much of a gateway RPG it was at the time.

SaintRidley
2014-09-30, 10:12 PM
I started playing in 2003, right after 3.5 launched. A couple of friends invited me to start and so I checked out a session and was welcome to join. It was something of a goofy game - the druid was an evil gnoll who charged everyone exorbitantly for a dose of goodberry, the cleric was inane and attempted to cause a distraction of some sort by going without pants, and so on. I wound up playing the Druid's white wyrmling buddy who comically didn't quite understand the concept of a hoard yet, while another friend who joined at the same time played a monk.

My dragon was interested in anything shiny, which included a chandelier we happened upon which I attempted to fly up to and take some of the crystals from. Turned out I got stuck, and the monk jumped up to help me down. Only the monk got even more stuck and nearly died from it.

It was a very seat of the pants introduction to tabletop roleplaying. And totally worth it.

Remmirath
2014-10-01, 12:19 AM
I started playing in my mom's AD&D campaign when I was around five years old. They were running through Keep on the Borderlands at the time, and I made a variety of characters for the campaign from then on, most of whom met various fates and one of whom stuck. I'd been watching them when they played for a while before that, and had found it interesting. Once I started playing, I read through all the books we had (at the time, mostly first edition books, with a single second edition PHB), and then more or less taught myself from there. I've never liked asking for help for things if I can figure them out myself, but I did have some help with the first few games I played in, not surprisingly.

When I began playing other editions of D&D and other roleplaying games, I followed more or less the same process of reading through all of the core books and then messing around until I had things down, only without the guidance of somebody more experienced if I needed it, because I was often the one assigned to figuring out how the system worked before we got started. The first session of a new game often goes a little odd rules-wise, in my experience, but it can be very entertaining.

KoboldCleric
2014-10-01, 06:24 PM
Specifically my first TTRPG: I ran into a cousin I hadn't seen in 10 years outside a Beer & Soda. I was picking up Soda for the football game, he was picking up beer for his TTRPG. He invited me to play this new game that had just come out called From Another Time, Another Land. I played an archer. Campaign featured the PCs as arab defenders of the holy land during the time of the crusades. Had a blast. There was no rape, no spellcasting, no rolling for class or race or cranial circumference, just a very extensive list of skills and an intriguing cast of characters brought to life by a group of players and a GM who were able to think seriously and in-character in a way that I have never seen duplicated.

Game lasted about 3 years and wrapped up on a truncated schedule so that we could finish before I moved. Have since played a number of other systems and am happily part of a great group that meets weekly, but nothing has since matched that first experience. Say what you will about the system, the players make the game.

aethel27
2014-10-01, 11:37 PM
My first RPG? One of teh old final fantasy's

First TTRPG?
4E in college..... never going to do that again found myself a PAthfinder game on roll20 and enjoy that instead :)
havent had a chance to get into a 3.5 game yet..

Roleplaying?
uhhh *whistles* still learning how to do that :smallcool:

lytokk
2014-10-02, 07:07 AM
I may have commented earlier, but I just remembered my first gaming experience. When I was a kid, 6 or 7, all the kids in our neighborhood hung out and did stuff together. We all played a bunch of video games together and one guy came up with the idea of doing a live action game. I don't remember what the first one was, but I think it might have just been called megaman digging. The whole point was you were robots in the megaman universe digging up ores and gems to either upgrade yourself or sell for upgrades. And fend off attacks. We did a lot of the digging variety of games, well, two more. Zelda and Mario. In the 80s you didn't exactly have the massive number of gaming universes there are now. Totally free form, no dice, but you had to act out what you were doing. I remember the sheer breadth of sound effects the game master made really did a great job of getting us into the game. In the end I remember playing a massive amount of different games. I hadn't thought about those days until I was flipping through a photo album and saw a picture of the GM. Played these games for years. It wasn't until I was about 20 I ever picked up a die and played D&D.

Great, now I'm nostalgic.

