Beginning

From the moment I watched that one Dexter's Laboratory episode I knew it was something I wanted to do. Mom wouldn't let me play D&D cuz 'Muh witchcraft'.

As a teen I discovered JRPGs, particularly Chrono Trigger and FF3 for the DS. I made up my own (shitty) RPG system, forced my brothers to play with me, and ran from there.

One day I discovered GURPS, haven't looked back since

>friends
Please, they left my ass high and dry for newer friends. My first games were with them but they never got past a third session and everyone wanted to roll shit for a new game. Turns out they managed to finish a year long campaign and they all still play to this day. I'm so close to giving up, the current group I try to play with aren't motivated to do shit and can't even answer questions like 'what would you like to see in this game?'.

My played many years ago. At one point, I learned of a local LARP group and almost joined it with him, but the expenses involved started to stack since we were tight on money and we realized it was silly as hell; touch only hits meant that the only viable melee was the two guys using a massive staff to poke others in the legs, and we gave up on spells when we saw a practice duel where a caster cast time stop and his opponent had to stand still and pretend not to watch as he counted to 10 and repositioned.
I played the Neverwinter MMO, which got me interested in the lore. At the end of that summer the 5e starter kit had come out, so I bought it and ran a ramshackle game with friends from marching band who also had never played and wanted t try. It was an awful mess, but a fun one.
The only time I got my dad to play was much later when I tried to run the starter kit for him and my steplings (he remarried) which resulted in the spiteful littlest girl attacking her goblin-weakened brother after losing interest in 20 minutes.

I used to watch Spoony's Counter Monkey vids and got interested.Also, there was this guy at my high school anime club who was running DnD 4e. He came to the first meeting of the semester with premade characters. I chose the dragonborn paladin. We never accomplished much and we were asked to stop playing by the club leaders because it distracted people from the anime. Eventually, I started playing with the guy and a few other friends outside of school.
Oh, and I've gotten friends into Dungeons and Dragons. I'd show my grandpa what DnD was, and while he didn't understand, he was glad I was doing something with my friends.

Painwheel is my favorite Skulgril.

My parents met playing rpgs. I knew the stories and characters from their old D&D campaigns earlier and more fully than the works of any author. With all of the books and stuff readily available, it was inevitable that I'd start playing. We started a family game when I was around eight. To this day, they still participate in many of my games.

My dad introduced me and my siblings to the original Star Trek RPG. It was fun, but he wasn't a terribly good GM and we figured out how to power-game the shit out of it by session 2.

That being said, I didn't really get into role-playing games until one of my friends introduced me to DnD 1e, and I got into 40k tabletop and RPGs shortly thereafter.

My father GM'd for us. The first serious system we played was "Chivalry and Sorcery," I was a dwarven artificer. It was cool adventures, he made maps and had a very involved world and the dungeons were sweet.

I never managed to get anything going on my own till college, but now I've had a really long-term campaign with great players and a few fulfilling side projects along the way. In not too long I'll be wrapping up this campaign of years, it's pathetic but I tear up thinking about it, just all of the good memories and fun I've had with these people over the years through this medium, and how we'll all eventually go our own ways into the wider world.

Saw the section for D&D in the dangerous book for boys, bought 4e tried to run a campaign and it collapsed in the first session due to playing it more like a board game and not really getting RPGs. Later ended up getting into war hammer after playing Rome total war and reading up about it on the Internet. One day walk into FLGS and find some of the people regularly played against playing black crusade with a huge fat guy DMing .Remember trying to play D&D and join the game. One guy doesn't show so we play feng shui instead, play a short adventure for 3 sessions, then the DM announces that he wants to run return to the temple of Temple of elemental evil, ad&d 2e. Play a wizard, have fun, get to the first layer of the temple before we change to black crusade. Then change to SLA industries. Then play a one shot of shadow run. Get fed up of constantly changing systems and start my own campaign of 3.5 with brother and some friends. Goes in for a while, but ended when I went on exchange, came back and I seem to have picked up the DMs sickness of never sticking to one system. Group fell apart and now I am stuck playing on roll20 and with the remains of the group and a few others irl. Roll20 did cure me of always wanting to change systems and am currently running a fun game of wfrp and playing in another.

That episode was my first contact with rpg too, user. I still remember how awesome I thought it would be to role play with one's friends.

My stepfather introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons. I now have complex feelings regarding the whole matter as he went on to murder my mother.

My dad had me playing Dragon Quest as soon as I was old enough to comprehend the rules.

