Gaming History Meme

[subplotkudzu]

While I don't participate in memes (I'm one of those iconoclastic loner types; plus, I'm lazy) if other people want to take this up as one I wouldn't mind. I'm suggesting that as a tribute to Mr. Gygax people post their first encounters with role playing games in general, D&D in specific (though for many of us those will be synonymous).

 

In my case, my first encounter was a description in _Dynamite_ magazine, circa 1980. Dynamite was a children's magazine which, as memory served, I subscribed to through the scholastic book fairs at school. The fateful article attempted to explain what D&D was and how people played it, with examples taken from the author's observation of actual play. It even detailed some of the differences between Basic and Advanced D&D, quoting an exchange in an AD&D game where the party illusionist rescued the Centaur PC from quicksand by using an Alter Reality spell to separate the water from the earth (since the Alter Reality couldn't effect living beings). After reading this, I had to try it.

 

My grandmother, bless her heart, bought me the red box copy of the game that Christmas and my path was set. I had spent several afternoons at my friend Chad Fleming's house playing the electronic Dungeons & Dragons game - where you moved your figure around a pressure sensitive grid and entering any particular square would reveal treasures and monsters. I giddily invited Chad over to play D&D and he was somewhat taken aback by it being the actual D&D and not the electronic game. I corralled my mother into this as well, and the two gamely ran through part of the sample adventure. I know it didn't have the same impact on them, but for me it was freebasing imagination. I don't remember any specifics of the session other than explaining to Chad that a mace was a big hunk of metal and not a pepper spray. A few weeks later I got my dad to play, and still remember his first level magic-user casting a Hold Portal to prevent an attack by a charging monster - my first encounter with player ingenuity instead of a direct attack.

 

Some of my friends took to the game, some didn't. Everyone was dabbling with it the next year at school as a 'cool' kid who had just moved into the area brought his own copy, making it a brief 5th grade craze. It wasn't until the next year when the school's morning announcements included an open call for new players at the town library's D&D club did I get a player group larger than my friend Greg. It wouldn't have mattered: I was hooked from the first time I read about the game, and even all of Jr. High and High School was just my running games for one guy I'd have still done it. My job is what pays me. Gaming is what I do.

Comments

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

It was 1980 or so, I'd just started playing "blue book Basic" with the other kids at school, and the module was good ol' B1, "In Search of the Unknown." My character was one of the pregens from the back, Trebbelos the Boy Magician. The party I'd joined had already made a couple of forays into Quasqueton, and they took me to the big chunk of mica down in the caverns that gives you a random magical effect if you chip off a flake and put it in your mouth. IC and OOC (not that I was really clear on the difference at the time), I wondered if it was some kind of weird hazing stunt for the new guy.

In hindsight, spending a year in an alternative school might not have been the best thing for me - I was already socially behind for my age, and that just got worse since most of the other students were younger than me - but I did encounter both D&D and Choose Your Own Adventure books for the first time there.

After Hearthwind, I wouldn't be in a proper gaming group for almost a decade. I dabbled in early Champions in junior high/middle school, and Traveller, and continued with D&D - but it was mostly solo, making characters and ships and dungeons and such, and driving my parents crazy by talking about the games. Then I got to college...

Finally, I'll note my rather unusual path between editions. I started with blue-book Basic, as noted above. A few years later, I got the Expert book. They didn't quite match up (besides the different levels covered) and I gradually realized that they represented different versions/editions. Then I found the Monster Manual, which I thought was the missing link... it wasn't, but that's how I got into (1st Ed) AD&D. I still have those books, which I read cover-to-cover during a family car trip down to San Diego; even the MM, whose cover and binding I practically destroyed by carrying it around in a backpack and using it for a writing surface for years, not to mention my ill-considered and soon abandoned coloring effort. (I've since acquired another MM of similar vintage for my collection.)

[40yearsagotoday.livejournal.com]

I don't know when I first heard about D&D. Back at cubs scout day camp (summer of 81 or 82), the counselors carried the books to play on break; they were tome of infinite mystery to me, but of course they weren't going to invite a 9-yr-old to play. About that same time "Mazes and Monsters" was broadcast and I watched the gaming scene and said "I want to do that!", which was rather antithetical to the intent. We moved, and I bought books and other RPGs (Star Frontiers, Marvel Superheroes) and even wrote my own, but I was still the only boy in Bloomsbury, NJ who had a yen to dungeoncrawl. I caught glimpses of games, from a karate instructor, from another camp counselor, but actually playing D&D seemed as far away as Middle-Earth or Narnia.
In '86 we moved to a small town in the Hyperborean reaches of New York state, and there I finally found other people who felt the pull of polyhedral dice. But I loved D&D for years before I ever got to play.