Wayback in the early to mid 80s (perhaps 1983), I bought the Player's handbook for ADnD. I guess I was about 16.

Earlier than that, I had been playing with the "choose your own adventure books, Sorcery books, Wizard of Firetop mountain" etc...

But I'm referring to a real RPG rules set, playing with other people.

So anyway, a new RPG shop opened in my area and they were doing introductory ADnD adventures to actually show people how to play RPGs.
I didn't have the rules at the time and only vaguely understood what RPGs were.

I had read many fantasy books before then, such as LOTR, The Hobbit and all sorts of other Author's books, but apart from the solo Game books, that's all I had to go on, RPG wise.

The guy who was running these sessions had the PHB, DMG and MM on the table, but all we got to see was the PHB from a distance and we generated characters, which was fun in itself.

I ended up generating a Human Mage, so I had a Sleep spell and that was about it.
The other players generated various other class/Race combinations.
I remember being pretty excited, as it all felt very arcane and secretive, especially as I'd not even had a look in the PHB really. The DM was just reading out to us what to do.

Then the gaming session itself started and it was awesome and exciting. You could throw a spell and roll dice and all those dice and and character sheets looked so cool.
He also used 25mm figures, which was even more awesome as it really helped visualise what was going on.
That and he drew out a map of where we were when fighting Goblins and a forest encampment etc.

Anyway, after that quite long session, I guess which ran for about 5 hours, it was the evening and the RPG shop where the sessions took place stayed open for us to buy the books.
Very kind of them indeed!   .

I ended up buying the PHB, MM and DMG there and then, along with a set of dice.
so did pretty much everyone else in that gaming session.

The other people and I ended up forming an RPG club and we even hired a community hall to play RPGs for a while.
The club lasted for some months and I played ADnD for that duration. So those months were a lot about playing the game and getting the rules terribly wrong probably, but it was awesome fun and I was truly obsessed with RPGs from then on.

Later I bought the 1st Edition Stormbringer Boxed set and that was the first RPG I ever actually ran.
Shortly after that I started running ADnD as well though.

To me the first time I opened up that PHB and started reading the rules and generating characters, it seemed very mysterious, secretive and special, like I had some secret knowledge the general populace didn't have.
It really gripped my imagination and attention as a major part of my life for years.

So, what was it like for you?
What RPG was it?
What were the circumstances of your first real RPG experience?

I remember seeing this:



and going "Holy cow!" (Hey, I was in 7th Grade and hadn't graduated to better cusswords yet.)

Mostly awe and wonder at what I'd gotten my hands on.

Yeah the various pictures in the books really fired my imagination.

In '78, my friend's older brother just got the PHB (he had OD&D books) and ran a game for us (I was 7, I guess my friend was 9)

I mostly remember being entranced by this:



And so my first character was a paladin, who died rather ignobly, trying to cross a crevice on a log and failing a dexterity check

Yeah, that's a great picture...no flashes of light coming off the paladin, no powahs...sword and shield. And courage.

The first book I picked up was the blue book, from the blue box. And there's this dragon looking at me, it's sitting on a pile of gold...

BX and Gamma World around the same time. Followed by AD&D not long later.

Id played in AD&D before that but never actually seen the rules.

For Basic it was a sense of "What is this?" and reading through and getting a grasp of how it all worked. Those alien shaped dice, the striking illustrations and the relative ease of it once you grasped the basics.

Gamma world was very different in a way as it was a very blank slate overall. Though it combined well with BX, especially for overland travel. The art was also different and set a different tone from BX.

Quote from: Doom;795869Yeah, that's a great picture...no flashes of light coming off the paladin, no powahs...

Well, none beyond his protection from evil aura.

An actual physical book? In or shortly after 1987.

Hungary was behind the Iron Curtain, so RPG stuff only got here in very small quantities and was still a largely unknown and poorly understood thing. Actually, I think computer RPGs, like the SSI Gold Box series, had better penetration at the time, because computer game bootlegging was way more firmly entrenched* - pnp RPG really only made a proper appearance after '89. (And yes, Fighting Fantasy books were also a big thing.)

Anyway, my uncle is a typographer and had the opportunity to go to Chicago on some professional business/scholarship/whatever it was; and he brought home two books for me. He didn't really know what they were, but someone out there assured him that this was the latest rage among kids, and the title and the cover looked like something I would really like (and I did).

Now, the books weren't Dungeons & Dragons. I know this was 1987 or shortly thereafter, because these books were published that year, on the 10th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope. They were the very first edition of WEG's Star Wars and the Sourcebook. As I'm typing this, they're in my desk, within arm's reach. Even the 1st ed. PHB isn't nearly that close.



*For a very long time, western computers such as the C64 were on the CoCom list and couldn't be legally imported into WarPact countries, so there weren't any legal computer game stores, either. People would smuggle (then later legally bring) stuff from mainly Austria, then bootleg it either for money or quid-pro-quo. Or just freely share if they were nice fellows. There were things like "copy parties" in local culture centres, events whose raison d'etre was to copy a large number of game tapes on somebody's double-deck recorder.

In the summer or fall of 1978 I got a hold of the Holmes Basic D&D Set with B1 Search into the Unknown. It wasn't until the fall of 1979 with the AD&D DMG came out that things really picked up with tabletop roleplaying. Until then we did a lot of hex and counter wargames which was also in a boom period at the time.

Confusing.

The version of Basic D&D I first purchased wasn't really intended for complete novices. I didn't really understand it until I got to play it with some older kids at school. The Fighting Fantasy books, which came shortly after, were much more geared toward the novice being as they were targeted at kids. The Mentzer Basic rules that came a few years later were better targeted at novices.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;795860I remember seeing this:



and going "Holy cow!" (Hey, I was in 7th Grade and hadn't graduated to better cusswords yet.)

Mostly awe and wonder at what I'd gotten my hands on.

Same here.  Same picture in fact.  The B/X books were the first I looked at, and by God did they leave an impression.  Erol Otus and Bill Willingham art for the win.

Quote from: yojimbouk;795937Confusing.

The version of Basic D&D I first purchased wasn't really intended for complete novices. I didn't really understand it until I got to play it with some older kids at school. The Fighting Fantasy books, which came shortly after, were much more geared toward the novice being as they were targeted at kids. The Mentzer Basic rules that came a few years later were better targeted at novices.

Actually the B of BX has some good pointers in it. Especially when you realize Keep on the Borderlands is essentially more DMing pointers at the start.

I first knew about D&D from seeing these weird little brown books for sale, but I wasn't captured until this:


At that point I knew D&D was something new and not another one of those little booklet wargames. Later I got Moldvay Basic and saw that first picture.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;795860I remember seeing this:



and going "Holy cow!" (Hey, I was in 7th Grade and hadn't graduated to better cusswords yet.)

Mostly awe and wonder at what I'd gotten my hands on.

At that point my reaction was similar, awe and wonder as a whole new world opened right in front of me.  Magic Missile and Web...the coolest shit ever.

1979. Holmes Basic. I had never played, nor had anyone I knew. Opened the books (Holmes Basic book and B1 In Search of the Unknown) and was captivated by artwork and maps.





But I couldn't make heads or tails of the game rules themselves.

I was pretty underwhelmed by the very first RPG books I got my hands on - Little Black Book Traveller. It felt cool and sophisticated as it was something for "older kids" (actually the books were my older brother's) but as you can imagine, for a 9 year old, it was not quite on target. But as a fan of Fighting Fantasy books I knew what I was after. Bought Tunnels and Trolls soon after (D&D was proscribed in the house) and went from there.