How did you get into traditional gaming?

Just like everyone else

Dad's friend got me a copy of 3e for my birthday, played a oneshot with just my dad GMing. Later played a game with my cousins, eventually started frequenting my FLGS and got into my first proper campaign.

Came here on a whim, saw some greentext describing these wonderful fantasy adventures, decided to give this D&D thing a whack

7 years down the line and I've alienated all my normie friends, moved away from my family, and become a reclusive novelist who chain smokes and drinks like a fish.

Now, I'm not saying that I nuked my life JUST because of traditional gaming, but it definitely didn't HELP.

By having no life, honestly.

My friends introduced me to D&D in High School, the brand new Eberron campaign setting book just came out and one of my friends had the 3.5 rulebooks.

In 1982 my older cousin let me play Advanced Fighting Fantasy. I got my hand cut off by a guillotine trap and was finally eaten by an ogre. Then him and his buddy Darren tied me up with knitting wool and locked me in the boiler room. I chewed my way out of the wool and escaped so I could go tattle to my aunt.

And ever since then I've been an adventurer.

A friend of mine introduced me to DnD 3.5, he was introduced by his brother. We were both 13 and played just the two of us, he mastered and also played.

Bastard played an elf ranger and just stealthed away from any threats, so my human fighter was always alone to fight. Shit was fun.

>find some random ass roleplaying book in the school library
>try our best to play it

When I was 10 my best friends dad ran a D&D game for us and it was pretty tight. When I got to middle school there was a whole club for this sorta shit and things kind of took off from there.

I picked up Magic just over a year ago now because a buddy of mine encouraged us all to get decks because his new roommate played a ton of Magic. Since then I've dropped about $3000+ on Magic cards. I'm a college student. I can't afford to be spending all my goddamn earnings on a trading card game. Send help.

My uncle was big into D&D when I was younger (not so much now, he's dealing with ME and diabetes, pretty sure he hasn't met with his usual group for a long time) and used to regale me with tales of some of his group's adventures, like his run-in with Strahd or this one campaign arc where they had to destroy this Frankenstein-esque demigod in an Astral demiplane in one of their higher-level adventures. I don't remember a lot of the speifics, but it was pretty cool shit to me at the time. He also ran a couple of short, 1 on 1 2E sessions for me when we were together and had the time/energy, which was unfortunately pretty rare, but it gave me a taste for the game. He gave me his 2E books at one point, I used to spend ages just reading them even if I didn't really get to play. Still got them around somewhere.

You sound like my current GM.

It's happened a few times to me, first time when I was about 12 some kid at school was reading an issue of White Dwarf, I asked him if I could have a look and being the weeb that I was, I was instantly fixed on the Tau. I bought a few units and played every weekend at the local store until I started having exams and shit to do.
Fast forward 5 years and I'm 17, been out of school for 2 years and one of my old friends asks if I want to go to his house and let off some fireworks for guy fawkes night, since he mentioned free food I was up for it. His house has entire cabinets filled with TTRPG rulebooks and miniatures, so I asked if he could run me through how to play and I started playing D&D every week until all my friends went off to uni.
Then a few months ago my closest friend tells me that a new store opened up in the town near us and we should go check it out, I got chatting with the owner who had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of RPGs and he asked me if I ever played Magic, I said no and he asked if I wanted a free deck, being the jew that I am I said yes and I've been playing since.

A friend of a friend taught me Magic back during Invasion block. I played for years until cards started to get stupidly expensive and Dawn of War had me interested in 40k and other wargames.

user confirmed for taste.

As for me, a pretty neat, but now less neat friend got us into it. He played it in college when a furry got him into it. Then he taught us 3.5 and I've been trapped in 3.PF ever since, but it's a comfortable prison and I own it. We're actually playing 5E now, but I keep pushing for things like Exalted or shadowrun. The guy who taught us the game is currently being worked to death at a Wawa, after he drank the social justice koolaid and his landwhale left him to marry a guy who looks like his evil twin.

Forgot to mention that I guess I've been playing for around six or seven years now. Same group, plus a guy, and minus the original guy.

