When and how did you learn to play D&D?

Ravenswing · October 31, 2013, 04:38:00 AM

Quote from: GameDaddy;703764Got SPI's Lord of the Rings in 1978. Really wish I had that game now ...

Huh. My copy gathers dust.

1977, freshman year of college. I'd had high school friends who had a D&D circle -- and, since some of them were on the yearbook staff, they put a lot of the interior illos from OD&D into it! Anyway, I stumbled onto a copy of the original Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes in the Northeastern University bookstore, thought "Huh, this is that game Marsha and Denise talked about," and picked it up. It sparked my interest, and I picked up the original boxed set at the FLGS. Started doing solo runs with my younger brother, and I cringe at how clueless I was.

After the first of the year, I was visiting another high school friend out at UMass. The guy across the dorm hall from her wanted to try out Empire of the Petal Throne, so we hauled in another HS classmate of ours on campus and played for ten hours straight on each of three straight nights. That really jumpstarted my interest, and I turned into a fanatic fast.

Part of my quick evolution into homebrewing was that one of the Boston-area FLGSs carried a few copies of The Wild Hunt and Alarums & Excursions. I followed the former for about a year, but it was a local product much devoted to swapping stories of local campaigns, which didn't hold too much interest. A&E, however, was huge, multinational, and heavily devoted to mechanics and rules discussions. I loved it, I quickly became a contributor for several years, and became a gaming iconoclast overnight. Never really did stop doing that.

jibbajibba · October 31, 2013, 04:59:21 AM

Quote from: Ravenswing;704298Huh. My copy gathers dust.

Mine too although I played the Fuck out of it when i was a kid. Of course the Saruman thrid player option is broken...

Would be a good game for FFG to do a reboot of with some minis and a little simplification of some of the hunt and capture rules.

Glazer · October 31, 2013, 05:30:51 AM

It would have been 1975 for me. I picked up a copy of OD&D at my local model shop when buying some Minifigs wargames figures, and learnt to play using only the orginal rules. I can remember that it wasn't until Greyhawk came out that we figured out spells could only be cast once a day - until then we though a magic-user could cast the spell they knew any number of times!

Maese Mateo · October 31, 2013, 11:48:21 AM

2000s and by the product

I never understood a single AD&D 2nd rule (first RPG I played back in 2003) until I sat down and read the book. Before that I just rolled a d20 and hoped to score high, with no idea how THAC0 (or GAC0 in Spanish) worked.

I also learned that the DM making me perform an Intelligence check every time I wanted to cast a spell (that is, 1d20 with a number lower or equal to my character's INT score) was a very dick move. Not to mention that the "one free Wish every time you level up" was something he made up as well.

Still, it was a very cool gaming table, one of the best I've ever had (more focused on roleplaying that the system).

jhkim · October 31, 2013, 07:42:32 PM

I answered "1970s and by my group/osmosis", but that's not exactly true.

I learned about D&D because the older brother of my best friend in preschool played. This would be around 1975. However, they never let us play.

I learned the rules from the Basic Set in 1978 or so. Still, those were early grade-school games and were borderline just "Let's Pretend".

Exploderwizard · November 01, 2013, 08:36:28 AM

Quote from: jhkim;704480I learned the rules from the Basic Set in 1978 or so. Still, those were early grade-school games and were borderline just "Let's Pretend".

D&D is pretty much a "lets pretend" kind of game.

Elfdart · November 03, 2013, 10:24:15 PM

Late 1979 for me. In the beginning, I only remember the Blue Book (Holmes), but soon afterward, the MM. PHB and DMG followed. I didn't get a copy of the blue book until the following year. I remember using the chits instead of the dice, which for some reason were hard to find at the time.

At first I started playing because my older brother had to take me wherever he was going. The older kids (ages 13-17 IIRC) weren't too keen on having so-and-so's little brother (I was 9) tagging along. That changed pretty quickly: Apparently the DM and I read most of the same books and watched most of the same movies because I could figure out how to spring the trap/find the gold/kill the monster more often than not.

RPGPundit · November 05, 2013, 01:16:54 PM

It was the 80s, and technically by product right at first (a school friend bought the game and asked me to figure out the rules). But within a couple of weeks at most I was playing with established groups and doing learning that way.

Raven · November 05, 2013, 02:10:55 PM

I accumulated a Mentzer Basic set and assorted other materials during grade school and junior high but only got to play a handful of times. I was already into gamebooks (Starship Traveller!) so I mostly taught myself by reading and rereading the rules (on the down-low, as my parents tragically bought into the Satanic scare crap; they got over it pretty quickly*) but those few early games no doubt gave me a big head start. 2e came out shortly after I started high school and that's when I really started getting serious about it.

*Mind bondage spells ftw. Debbie was right!

Haffrung · November 05, 2013, 02:32:58 PM

Bought the Holmes Basic set in 1979. Found it unfathomable as a set of game rules, but full of mind-bending awesome nonetheless. Had a friend's older brother teach us how to actually play.

So introduced by the product, learned from buddies.

Justin Alexander · November 06, 2013, 03:43:34 AM

1989. After bouncing off MERP, Bunnies & Burrows, and the Batman Roleplaying game the BECMI Basic Set finally let me figure out what the heck I was supposed to do with all those rules.