How were you first introduced to D&D?

She showed up at a party I was at in 1975, and next thing I knew we were in bed together. We were never introduced, though.

F

Gnat the Beggar wrote:Did not even think of D&D again until I started college 2 years later, joined a small group for a year, then they simply faded away.
Tried a few times in the next few years to find other groups to no avail.

And then what?!!!

Well I unfortunately haven't been involved in the old days.

My introduction to roleplaying games was through games like The Elder Scrolls - Daggerfall and Baldur's Gate. Then I heard about a convention called GenCon which was supposed to be about roleplaying games so I went.

To my amazement I discovered this convention barely had a computer game present (at the time I was convinced there were only computer rpg's)   Instead there was this pen & paper version. Hmmm. So I got the complete starter set (TSR 1167) and that was my very first D&D purchase.

Since I had bought the game, I was bombarded to storyteller immediately. I got a group of friends together with whom I had played MUD's for years and we did a first very basic session.

Then by chance, someone told me about a local gamestore. I went there, found more D&D books, two of the three store owners gave us a demo session and I was hooked. Those two guys became life long friends, and are still the guys I play with even now.

Since I was the storyteller in our own little group (the MUD guys), I was buying all the books and that's were the collection started.

In case anyone is interested in that convention, it was GenCon Benelux 31st of July + 1st of August 1999. It was also, as far as I know, the last GenCon Benelux that was organised. Looking at the program folder now.

The honorary guestlist :

* Mike Edmonds - Logray (Ewok shaman) in Star Wars Return of the Jedi
* John Hollis - Lobot (Lando's aide) in Star Wars The empire strikes back
* Michael Sheard - Admiral Ozzel in Star Wars The empire strikes back
* Jeremy Bulloch - Boba Fett in Star Wars The Empire strike back/Return of the Jedi & Captain Colton in Revenge of the Sith
* Chase Masterson - Leeta in Star Trek Deep space nine
* Tony Szczudlo - TSR artist for Birthright amongst others
* RK Post - Artist for Magic the Gathering
* W.J. Maryson - Dutch fantasy author

RPG's being played :

* Alternity : Incident at Mirfak, Fold in the Tapestry, Living Verge Whirlwind Tour
* AD&D : New beginnings, Ghost story, Secret lives (tournament), The musketeers go to war, Everything is relative
* Living City: A boy and his mammoth, Crawl
* Ravenloft : The doorway to darkness, In the flesh
* Vampire : Family reunion
* Legend of the five rings : The tomb of Iuchiban
* Shadowrun : A cascade crowning
* Call of Cthulhu : Arctic Dreams
* Ars Magica : The Fudarus gathering

Other than that there were also some unnamed Star wars and Star Trek games and Vampire LARP. Watched the LARP and just could not figure out what they were doing. Who would know, years later I'd play Vampire LARP myself  

Funny story when I was talking to Tony Szczudlo. A guy walks up with a magic card in his hand.

Guy : Could you sign this for me ?
Tony : That's not my art
Guy : Yes it is
Tony : No it's not. Want me to sign it anyway ?
Guy notices RK Post is a booth further : euh no, sorry.

Anyway Tony was a really nice guy, I bought a print from him showing a huge battle between orcs and humans. He gave me some smaller prints for free.

I also remember joining the RPGA (although I never played in their games due to no conventions where I could play), and receiving the Kidnapped module as part of becoming a member. Opened the module and it was incorrectly stapled together so the cover was upside down compared to the booklet so I returned it and asked for a new copy  

A nice trip down memory lane.