I had friends in high school who got me into it, and the enjoyment just continued into college, with myself getting deeper and deeper and more proficient in the systems I play.

I secretly bought the 4e core three books and hid them under my bed so my parents wouldn't throw a christian fundie shitfit. It was four years later I actually got a game when I moved out at 18.

Manual of Planes at my public library.

Could you say it was your gateway drug?

When I was ten or even younger, I bumped into an anime FRPG. Pokemon, to be specific. It all just got worse from there on.

I always had an interest, partly because my dad bought into the "D&D is satanic" craze and it was therefore taboo, but I didn't actually get to play until 18 or 19, when one of my friends invited me to join his D&D 3.5 campaign.

I always wanted to play D&D, since I heard of it's existence back when I lived in a town in the middle of an island. Due to personal autism, and the fact that every single teenager in the island hated my guts, I had to wait until I left for college to finally get into a game. It wasn't until 4 years after moving, that I would be able to get into an actual campaign, due to every single game I ever entered it crashed and burned before 3 sessions.
Unfortunately, the GM didn't like to read much manuals, so we ended up playing bastardized versions of every game he ran, and until he got bored and dropped the campaign and system and went with something new. After a while, I decided to take the seat and GM myself, and the curse is back, and since then, the past 3 years I have started at least 6 campaigns and each one of them got crushed for multitude of reasons.

And I'm starting a new one this Monday, and I hope this works because I need the non fake social interaction.

Neverwinter nights

my fucking nigga. Baldur's gate, too

I haven't, not yet.

Ok, Veeky Forums, serious question time: I've reached the point where playing a TTRPG is one of the very few properly social activities that threatens to make me leave my cave (I haven't played one before, but I'm conceptually interested). Is this just going to be another unfulfilling dead end that I regret after some time passes? Obviously, I don't expect you to read my future, but I imagine some of you have been in similar situations. After spending some time on this board, I've gotten the impression that many of you don't actually enjoy this hobby anyway.

To be honest, I'm pretty sure the first exposure I had to RPGs was that Dexter's Lab episode about it. Well, that or E.T.
And then when I was 8, maybe a year and some change after that episode would have aired, I got a second-hand copy of TSR's Dragon Strike from my cousin. Which came with this instructional VHS tape: youtube.com/watch?v=FF1_IHliRhI
Goofy as it is, it really does make for a fair primer on how to play and GM a game.

Around Christmas when I was 9 I saw the TSR logo on a D&D starter box and my Grandma noticed I was enamored with it, and bought it for me. My oldest brother would run it for me and my two other brothers.

A group of friends I was introduced to played regularly, and I definitely wanted in.

In turn, they had learned D&D through one of their dads, from a young age.

Don't do it. We don't need another basement dweller making our game store smell like salami gym socks.

Nerdy friend got the 3.5 books, showed me some of it, and invited a few friends for a session not much later. It went really well since all of us were into Ragnarok Online at the time

After moving out of the country I stopped playing, but I started a group almost three years ago when I had a strong desire for doing creative stories in RPGs, and we've been going strong through multiple systems, and now I've been constructing a fantasy setting, while also having a fun M&M setting as well

It seemed fun.

Walked into my FLGS and asked "Can I play?"

...

My mom used to tell me about how she used to play OD&D, and that got me interested since it sounded so cool.

Sadly, it is to my great regret that I was corrupted to the ways of 3.pf by this other kid I knew, before realizing the error of my ways

A guy from my church got me the Mentzer Basic box for my 10th birthday. My dad beat me and that box was the one good thing in my life. I loved the solo adventures so much that I've devoted most of my free time to trying to recreate the fun of that solo experience and pass it along to the children of the future.

Friend in highschool persuaded me and a few others to try 3.5. For the longest time those guys were my closest friends. Still keep in contact with most (including my best mate), but due to reasons I broke off contact with the guy who got me into tabletop.

I found 1D4Chan, then Sup/TG/, then I finally made my way here.

