TheRPGSite

Greetings to all...

I always find it interesting to ask people this: what was your very first game playing experience? What was your character's name and class? How did it go? And what was your impression of RPGs as opposed to other games you have played?

I'll start.

My very first game was 1979 - D&D's B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands. It was myself, the GM, and another player. I ran a MU with the unimaginative name of "Ram", the other player was a Fighter named Blue Fist. We made our way to the 'Caves of Chaos' and nearly got killed by a Giant Rat. When we were better, we found a bunch of chump change, then got ambushed by a Gnoll and a Troll. Both our characters dumped the loot and ran away. We managed to make our way back to the Keep, only it was locked for the night.
Both of us tried to swim across the moat and drowned.

I thought that it far outstripped any other game because it was powered by imagination and also didn't require us to conform to a set of pre-arranged plans. I really liked the freedom to do whatever I wanted and also the idea of creating a new character that could be however I wanted. -- I was hooked.

What about you? Share your first game experience with us.

78
Holmes Basic
Home brew dungeon

We were in middleschool and the DM thought that naming the characters was silly and childish, so he didn't allow it. I was simply known as Dwarf Fighter.

1991.  TMNT & OS.

I accidentally killed a cop in the scenario with the school taken over by mutant birds.  My first 'accidental' kill.

I learned to rationalize collateral damage at an early age.

Holmes Basic (I believe), 1979. My best friend ran me through the intro dungeon.

First character - a Paladin named Minston Diced (say it out loud). Yes, even at that tender age I though highly of my ability to make up puns. I'm still wrong, of course. I have re-cycled him many times over the years (was my first 3e Character in fact, though I went Fighter that time out), including my first World of Warcraft character.

Second character - female Cleric named Wilma (had a crush on Erin Grey/Wilma Dearing at the time). She, too, has turned up many times in the years since (WoW included). This proves that I am not, in fact, a mysogynist as long as the female in question is hot.

The only thing I have clear memory of was thinking the game was fucking amazing.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st Edition, in 4th grade.

Remains , IMO, the pinnacle of one-book RPG presentation. It took a long time for anyone to convince me to play AD&D , which I saw as shoddy, unorganized, and with no internal consistency or setting detail to speak of in comparison.

I didn't play but my first gaming experience (about 25+ years ago, I think) was running a RQ game. I felt like God and pretty much ran games that way for a couple of years.

Regards,
David R

8th grade, 1994; played a thief in a miniature dungeon game. Classes really didn't matter, since we didn't do much but run around and fight. But I did pick one locked door in that dungeon.

I played a few more times before one of the players and I decided to buy some books and figure out how the game was really played.

I don't remember the first time I played. Started around  6 years old, playing with an older brother, in 1980 or 81. I have vague memories of playing fighters, thieves. I remember we played Oriental Adventures pretty heavily, when that came out.

I seem to remember Marvel SuperHeroes as well. Or DC - they had a superheroes game.

So - I don't remember my first game, my first character, or what RPGs felt like as compared to other games. The first memory I have of a "game-board" is blue graph paper in a D&D module, actually. I never got the experience of "discovering" roleplaying games. Sort of like I don't remember learning to read.

Got my two fingers chopped off in a trap. I was a thief.

I think I wound up getting killed by a goblin but I don't exactly remember. It was just the one session.

I was about 9. A friend of mine had the Ravenloft module, and I think I played a Fighter. Then we switched to a Lankhmar campaign.

James Bond, around 1989-90 I think. No idea what the characters name was. All I really remember was that he had a prosthetic arm that could extend to grab things and hit people. And that he had to have reconstructive surgery because he was too well known.

A friend in school ran a maze, with a minotaur. I had a halberd, and a lantern. Its rules used only purloined D6's from a board game. I imagine it was created by listening into an older siblings D&D game. I don't recall having things like stats, many rules, or even a name.  Yet that stuck with me and I finally got the connection back to D&D and away I ran.

I seem to recall my first D&D PC being an Elf named (something) Eagle, and my AD&D PC (several years later) was Talos Clawhand, who had a clawed hand, inspired by a short story I read which had "mutant" things in a fantasy environment.

I'm another Holmes Basic, In Search of the Unknown.
I gm'ed. The hardest part was coercing my friends.
Still at it, I guess. ;o)

First game I ever ran was odd. I started playing D&D and my mom was worried because of the whole satan worshiper rumors that were going around. So I had to prove to her that it wasn't anything like that by playing a game with her.

I suppose I could have bored her out of it by spending an hour building a character, but I just used the basic stats and made her a fighter and had a little "find my stolen treasure" adventure that ended about ten minutes into play when she realized there was nothing satanic about walking through a forest and beating up monsters.

I was twelve or thirteen at the time and the whole thing was pretty awkward. But at least she checked it out rather than trying to just ban me from playing it like some of the other kids.

1985 (9 years old). Red Box, I played a fighter by the name of Sir Harald (I wanted to be a knight, but there  were no knight so I got a fighter. He went on to become an Inmortal 2 years later, Saint Patron of Knighthood. My first game was about healing a cursed forest.

D&D Basic Set (the "black box" with the big honkin' red dragon on the cover). Having already played the "solo" adventure contained within (I remain convinced that this is still the best introduction to RPGs ever), I cooked up a dungeon of my own (stealing a bit from the one in the boxed set, of course) and threw my friends against it.

