How were you first introduced to D&D? • Page 3 • Collecting General • The Acaeum

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How were you first introduced to D&D?
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Matthias
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Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 2:34 pm

bbarsh - was your local hobby shop the Shutter Shop by chance?

I grew up in Milford, MI and was first introduced to the game by my best friend's older brother. He was running an AD&D game for a handful of friends and when they needed additional players, my friend and I jumped in. Once we got accustomed to the game, we started our own campaigns (corrupted numerous local youths) and graduated to regular player's in the older brother's campaign - where we battled for two summers against the forces of a wererat tyrant named Kraven. My ranger was eventually killed when infiltrating the wererat's castle.

This was in and around 1981/82 (5th grade). My friend's mother also happened to work at the only nearby store (Shutter Shop) that carried D&D. I don't recall the first item I purchased, but I still have a copy of the MM that my mom's friend gave me for Christmas 1982 (with a nice Merry Christmas note on the inside front cover).

We didn't play anything other than D&D until DC Heroes came out. Soon after I went to high school and stop gaming for a few years. When I got to college, a high school friend attending the same school was rooming with someone looking to start up a Call of Cthulhu game (Masks if I recall). It has been nothing but trouble ever since...

Keith the Thief
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Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 10:20 pm

Not counting Metamorphosis Alpha, which was part of our D&D world, my first non-D&D RPG was Traveller.

All of us in our D&D group were SF fans.

But Traveller just wasn't the same experience.
Naturally I bought everything I could, of course, being OCD about that kind of thing.
Wish I still owned all of it.

Keith

"Never let it be said I didn’t do the least I could do."

bbarsh
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Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2011 10:32 pm

Matthias wrote:bbarsh - was your local hobby shop the Shutter Shop by chance?

I grew up in Milford, Mi. My friend's mother also happened to work at the only nearby store (Shutter Shop) that carried D&D. I don't recall the first item I purchased, but I still have a copy of the MM that my mom's friend gave me for Christmas 1982 (with a nice Merry Christmas note on the inside front cover).

We didn't play anything other than D&D until DC Heroes came out. Soon after I went to high school and stop gaming for a few years. When I got to college, a high school friend attending the same school was rooming with someone looking to start up a Call of Cthulhu game (Masks if I recall). It has been nothing but trouble ever since...

No, I grew up in St. Clair Shores. It was Whistle Stop hobby shop. Still there but in a new location. The guy who owns the Shutter Shop just passed away a couple months ago now. Sadly, the store is closed. Not sure what will happen to it. He still had some Marvel RPG stuff, but not much else. My wife is from out here - Milford.
Great gaming story by the way!

And I could've bought these damn modules off the 1$ rack!!!

New modules for your Old School game http://pacesettergames.com/

Everything Pacesetter at http://pacesettergames.blog.com/

FormCritic
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Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 1:45 am

I heard about Dungeons and Dragons from a brief mention in a magazine (PC World?)

My high school friends had a Holmes Basic Set. They told me about their adventures.

I played in the local game - and cursed that I was already a junior and thus only had two years to play.

After playing a character in my friends' games for a while, I kept thinking I wanted to play a game with more scope and detail, with more interesting things to do. So, I made my own "world" and became the DM.

That was in 1978.

My wife and I have been hosting weekly games (probably 35-40 weeks per year?) for all 27 years of our marriage.

My high school campaign is still going on, albeit through many permutations of style, storyline, edition and personnel.

Holmes to AD&D to 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition to 3.5 to Pathfinder.

(We did have some diversions into Warhammer 40,000 and Shadowrun.)

(No 4th Edition games for me.)

"But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world."

obxharvey
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Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2011 9:07 pm

Several friends had photocopies of parts of various TSR rule books, modules, etc. and were running adventures, around 1980. One of the few books that they had was the DM's book from a red basic set. My first character was an elf and I remember being part of a party in one of the Slaver adventures. I still have some of the homemade character sheets! I was a latch key kid, school ended at 3 and mom did not get home till 5. One day after school, I took my half dollar collection and rode my bike to the hobby shop and bought the basic set with the Erol Otus dragon on the cover. Man, was my dad MAD that I had spent my collection. Best investment I ever made, I still have it. Been collecting ever since. I played off and on thru college. Started playing with my daughters last year. Good times!

MetaSigma
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Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2011 9:22 pm

OBXHarvey wrote:Several friends had photocopies of parts of various TSR rule books, modules, etc. and were running adventures, around 1980. One of the few books that they had was the DM's book from a red basic set.