So what I'm saying is Veeky Forums is what got me into Tabletop

Some Vietnamese kid showed me how to play MTG on the playground.

>I've devoted most of my free time to trying to recreate the fun of that solo experience and pass it along to the children of the future.
You're a good person user, I'm sorry about what happened to you, but I want you to know I appreciate that you haven't let it completely bring you down.

Keep strong, you're good enough

Thanks, I needed that today.

I'M ATTACKING THE DARKNESS

My older brother was big into tabletop in high school and I got dragged to a couple of sessions when he was supposed to be babysitting me.

Some old internet friend tried to getting a group of us to play pathfinder a few months ago.

I really liked a lot of it, but it was kind of a mess.

Ever since then I kept trying to find some game, any really.

It's as good as the people you play with

Met 2 guys in the 6th grade. One had drugs, the other Warhammer.

I picked the wrong one.

Newfag.
I read Planet Fargo's tabletop article when I was a teenager, followed the links to DM of the Rings and the then-new Darths and Droids, and the rest is history.

I was interested by RPG games and CYOAs.

I'm too autistic to fiction in a group so I never truly got into them though.

Underated

Dungeon hack for DOS,ff6 and fft.
Then MTG during ice age.
Watched every episode of gargoyles as they aired.

More fantasy fiction and games.

I was pretty young.

Then in 1999 I started playing vampire revised, got 2e DND used, and switched to 3.0 when it came out.

I was really into Think Geek for a while. I honestly don't remember how I stumbled across them. Anyway, they had the 4e Red Box for sale. I had always seen dnd on TV and thought it looked fun. So I bought it. It blew mine and my friends' mind. The Internet quickly convinced me that dnd4e is trash and Pathfinder master race. I think it was Giant in the Playground forums or some trash site, I don't remember. So I started buying Pathfinder books and we played that for a couple years.

Eventually I realized there is a whole world of rpgs out there and started reading all kinds of different books. The more I read the more I realized Pathfinder and most editions of DnD were trash.

Here I am, seven years later, and 22 years old playing about two games a year, but also reading two games a month. I don't have the time to play much anymore like I did in late high school since I'm a full time student with a full time job, but man do I fucking love reading rpgs.

I wish I had discovered it in middle school instead of wasting all my time playing Halo.

Kind of dipped into it, dipped back out of it, and dipped back into it again.

3rd grade, MtG had a spurt of popularity in my school. Wanted to get into it in order to fit in with what the other kids were doing, but parents forbade. Combination of "just another dumb fad he'll grow out of" and "It's satanic".

...yeah I know. "The cool kids play magic and I want to fit in" sounds funny as fuck in retrospect.

Found shitty christian knockoff called "Redemption". Nobody wanted to play. Languished.

Got into Mechwarrior 2 for PC either just before or after MtG was trending.
Subsequent expansions.
While searching the newfangled internet for the only thing it was really good for at the time: cheat codes, I found out that Mechwarrior was from Battletech, which was a... board game? with... models? Wow, those are really small compared to my model jets... and... OH! A card game!

After nagging my parents to take me on a trip downtown to the only place the internet said I could find those cards, I also found TROs, which were like the PC game blueprints and stats that were imagination fuel for me. Got TRO 3055 Revised, A starter deck of Battletech CCG, Two boosters, and a pewter mini of a Warhawk.

...still kicking myself for not grabbing one of the Marauders sitting on the shelf, instead.

My dad gave me the D&D Rules Cyclopedia when i was 12 and i always wanted to play. then he introduced me to GURPS 3e, which i preferred over what I read in the Cyclopedia

After that I played every game-book I could for a few years. I finally played AD&D 1e in 4th grade.

Does anyone remember the Dungeon board game?

I took a dungeons and dragons summer camp at my local museum.

was dope af

I played a Hatchetman once

>tfw I never had any family members to introduce to anything other than fucking monopoly

I have no fucking idea. I haven't been at it very long, but whatever caused it must have been so utterly boring (or perhaps horrifying) that my mind has blocked it out entirely.

Or my brain is starting to calcify, I have been getting headaches.