Jay R
2014-10-02, 09:08 AM
Yeah. I recognize how much of a gateway RPG it was at the time.

I never noticed that. When it came out, I'd been role-playing for 14 years, and it never struck me that it would bring people in. I bought it for the props for my D&D game. (In fact, I used some of them just last month.)

LibraryOgre
2014-10-02, 02:42 PM
I never noticed that. When it came out, I'd been role-playing for 14 years, and it never struck me that it would bring people in. I bought it for the props for my D&D game. (In fact, I used some of them just last month.)

I would if I could find them. Great plastic minis.

cosmicAstrogazr
2014-10-02, 03:06 PM
Ohhhh man. I was six years old, and snowed in in very rural Colorado, and some of the older kids around were playing (there were... three or four other houses in hiking-through-the-snow distance? I think? This is more than twenty years ago, so...), and I read through all the books I could get my hands on at the time, and so that naturally included the rulebooks... Once the other kids realised I could read and more-or-less comprehend the rules, I got dragged in, and I've been going ever since. :smallsmile:

My first character was 'an elf with a bow', but that didn't last long, because what I really wanted to play was 'a wizard who is secretly a princess or maybe a princess who is secretly a wizard', and once I had, I guess, proved myself? I was allowed to. Ahhhh, memories......

EisenKreutzer
2014-10-02, 05:05 PM
I started roleplaying when I was about 15 years old. I grew up in a small town in northern norway, which is way out in the boonies even by norwegian standards. There weren't many social outlets for a teenage nerd in a small town, but luckily for the few of us that lived in the area there was this bookstore owner who recognised a group of social outcasts and started up a club for all of us. He was a very christian man, but he was sweet and openminded and not preachy at all, and he was a huge nerd himself. He provided us with a church basement to play board games and Magic: The Gathering in one night a week, and all he asked for was thirty minutes to tell us about his faith. We didn't mind, he was a very nice guy and we had lots of fun.
One night he had invited two guys from out of town who attended a writers school in the area to come talk to us about roleplaying games. These two guys were older than us (I think they must have been 18-10), and they impressed us with stories of conquests and bravery. A bunch of us thought it sounded like fun, so we got to try playing with them. This was AD&D 2nd Ed, mind you, and we had to bring calculators to work out THAC0 and stuff, but we had tons of fun. After two or three sessions, I tried my hand at GMing for the first time.

And that was it, I was hooked. D&D 3.0 came out not much later, and I bought the books and played with a small group of friends. After that I moved to a different city for school, found new friends and discovered World of Darkness games. After a few years of that I moved again, and discovered indie-games and the RPG-theory scene, and after a few years of that I went back to more traditional games with a whole new outlook on roleplaying games, systems and gaming in general.

And now, 15 years later I'm here. I've been playing these games for half my life, and I love it. I never have as much fun as I do around a table with my friends, pretending to be warriors and wizards, rolling dice and laughing and joking.
Honestly, without roleplaying I don't think I'd be the man I am today. It's taught me confidence and math skills, it's given me great friendships and keeps my wild imagination busy.

Sidmen
2014-10-02, 08:50 PM
My play experience began with the crpg: Baldur's Gate. The game was weird: plate armor was worse than the chain I began with (what? my AC went DOWN), and my sound card had somehow gotten acceleration turned on so all the voice acting in that game sounded like chipmunks. Eventually I figured out how the game's math worked, how to turn the acceleration off, and how to put my own voice in the game as a playable option (with an echo - because I was awesome). Then came Baldurs' Gate 2; I tried some others (words of radiance, for one, but couldn't stand them).

And then there was Neverwinter Nights, and its strange new math (now AC increases when I wear better armor? what sorcery is this?). I learned how to play 3.5 from the little math scrolling at the bottom of the window in Neverwinter Nights. I, of course, followed this up with Neverwinter Nights 2 and Icewind Dale 2 (Icewind Dale came with the latter - but I couldn't get into it).