My absolutely first touch with tabletop gaming that wasn't like Yahtzee and shit was a friend of mine telling me how his brother and friends played a game with dice and stats and stuff like a videogame but with papers, so we tried something they had - it was some strange homebrew that basically had a d6 roll for everything - and I mean EVERYTHING.

My first actual game was one of the older editions of Drakar och Demoner, the swedish game, in the Chronopia setting. That was just a test thing though, and it came several years later. I tried GMing some shit I got but nothing really successful or fun.

Finally, my first proper group came when I tried Dark Heresy 1e for the first time, which was shortly after FFG had taken the license. It was a blast.

None of my family members have ever been interested in tabletop stuff much. My brother has shown some interest in my Malifaux figures and X Wing minis, and was at least partly interested in trying Armada at one point. Luckily I have a lot of friends who are nerds.

I was just reading 40k lore on Lexicanum, at some point did a google search on Commander "Aramus" of the BR, got the 1d4chan article instead of the Lexicanum article, and with time I discovered Veeky Forums, Veeky Forums and TTRPG

I love these threads because I had three separate introductions to tabletop games.

>age 11
>kid in my school is reading white dwarf
>ask him about it
>those Tau things look pretty cool
>decide to start playing 40k
>give up after a few years because it was too expensive a hobby

>age 17
>left school two years ago and basically lost contact with everyone
>out of the blue, friend invites me out to celebrate fireworks night
>whole bunch of us
>knew they all played D&D
>ask if they wouldn't mind showing me how it works
>have a one shot session and quite enjoy it
>play regularly until everyone moves away to various unis

>age 21
>out with a few friends drinking
>one of them mentions a new store opening up in town
>it's right across the road from the pub we were at
>decide to check it out real quick
>get talking to the store owner
>really knows his shit about RPGs
come to think of it, not sure why that surprised me
>asks me if I've ever played magic
>I have not
>offers me a free deck with a demo
>he had me at the word free
>been going to the store ever since

two steps, early 90's
** i had a friend literally tell me DnD was a psychedelic demon game where you actually saw dragons and could cast spells. not being well educated at the time, i went and looked around. i found a group, realized what it was, and started to get better at math and understanding mythology.
i switched to White Wolf style games 5 years later.
** i had a long time interest in models and toy soldiers, then some fuck brought a FASA catalog to church. the little minis siren call got me. being flat-out poor, i looked for an alternative to spending on mini's. amarillo design bureau had a free catalogue they'd mail to you, so i scrounged up a stamp and requested one by mail. my first wargame was StarFleet Battles, so my math skills started taking off just so i could understand the game and hopefully find another player. however, i saved up 7 dollars and bought my first real mini too. a 1st edition Batletech Mad Cat. painted him in model enamels. i still have the fucker.

I tought tabletop RPGs looked neat since i had been roleplaying online since i was 12. So i got on roll20 and started playing.

Battletech with my older brother back in the 90s, when I was under 10 years old or so. CRPGs through my teens and early twenties - Baldur's Gate, Asheron's Call, etc. Recently started tabletop D&D with random friends at the age of 30.

I just found a gamefinder thread on /mlp/ and went "fuck it". Turned out the GM was a piece of shit, but I accidentally trolled him away and the new guy ended up taking over and made the campaign way better.

>Lived in a house where D&D = witchcraft, makes sense as my dad had some VERY negative things brought into his house by his own dad fuckin with that stuff
>see it occasionally around on stuff like yugioh (the old one, where it was a variety of games. one of which is a d100 rpg played by bakura with yugi and gang's souls)
>avoid it until my mid/late teens, meet some friends at church of all things, get into MTG, and by extension the acquisitions inc games (wheaton in hell was my first ep). instantly fell in love with the idea. rather than playing dnd, made my own system using MTG cards as monsters. pretty good, still being perfected.
>since then i don't have too much time to play, but do work on designing an alternative to D&D that makes the game more active, yet simpler to play.

Currently planning on running a game of Ryuutama with my SDE minis as PCs and monsters. also directing the art on my own project that is more eastern fantasy than western.

Explain

My mom actually got me into it. She used to play OD&D back in the day, and was all into that stuff before she graduated and joined the army.

As I got older, and kept playing more fantasy games, she kept talking about how different things were than her day, so I decided to try ot D&D for myself to see why she enjoyed it.

At first I was about to start with 4e, but then some huge neckbeard gothfag, who's mom kept trying to get him to go to the church we went to, fooled me and got me into 3.5e.

