'70s, taught by a friend, who was taught by a junior high school teacher, who ran a house-ruled white box in a class to teach math.

About a year later, got Holmes and then the PHB when it first came out. That's when I learned about the differences from what I was taught.

199...8? It was at the end of high school in a friend's stingy basement apartment surrounded by drugs and alcohol. Rather than getting up to some other kind of mischief, we played 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

On my very first Statistic roll ever in my life, with a 3d6 I rolled a Strength of 18. That makes me happy looking back on it. Thinking on the game itself all I remember is a confusing mess...and I thought it was tremendous fun.

//Panjumanju

1979, age 10, Jew Camp.  Cabin at night, older bunkmates were playing, blew my mind.

1992, with a "friend" of my mother's-- she later married him-- and his children. Theoretically, we were playing first edition AD&D, but the game we played didn't have much to do with the book at all. The DMPCs had special abilities that made Unearthed Arcana look tame and pale in comparison, and my first AD&D PC was an Elf Monk. (My first RPG was actually Gamma World.) You get ability score increases by level, but only from certain classes and... yeah.

It was interesting learning how to play D&D "by the book" with real people.

Quote from: Mistwell;7040291979, age 10, Jew Camp.  Cabin at night, older bunkmates were playing, blew my mind.

they really called it Jew Camp? In an unironic way?

so what did we learn from this ?

the RPGsite has 80 active members 85% of whom have been playing RPGs for more than 25 years ?
Didn't we know that already are we trying to build on our angry old grognards web persona ?

Some school friends played D&D at university and knew that I played RQ so invited me along. I played AD&D for a couple of years, but it always was second best for me.

I started playing Steve Jackson's Melee and Wizard in 1978. Moved on to Traveller and Runequest and it wasn't until about 1980 that I first played true D&D with some guys in school who were heavily into Iron Crown settings: City State, etc.. Gotta say I was underwhelmed with the system and blown away by the ICE stuff. Went back to Steve Jackson when he published The Fantasy Trip (have purchased almost every edition of GURPS since, including Man to Man, but balked at 4th edition -- enough tweaking already!).

In 1981 I bought one of the very first box sets of Call of Cthulhu (printed in brown ink -- which I later heard was a mistake, but absolutely fitted the product to a T) and it has been my go-to system ever since. (I have five editions of it on my shelf including the leather bound 25th anniversary edition and the d20 edition.)

I did purchase the AD&D books some time in the early 90's but never really spent time with the system. When 3.0 came out I played it at a Con and decided to give it a try. Generally I like the support material and the artwork, but having rolled more than half my life to score under the target number, d20 just feels like driving on the wrong side of the road.

I splurged the other day and bought Chaosium's BRP fat book to get over the limit on Amazon for no cost shipping. Should have just stayed with my CoC and 2nd edition Runequest. I still trawl the local comic emporium for new games, but it takes something startling for me to buy anymore, especially with so much free content online.

Quote from: jibbajibba;704065so what did we learn from this ?

the RPGsite has 80 active members 85% of whom have been playing RPGs for more than 25 years ?
Didn't we know that already are we trying to build on our angry old grognards web persona ?

I think the osmosis/book larnin' split is more importa . Here, more people learned older editions by osmosis than by reading rules, while the newernewer editions are the reverse. On RPGNet, more people learned by the book than by osmosis, except for the youngest group. On both sites, the youngest group is small.

Apparently, this poll was run on ENWorld, too, although I don't go there and don't know the results. On RPGNet, someone claimed the poll proves conventional wisdom is wrong and most people learn by reading the rules.

1991 for me.  I saw the "Black Box" Basic set at Toys R Us.  I always wondered about it, due to familiarity with the 80's cartoon as a kid.  It looked a lot like the video games I loved at the time (Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Zelda), but you could play it on the table with friends.  I brought it home and devoured the solo adventure that same evening, then proceeded to spread it among my friends, much like lycanthropy.