My first actual pnp RPG was just a few years ago (mind, those games I was talking about were played in the late 90's). When I drove 3 hours to another state to play with a group using dnd 4th edition. I played a wizard, whose magic missile never hit anything (yeah, they broke magic missile in the first print run of 4e) and failed to do anything of value except using prestidigitation to make the assassin's armor glow when he ran. So we easily followed him - breaking the DM's carefully laid plans and endearing myself to the players.

Nobody ever expected me to return (3 hour drive + failing Every. Single. Roll.) but I did. And now I'm DM'ing for a group closer to home.

Psyren
2014-10-02, 08:55 PM
I grew up in the Caribbean so tabletop was all but unheard of, even Magic. Thankfully I had Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy 1 and that Mircroprose Magic game to teach me the basics.

ramakidin
2014-10-02, 10:25 PM
My entire tabletop RPG experience started almost a year ago, when I asked my mom if she was ever going to use that D&D starter box (4e) she got for free at a librarian convention. She said no and that I could have it. I forced my brother to play out four characters at once while I DMed the pre-made adventure. When he refused to fight the dragon cause he swore it would kill him, I invited my other friends to play. Now I DM for a group of 8 players and starting in December we may actually figure out how to roleplay a character in the new campaign world I am building. :smallbiggrin:

The Hanged Man
2014-10-03, 04:45 PM
First month of 6th Grade, my best friend and I were serving detention in the school library, helping them haul boxes out to the trash. One box had a ragged copy of Ars Magica 2nd Edition, and a big heap of Dragon Magazine back issues. One of the librarians snapped at us for thumbing through them when we were supposed to be getting punished, but we missed that subtext, and assumed they were being thrown away for inappropriate content. So we stashed that box behind the dumpster and came back for it after detention. This was like 1993, a couple years before The Internet was a part of my life, and I would have fought wolves for a hypothetical glimpse at a grainy drawing of a buxom elf maid in a chainmail bikini.

We used these materials as inspiration for a poorly-made homebrew setting that was basically Heavy Metal Narnia. A couple years later, we decided to actually try Ars Magica as written. That directed us to Mage: the Ascension and the rest of the classic WoD (especially Changeling: the Dreaming), and then GURPS via the 1st Edition ports of the Big 3 WoD games (still my preferred WoD system, over any rules White Wolf has ever mashed together). I didn't actually try D&D for the first time until later in High School, because I had a baaaad case of Mid-90's White Wolf Fan snobbery. After that, I realized I could have a good time playing pretty much any game, so long as I was playing with cool people.

Biffkinbot
2014-10-03, 10:14 PM
about a month ago, I entered a social circle and overheard them planning a campaign. requested invite, got invite, started my first crappy fighter.

said fighter died last week, working on a knight and a backup beguiler trapsmith with a fujoshi personality. can't wait to cast ghost sound to make people hear lewd things.

Ailowynn
2014-10-05, 01:16 AM
Well . . . "back in the day," a friend and I would just sorta make up games. One of us would be the storyteller, and the other would make up a cool looking character sheet thing and maybe roll a few dice, and completely disregard the laws of physics (one time my friend shot an elf out of a bow at a BBEG, for example). Then, we got a bit older and decided that, since we both loved Star Wars so much, we really ought to see what this Star Wars RPG thing on eBay was all about. We went through about three editions in a month ("No, wait, this one's even newer!) and did a bunch of mini-campaigns with just one or two friends. And somewhere in there we played the Dragonstrike board game (still my favorite board game to this day, even though I lost all the minis and most of the tokens).

Eventually, that turned into real campaigns and whatnot . . . although, to this day, I have never been in an actual D&D campaign. We've done Pathfinder, and Swords and Wizardry, and half a one-shot of 4E, and half a dungeon crawl in Next; but never yet a true D&D campaign, or even a true D&D story arc (or even a true D&D adventure).

Squark
2014-10-06, 02:20 PM
My Dad finally let me look through his old 2nd edition player's handbook and d&d basic set. Then, for my birthday, I opened a thin rectangular package and found the 3.5 player's handbook. From there I began working on a campaign with my best friend and out little sisters.