To this day, I regret ever listening to him, as I've been stuck in Pathflounder for years and only just now am able to escape to new systems.

But yeah, my mom's the coolest, and I thank her for getting me interested in fantasy and such while I was little.

Das sweet.

elektranon, is that you?

No.

I'm not sure if you'd call it tabletop, but my first experience roleplaying with rules was St. Ivalice, an InvisionFree forum made by people from the GameFAQs/Gamespot boards for FFTA. We basically emulated the mechanics of the game from scratch, and let me tell you, the math can get a bit wild when character attributes quickly reach three digits.

We never did get very far with the actual roleplaying (lack of moderators with the drive to DM), but we sure did a ton of homebrewing. And if nothing else, it was a fun, surprisingly drama-free community.

A friend of mine loaned me Dragonlance novels, then told me there was a game version.

I assumed he meant a video game or something (which there was, I found out later, not that it was any good), but no, he meant D&D. And then we played our own games in the setting.

Didn't make the thread, guys but the topic seems interesting.
Gonna lurk here for a while, will also be reading a long ass comic on /co/

Grew up playing 40k and MTG every Thursday and Friday as the local comic book shop's resident annoying 12 year old.
Saw people playing D&D one night. Asked if I could join. They let me roll a level 1 character and killed me off immediately but I was fascinated just as quick. Bought the 3.0 PHB and would try to run games for my classmates in sixth grade during indoor recesses.

I got MtG Portal edition way back in the 90s

Prior to that the closest I ever got was the Battle Chess computer game

I was like 4 and sat in on my cousins' AD&D games, then they helped me make a character for Shadowrun a couple of years later.

So should TG make a Skullgirls group or something? I feel like there's a sizable population of people who would play that game here.

true OG

still got the original keep on the borderlands somewhere

do you think it could be converted to 5e and still apply most things in it

I don't see why not. As I recall, they made a "Return to Keep on the Borderlands" as well. I think I have the pdf somewhere.

Shamefully, ive only been playing for less than a year, but i live in a third world hole and didnt even know such things existed outside of that episode of Dexters Lab

Yes, please.

i want to run a game for my brother and some of my frienda, do you think original dnd would be good? Brother is 15 and all the rest are 22 (probably gonna do a solo session with him to try it out)
I've dmd a few games of 5e, is ODND hard to play?

I got into Magic 15 years ago and when I read that it was heavily influenced by D&D, I got into that too.

Also, shit taste. Parasoul is best skull.

She's a psychotic half-asian girl from Canada that is love with her dad and wants her mom dead, she's also a qt

>At week X some friends started to talk about rpg
>some seller go to schoo to sell books
>enter the place where he is selling books
>see rpg books there
>go to friends and brothers and tell there are rpg books being sold
>we go to the place
>both my brothers and his friends decide to buy books, they buy werewolf and all d&d 3 core books, and one book about templars for a brazillian system
>the books stay in our house because my brother was suposed the one that would dm
>I read the stuff

I started in 1985 at the age of 10. I moved into a new neighborhood and the kids down the street invited me to come hang out with them and play a game. I figured we were going to play Monopoly or a Clue type thing. I had never heard of RPG's but they pulled out Dungeons & Dragons. It was a terrific mind blowing experience that gave a young boys wild imagination focus, that I obviously still embrace to this day.

your mom is one classy lady

>she's also a qt
Good enough for me.

roll20

My dad introduced me to D&D through the Rules Cyclopedia. And then he introduced me to GURPS 3e.

I've convinced my friends AND family to give GURPS a shot, and they liked it.

Roommates were starting a game in our apartment. After one girl got kicked out after session 2 for constantly derailing, and trying to start a prison riot by semenboarding a guy, I joined! Our DM was flying by the seat of his pants and had no plans. The map was terrible, the encounters unbalanced, the NPCs bland, but damn if we weren't having fun.

I was 8 and was visiting my dad in another state for the summer. He had to work so I ended up spending a lot of time by myself. Just down the street from where he lives was a hobby store, so one day I decided to go down there.

There was a group of older teens playing D&D and I sat around and watched. They were hanging out there every day, and I had nothing better to do so I started hanging out there too. Eventually one of them asked if I wanted join.

I said sure, so I started playing with them. Blue box D&D. They were level 13 or so, but the DM was a stickler and made me start at level 1. In his group there was no resurrection, if someone died they'd start over and need to get power leveled by the rest of the rest of the group. So I made a wizard and rolled a 1 for my hit points. Yup, 1 hit point wizard.