Not in 1980 they didn't.

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obxharvey
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Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2011 10:38 pm

Well, I may be wrong on the exact year, but it was the early 80's because I was around 9 and my first box set was the one with red rule books with the Erol Otus covers. I still have the books, box is long gone. I bought it because one of the guys had one of the red rule books and he told me to get the basic set so we would have a complete set of rules. Maybe 82 at the latest. Most of what we started with was handwritten notes, homemade adventures and some stuff one of them copied from a rule book with a manual typewriter. Slave Pits of the Undercity was the first real module we played, but we had been gaming for at least one summer before we got that. I remember photo copying stuff from my books on my mom's work photocopier for them.

FormCritic
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Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 1:22 am

OBXHarvey wrote:Several friends had photocopies of parts of various TSR rule books, modules, etc. and were running adventures, around 1980. One of the few books that they had was the DM's book from a red basic set. My first character was an elf and I remember being part of a party in one of the Slaver adventures. I still have some of the homemade character sheets! I was a latch key kid, school ended at 3 and mom did not get home till 5. One day after school, I took my half dollar collection and rode my bike to the hobby shop and bought the basic set with the Erol Otus dragon on the cover. Man, was my dad MAD that I had spent my collection. Best investment I ever made, I still have it. Been collecting ever since. I played off and on thru college. Started playing with my daughters last year. Good times!

LOL That's a new one in the Angry Parent category.

"But I have watched the dragons come, fire-eyed, across the world."

Badmike
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Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 3:15 am

As a complete non-sequiter, my dad gave me his coin collection when I was a kid, I kept it up, added to it over the years and still have it....includes tons of silver dimes, quarters, half dollars, and every Lincoln penny back to 1909...but is dwarfed in value by my D&D collection. If I had been smart I should have dumped it in 1979 when the silver market went nuts and bought D&D stuff with the money (I actually sold one mint looking silver dime at the time for $6 to a local dealer who probably ripped me off at the time; the same dime 30 years later is worth about the same amount; a SW copy of a mono G1 would be ten times that).

Mike B.

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SimperingToad
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Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 11:44 am

Badmike wrote:As a complete non-sequiter, my dad gave me his coin collection when I was a kid, I kept it up, added to it over the years and still have it....includes tons of silver dimes, quarters, half dollars, and every Lincoln penny back to 1909...but is dwarfed in value by my D&D collection. If I had been smart I should have dumped it in 1979 when the silver market went nuts and bought D&D stuff with the money (I actually sold one mint looking silver dime at the time for $6 to a local dealer who probably ripped me off at the time; the same dime 30 years later is worth about the same amount; a SW copy of a mono G1 would be ten times that).

Mike B.

You're looking at it the wrong way. Coins are insurance, not investments. When paper fails (and it always does), gold & silver will retain value, a sort of wealth insurance. When the dollar collapses, you're not going to be likely to find someone who will care if the SW G1 is rare.

If the half dollars were silver, I'd be a bit miffed too. But then I never would have given my kids something like that unless they understood what lawful currency meant. [/threadjack]

My first exposure was waaaaay back in the summer of '78 with the Holmes set as a soon-to-be 11 year old. B1 all they way. No clear recollection of the first character, but I believe he was a human fighter. We didn't use names until sometime later. The guys who introduced me (a pair of brothers, and for a while their sister) and I drifted apart in the mid-eighties. I hadn't seen them since until the younger of the two passed about 5-6 years back.

clangador
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Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 4:35 pm

My oldest character sheet dates back to 1974, although I don't remember much about playing him. Just his name and I think the DM had use use index cards for character sheets and kept them after every game. I believe the sheet I have is a copy of one of those index cards. I was talking to one of my friends from that era and he remembered more about the game than me as it was his older brother running it.

I didn't really start playing until 1977 when Holmes Basic came out.

~Clangador
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SimperingToad
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Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2011 4:43 pm

We had used loose leaf pages from the start. I did use index cards during some solo games BITD, though.

obxharvey
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Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2011 3:01 pm

Oh, I understood the value of the coins. My defense when my dad got mad was that I only spent the common half dollar ones that were in bad shape, I saved all the real valuable ones, the silver dollars, old mint half dollars, Bicentennial silver coins, etc. I had some cash, I just did not want to wait till I had enough. I still have the rest of the coin collection, I am too afraid to sell them!

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