Knaight
2014-10-06, 02:44 PM
My mom played D&D in college, and mentioned it in passing a few times when I was young(er). For whatever reason, it really caught my attention. I then developed freeform roleplaying in elementary school from that, and played it with my brother - it then propogated through the entire school, as one of my brother's friends was pretty popular. So I GMed and played a lot of freeform with a lot of people. Then, when I was 11 or so I found a 3rd edition D&D PHB. It never suited me, but it did give me an idea of what to look for, and I got into the hobby.

Akal Saris
2014-10-06, 04:27 PM
I started reading pick-your-path adventure books in elementary school and then decided to play out adventures with my friends, where I would be the "book" and they would be the captain of the Enterprise (we were big on Star Trek).

Later I went to summer camp and watched the counselors playing D&D. I wasn't too interested until I saw the Monster Manual and from that point I was borrowing it constantly to read about the creatures. When I got home I talked my friends into playing "D&D" which was basically two-or-three-person storytelling with no rules except a d6 to determine some random probabilities, and lots of fighting with sticks to act out encounters :) I ran them through the story of the Hobbit and other books and set my games in settings like Warcraft II or Middle-Earth.

Once I entered middle school in a new city, I started reading Dragonlance and picked up the 2E PHB and DMG, which led to me running much more structured games for my new friends at that school, supported by knowledge of a campaign setting. When we were in high school, 3E came out, and I ran my first "real" games of D&D following the "actual" rules.

Later I became interested in character optimization side of the game about 8 years later when I was working in Japan and had nobody to play with until I started running and playing play-by-post and play-by-email games, which introduced me to the enjoyment of role-playing combined with writing a story.

Nowadays I run Skype games of Pathfinder, which is an interesting evolution because as a DM I can't "use" any combat maps or see my players' faces, so the tactical component of the game is somewhat diminished in favor of - once again - mostly cooperative story-telling.

Rallicus
2014-10-06, 05:53 PM
It was about '97, if I remember correctly, so I must have been 9 years old. 3rd edition hadn't been released yet. My friend used to always tell me about his brother's D&D adventurers, and D&D became a sort of holy grail to us. There were no LGSes around, though, and google-fu didn't exist (if it did, we didn't know about it), so we didn't have a lot of options.

Our sole hope rested in a statement my friend would make occasionally: "I think my brother left his books in the garage before he moved out." We'd search through his garage from time to time, rifling through boxes and storage containers in the vain hope of finding D&D material.

We'd do this whenever we got the itch, I guess you could say, but it never turned up anything.

Two years later, my friend knocked on my door. I remember next to nothing from my childhood, but this moment stands out like it happened yesterday. There was my friend, grinning from ear-to-ear, holding a AD&D module in his hands.

He'd found the holy grail. It had been in the garage all along, hidden in some obscure, out of reach box.

We played for a while, but eventually our interest waned. 3rd edition was released so we picked up that once a new LGS opened up nearby, but we grew bored of it almost instantly (it's no wonder I find the edition, and its subsequent releases [.5 and PF], to be my least favorite). Our attention turned to UO and from there it was MMOs or bust.

Then, when I was in my late teens/early twenties, my new set of friends and I discovered a storage container filled with 3.0 edition stuff. We started up again, though it didn't last long. It did however light a spark, and I've been running tabletop games online ever since. Although I haven't touched 3.X in two years, and I plan on never being a player or DM in it ever again.

TLDR version - I can thank rummaging through storage boxes for my introduction, and re-introduction, to tabletop.


Nowadays I run Skype games of Pathfinder, which is an interesting evolution because as a DM I can't "use" any combat maps or see my players' faces, so the tactical component of the game is somewhat diminished in favor of - once again - mostly cooperative story-telling.

You should really consider trying roll20. It's an excellent free virtual tabletop.

Comes with voice and webcam interface built in, too.