I feel my entire childhood conditioned me towards D&D due to the popularity of sword & sorcery/science fantasy in the 80s.  I was already steeped in things like fantasy movies (Conan, Clash of the Titans, Krull, etc.), cartoons (He-Man, Thundarr, D&D), comics like The Warlord, and so on.

Even before D&D, I was already experimenting with DIY fantasy board games.  I cobbled one up out of a shoe box and board game parts I called The Tower.  I think it was a ripoff/hack of Fireball Island, but I don't remember the details anymore.

Initially learned from the Holmes D&D, with some other kids in the neighborhood.  (Circa late 1970's).

Later picked up Moldvay basic and started to learn how to DM my own games.

1984 for me, and I learnt from a game because I didn't know anyone who played RPGs.

Like a lot of Brits my gateway drug was Fighting Fantasy game books. Through them (possibly through the magazine they published for a while) I learnt about the concept of RPGs, and was able to persuade my mother to take me to Games Workshop and buy me a copy of Car Wars.

I think I may have ended up with that specifically in large part because it was cheap. Of course, it wasn't an RPG. I never did play it, actually.

Anyway, on second attempt, I save up my pocket money and bought myself TSR's newly released Marvel Super-Heroes. I persuaded some friends to give it a go, and we commandeered a classroom and got a campaign going a few lunch times a week. Things were rough and ready for the first few sessions, but we figured things out as we went, going with what made sense when we had rules issues.

That campaign fell apart after a few months, but by then I'd made contact with the other role-playing group in my year at school. They didn't have a classroom to use at that point (in Britain at the 80s playing outside in bad weather was seen as character building, and so kids outside of sixth form weren't allowed indoors at lunch - finding classrooms we could use was a never ending battle), so they started using "mine", and I joined that group. They had previously been playing AD&D, but at this point they'd "outgrown" that, and were now playing Palladium FPRG.

I didn't actually play AD&D at all until 1989. When 2nd Edition came out I managed to persuade the group to give the new edition a shot, on the basis that most of their cool gaming stories related to the old AD&D campaigns. I GMed a series of adventures published for Dragonlance shortly after 2e launched. All I really remember about them now was gully dwarves, our Paladin drowning in a swamp, and a really epic final battle with lots of dragon riders.

1990s for the RPG industry from a book. Star Wars d6 from WEG specifically. I swear I'll seriously play it someday.
2003 for actual play with my Traveller group - which has been going strong for most of 10 years (aside from a couple of little hiatuses*), and 2008 for D&D 3.5 with another group - and I'm now in a Pathfinder group which has been campaigning for over a year.

Quote from: GameDaddy;703764Squad Leader wasn't released until school was almost out in 1977. The favorites for us at the time were Panzer Leader, Panzer Blitz, Russian Campaign, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Bltzkrieg, Ceasar's Legions, Luftwaffe, Alexander The Great, & Tobruk, and, of course, SPI games such as Barbarossa, Modern Battles Quad, Korea, The Mobile War 1950-51, Oil War, Outreach, Red Star - White Star, Starsoldier, 30 Years War Quad, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler . I had a subscription to SPI and remember getting Gondor: The Siege of Minas Tirith.

Got SPI's Lord of the Rings in 1978. Really wish I had that game now, as well as Strategy I. Both phenomenal good!

'77 was a good year. SL also had a role playing element in that you had a blank leader chit which you could play up through the scenarios. Ah, Diplomacy, Afrika Corps - I still have a stack of Generals somewhere, Blitzkrieg, I had the slip cover Panzerblitz with the special all PB General tucked inside, it's gone now. First Game  played by GDW wasn't Traveller but Drang Nach Osten, I found out about Traveller from a GDW catalog inside Imperium, bought it in '81 after I bought Gamma World.

Moldvay. Sold that so friends could play (I lived in another town) and couldn't find another copy, so wrote my own game which got played to death till Mentzer set came along. After that tried everything put out from late 70s to about 1987 as the group tracked down every kind of game. Call of Cthulu was one of the least successful, as was T&T and Runequest. They just didn't get much of a run.

Played mostly BECMI, AD&D 1e and supers games.