So the game starts and our party is going through a dungeon. We get in a fight with a chimera and I cast magic missile. I did piddly damage but thought it was the coolest thing ever. After the fight we found a treasure chest. So I yell, "I open it!"

The DM says, "Alright, but the chest has a trap on it. And you didn't look for it. So make a Saving throw vs Death.... you fail and take 21 points of damage. You're dead."

My eyes got all watery and it took everything I had not to burst into tears. The other players saw that and were like, "Come on, he didn't know. He's new. Let him take that back."

The DM didn't like take-backs, but he didn't want me crying in the middle of the store so he let me take it back and then told me how important it was to let rogues look for traps.

So a bit of a rough start but I ended up having a blast that summer and became a roleplayer for life.

I stumbled upon some guy's D&D blog late in high school and spent the summer before college coming up with a character. The only thing was the blog was mostly about 1e and 2e and the only book I had was a AD&D monster manual. When I joined my college's "Gaming Society" everyone was playing 4e and 5e was on the horizon. I also watched a lot of Spoony's videos back in the day

Why dont she try to enter into a degenerage love triangle?

IN another note that has to do with the thread, I started when I was a kid and just played tabletop with my family. At the time we were poor, and videogames were out of my leage, so I ended mostly reading and playing boardgames when not going to my kid friend to play with action figures.

It turned a little more heavy in my life much later when I was in an all boys school and we found D&D first edition in the library, and as no other dudes but me and my friends gone there (We liked fantasy and the librarian was a huge nerd with a white cat called gandalf) We demanded it for ourselves.

From there on, we played almost all our time until high school, when the gang gone to many places. We still play here and there, and actually been doing a campaign with two of the original members. Its on a halt tho, because I ended having leukemia and am doing chemotheraphy, will survive. We are seeng how to use roll20 and a modem now for me to GM,
hospitals are fucking boring.

Sorry for the blogpost, got carried away in boredom.

Same, excepting Christfag mother.

>How did you first get started with tabletop games, Veeky Forums?
Thanks to Veeky Forums I learned shit like this exists
>Did you also convince friends and family to join, too?
The same group I've been playing vidya with for last 8 years wanted to play shit, somebody had to become the DM, and now one player has been avoiding me to not take a level up, delaying the fucking session 3 days already
Nigga's about to get replaced by a DMPC if he doesn't find 5 fucking minutes to do his level up shit

that sounds awesome, FFTA and FFTA2 are among my favorite video games

What year was this?

ODnD isn't hard, in fact there are less rules than in more recent editions. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on how good the GM is. In the old days, a lot of non-combat stuff had to be adjudicated by GM fiat.

I haven't played D&D in ages, having moved on to other games and genres. I keep with the game though, out of nostalgia. I think 4th ed is pretty interesting, honestly.

We had an RPG club in school and it was one of the sanctioned extra curricular activities.

The guy running it was (and still is) a magnificent grognard.

And I only got my little bro to join in, mostly because he was one grade below me and went to the same club.

In the first week of a study abroad program in college I randomly befriended this couple. Second week into the program we were hanging out between classes and the guy in the couple brings up that he wants to DM a 5e campaign while we're here and asks if I'd be interested. I'd always suspected I'd love D&D but never had any friends who played and I jumped at the chance.

This guy set up a group, players were me, his gf, who was relatively experienced, another experienced guy and an unexperienced girl. He was/is an amazing DM, a history major who is super into historically accurate lore and continuity, and is a rules lawyer in a way that allows for fun. He explained me the classes and races and helped me construct a life cleric. We played for about 4 months in that campaign and when we all got back to the US he started up a new one. I'm still using that cleric, I love him and I can't believe my luck in having this dude as my first DM. I'm hooked on D&D for life because of him.

Not a prolific fa/tg/uy but I got my start in middle school in the 90's. The dad of a buddy of mine was into PnP and table top so my school buddy would bring the Mechwarrior RPG book and the Palladium Robotech book to school and we would roll up characters and play very quick games. We also played a short game of Battletech. We had a limited time to do so at school because the class we played in was only an hour or so long. It was a Gifted Program class so it was sort of free form (my end of the year project was interviewing my best friend's grand father who is a straight up tinfoil wearing alien believer) and we got to do what we wanted as long as it taught us something and PnP+table top is pretty good at teaching kids creativity.

So I ended up borrowing the Mechwarrior RPG book and one of the BT TROs from him for the week and then he got caught with a sizeable amount of pot and expelled and I never saw him again.