In 1979 I was introduced to the game by a guy called Dave Enderby. The rules seemed fairly fluid. Anything had to be ordered through Esdevium Games by mail order. There were one or two pre-written adventures: Citadel of Fire and Dark Tower & Badabaskor 90% was made up high fantasy.
In the 1980s we ran a Greyhawk based campaign fuelled by peanut butter and coffee and the Horslips.
By the end of the decade, coming back from university there was a real mix of combat/magic rules for different GMs: Palladium/Stormbringer mix with Jorune oh, and the coffee was replaced by beer and Black Sabbath/Blue Oyster Cult & Jethro Tull. Then there was Cthulhu & Thin Lizzy & beer (Nyarlathotep GM'd by red_bus). Even later a Greyhawk based campaign RM (combat & skills)/AD&D (magic) accompanied mostly by Ozric Tentacles. The twists and turns of Vecna & Kas, true flan freedom fighters sullied and slandered by the evil machinations of the imperialist propaganda machine of the Oerids - only the paladins of Vecna knew the truth: and of course Jack of the Shadows & Rhialto.

Being as I suck, my very first impression of D&D came from the cartoon series, at least visually since the books were not allowed in our home thanks to overprotective parents with the fear of God in the belt at their pants. And then, one day, my brother came home from a Boy Scout camping trip with tales to regale the youth and it clicked that what he was describing was what I had seen and then, lo! In a book store best left unnamed (since it is no longer in business) I espied the 1st edition AD&D DMG. It sat, and sat, and sat until one miraculous day I had garnered enough gold coins to loot it away and secret it far inside the "devil's library." It was the only book I owned, and the only one I thought I needed, so I played what I thought was D&D based on what I could find and make up, only later to discover that it was not "exactly" how the game was written... but, oh well. I kicked ass.

I was teased for NOT playing D&D in the summer of 78, the kid in question was waving a collector's edition white box (although I didn't know that at the time).  Later in Boy Scouts I learned what D&D was and somewhere bought a Holmes edition boxed set. I was in 7th grade at the time.

A friend and I were deep into wargames (1776, Third Reich, etc) and so we gave Holmes a try. He ran me through the dungeon first. I played a magic-users and died in the first room (the one with the skeletons). I attempted to use the parry rule but it didn't work out. The we flipped it around I ran my friend through the dungeon. We determined we needed more players.

Later that winter we split the cost of a player's handbook and was disappointed that it didn't have the combat charts. So we were still stuck playing a max of 3rd level. Finally sometime in 1979 I got the Dungeon Master's Guide and it became my main hobby.

We weren't aware of original D&D until year later. My initial introduction through Boy Scout involved guys using Homes and a monster manual.  My initial impression of the Monster Manual that it looked like it was taken from a library book that it had all these monsters from mythology. (I was a mythology buff) I remember being impressed that a Catapoleas (sp?) was included. When I started buying Judges Guild I was puzzled by the reference to rules, items, and stuff that were similar to in the AD&D hardbacks but not the same. At the time I chalked it up to the poor editing of the products.  

Then I got the white box set and realized what it was and also what poor editing really was like. My copy even had the rule that all damage was 1d6 omitted from the bottom of the one page. Which cause me to be confused about that point for many years.

The primary appeal of the game was the worldbuilding. My mom was a teacher and had a stack of quarter inch graph paper. I took a big sheet of oaktag (thick cardboard you draw on).  Made a campaign map. I then ruled out rectangles in letter paper size proportion. Cut it up and then drew the detailed map on the quarter inch graph paper using the tiles to make sure everything lined up. Lost everything from that project years later.  

Because of my interest in worldbuilding I was a dungeonmaster all the time. I only managed to get two characters up to 6th level and one to 11th level.

My first Dragon Magazine was #38. My first non D&D game was Traveller.

5th grade, towards the end of the school year, 1980.  Chris S. brought the blue box into class.  We generated characters and even made it part way up the entry corridor of B1 before we had to go home.

Gnat the Beggar wrote:Now I mostly play RPGs with the grandkids.
Sometimes a few local buddies get together, but not often enough.

Yeah, the vast majority of my present-day games are with my son, although I'm forming a new group if one of the players can stay out of jail long enough.

However it sounds like your collecting activities go beyond the games with the grandkids. How did you get into that (after originally losing interest)?

Echohawk wrote:   I sometimes have a problem with characters ending in up jail. Players... not so much...

I can sympathize. Two of the players in my former group did prison time, one much longer than the other. At least it's fairly easy to figure out what to do with their characters while they're gone... The dungeon... <sigh>