My first real RPG game as a player would have to wait a couple of months, with one of my friends picking up Tagmar (a local fantasy heartbreaker) and running us through it.

I was 12.

Good times. :)

One could argue that it was the solo adventure in Mentzer's "Red Box". After that I rolled up a cleric with the rather imaginative name of "Frodo". Never played with it though.

Since I was the only one to read English well enough in my group, my first game was "The Lost City" by Tom Moldway, as "the DM and explainer of rules/stuff/what all of this is about". It was Nov. 1st, 1984.

When I returned home I discovered that burglars had waylaid my house, so it was a day to remember, no doubt.

I was 8, in the summer of 1991. TMNT & OS. I was the GM and I played a wolverine commando. My buddy was a vulture with an assault rifle. We drove a car around post-apocalyptic western California and shot some guys trying to steal a truck.

I was eleven years old.

I fiddled around with a D&D Red Box with my cousin. Neither one of us could actually figure out how to play this new game his mom had gotten him - we had fun trying. Some guys at my church were playing AD&D and I was invited to play. I had to borrow a set of dice. I thought the dice were really cool.

My first three characters were thieves. The first died from a poison needle trap on a locked chest. The second thief was swallowed whole by a giant frog. The third thief actually made it to third level before being crushed by an Indiana Jones boulder sized metal ball coming down a greased chute. I may have lost another thief to a twenty foot spiked pit trap.

I remember switching to a Fighter next..... I think I reached fifth or sixth level before dying when our mage cast fireball in a tight space.

I've lost far too many characters of various classes over the years to remember their names. I do remember one character's name though. That would be Orin Duchane, an AD&D 2e Fighter/Cavalier that I managed to get from first to 17th level over a number of years. He died in epic fashion, while saving the kingdom he was sworn to defend from an ancient dragon trying to open a gateway to the Abyss.

My first game was RuneQuest back in 1981. I was introduced by my older brother as I had been drawing some treasure maps. The first scenario was from Chaosium's Apple Lane supplement 'Rainbow Mounds'.
I was playing a Black Fang Brotherhood Assassin who managed to fall off the bridge into the water. The GM, a friend of my brother, then switched to dealing with how my sister was doing with her character.
Only after an hour did he reveal I had been rescued by Newtlings.

If you don't count Fighting Fantasy books, it would have been the D&D basic set. I was 12 years old, and I don't remember almost anything about it except that we really didn't understand any of the rules.

RPGPundit

Tangentially, I visited the big used bookstore about an hour from my place today. They have a lot of used RPGs, but the last few times I've been in I've been disappointed because there was no Old D&D stuff. As it turns out that was because they had it all in another part of the store, in its own section. They had a shit ton* of stuff. I picked up a copy of the Moldvay basic book ($4.95) for my 10 year old, and a copy of the 1e DMG ($7.95) for myself. The latter was the very first gaming book I ever owned, but it has been decades since I owned or looked at a copy.





*Imperial not metric.

My first game was in '83.  I didn't play, I was the GM...a first time GM with a first time player.  The game was FASA Star Trek.  

It was very different from the board games we had played, but it could certainly encompass anything our imaginations came up with, which we liked.  I liked it enough to run that game system for the next 5 years.

Holmes in 1979-80. My first character, Rollo the Thief, was killed by the ogre in Keep on the Borderlands. My second character, Mollo the Magic-User, made it to very high level as our group gradually shifted over to AD&D.

Using the Holmes 'Black Box' ( Big red Dragon based on the Dungeon Dwellers mini! vs Fighter & MU ) was running "The Ghost tower of Inverness" for my sister...I think it was 1980? I was 12.
She played a human fighter named "Michael" because she had a crush on a guy at the roller skating rink by the same name.
I thought it was a realy lame name for a fantasy guy...I remember an encounter with some Gnolls and thats about it.

Some vague memories of stuff me and a buddy down the street did when I was 10/11ish. I remember the "G" and "B" modules being completed (I was the DM). We used minis and the Gold character sheets. I had a set of Red d. with yellow crayon filled #'s...played those d. till the edges started to crumble!
To many drugs since then.
:o

D&D 3e.  Living Greyhawk (Keoland -- represent).  Vismor Ashmara, a gnome illusionist who had the oddly serious name because he was raised by an urban human wizard rather than gnomes.  We had a really good DM, and fairly patient older players who helped me out a bunch.  I liked the relative freedom (both real and imagined), but a lot of the rush was just never having played a game like it before (although I had played NWN prior).  I liked how you could work in creative solutions to problems that most video-games couldn't allow.

And for some reason I remember there being some...Blackwatch?  Darkwatch?...that kept insisting there were no undead in Keoland, even as you were taking the onyx out of the corpses.

Moldvay D&D Basic in 1984. I stole a ring of regeneration off a sleeping wizard. I never looked back.

1978 - D&D with one of my best friends and his group. We played on an oak table that was 500 years old. It was memorable.

Quote from: Tetsubo;4934451978 - D&D with one of my best friends and his group. We played on an oak table that was 500 years old. It was memorable.

Where was that?  Did someone's mom just have a 500 year old table in their basement?

Quote from: RPGPundit;493590Where was that?  Did someone's mom just have a 500 year old table in their basement?

In their dining room actually. The Father iof the family was a museum curator and collector of antiques and art. There was a small jade head on display in the living room that was 5000 years old. One of the sons had a Brown Bess from the American Revolutionary War in his closet. The family was British by the way. They didn't fight on the American side.