I got started with Choose your Own Adventure books and their knock off. I used ro be practicaly obsessed with those things as a kid. After I went through the local libray's supply, I started buying them myself. A counter worker noticed by interest and we started talking about a game that was like them but more open ended. He told me where I could find out more about (our city's first FLGS), I went and left with a fresh copy of red box Basic D and D.

I talked a friend of mine into playing and we ran solo games with each other for awhile mosty drawing from the books, movies and games we loved. Not allot of dungeon exploring really, cometo think of it but almost soap opera-ish interpersonal stuff mingled with the moments of combat and action they generated. After a time, we got some more friends to play and moved on to other games like Marvel FASERIP, Star Frontiers, Cyberpunk 2020, etc but with the more story focus, seeing them as interactive books more or less CYOAs with infinite pages.

How did you get started in odd hobby?

Actually, I'm pretty much the same.  I loved the Choose Your Own Adventures, and I got into all the other gamebooks I could find.  Then I heard about D&D and it's been downhill since.

Hmm, well I think the sequence was gradual and layered. By the time I played my first RPG, which was the arena combat Microgame Melee, the minimal version of the combat system for The Fantasy Trip, I was already into both complex (war) boardgames and inventing games and playing in imagined settings with their own histories. I had heard stories about D&D but it wasn't until 5th grade that it became popular (for less than one year) in school, and D&D itself seemed very weird and annoying (and was the butt of endless jokes by me and my friends) and TFT seemed much more interesting and logical and not ridiculous in the ways D&D seemed silly to us. So I and some friends already had big gaming and make-believe habits and TFT just provided the best structure for consistent gameworld development (and pulling back in the make-believe elements we used to play with even when we were in pre-school, but now could find structure) in a style we liked.

I had several Choose Your Own Adventure books. I liked the idea but was critical of the execution, especially when it seemed like there were many unfair endings. I much preferred the TFT MicroQuests, which were a similar sort of programmed adventures but were largely to give context for a bunch of tactical battles, and of course had uncertain outcomes and more detail rather than fixed A or B outcomes.

I've played several CRPGs before and it became my favourite kind of game. But then two childhood friends told me how they were playing "REAL RPGs" and that one of them once got kicked out of a tavern for insulting the patron. The concept seemed foreign to me. "How can you insult somebody in an RPG?" I was asking. "You just do", was the answer. This left me baffled. How can you play a game, where you can just "do" things by telling somebody that you do them?

Later–sometime in the mid 90s–I got to play MERP as my first actual RPG. I very clearly remember that RPGs got me hooked when it sunk in that I can actually do anything my character was phyically able to do. That blew my mind.

Oh, and also we got whipped and chained by the townsfolk, because the first thing I did with my freedom was shoot an elderly man in the hip, because he laughed at my lackluster attempt to climb the townhall.

A few poorly run games of Holmes D&D and a love of   SF and Fantasy, combine that with an easy way to make friends with similar interests and viola, a new habit.

As for Choose Your Own, oddly they came after,  I was just young enough to get a little value from them , well young at heart anyway.

I've always played games of various kinds. I've also always been something of an actor. It fits.

Chainmail

Then I purchased Steading of the Hill Giant Chief at a big retail toy store, just based on what the cover looked like. I didn't understand what was going on in the interior, but it seemed cool

Then a friend of mine whose big brother was playing D&D and other games taught me Melee. We played the shit out of that for a year or so

Finally, I got introduced to 1E, bought the player's hand book, taught it to my brothers and a couple of friends, and away we went

The same summer that I read Lord of the Rings, I visited my cousins and they were playing D&D one night, my aunt showed me a church publication questioning whether it was appropriate but I played anyhow.

Swords, dragons, lizardmen, wondrous magical items, wizards, how could I not be hooked?

In the 3rd of 4th grade during summer vacation I read The Hobbit and loved it. Then that year my folks got me Hero Quest which I loved and then a couple years later I got Dragon Strike which I also loved. I would play GURPS with my older brother and his friends would they would have a sleep over but I really didn't get into gaming until 1996ish when I picked up the BirthRight campaign setting. I didn't even know I needed anything until I got the box set home and it referenced needing the core books. I got those for Christmas that year and then I was hooked.

My friends and I played it like Hero Quest and Dragon Strike IE Dungeon Crawls and stuff. We didn't get into "acting" like others. We still don't "act" we treat it firmly as a game and not a way to tell stories. Stories are purely results of playing the game and usually are stories we tell after playing about what happened in the game.

Some classmates had just reached name level (or rather their characters), they had a budget and they wanted a big castle, but they didn´t really made progress.
So I took the role of the architect and designed them one by the rules excerpt they gave me. Instead of just daydreaming around it was a real revelation to now have numbers under your design and other people to test (and appreciate) your creations. Some times later I was invited to a birthday party with "the real stuff" and since then I was hooked.

My first GM was a girl. She charmed my human fighter with a pixie and made me kiss it. So I did.

She became my first girlfriend.

I think I was 9.  I was the tagalong kid brother.  Went with big bro to his friends to play Star Frontiers.  I made a Yazarian.  There was a small fire and I decided to put it out by pissing on it.  The GM said that I did it, but earlier that day while siphoning gas, I drank some and now was expelling the petrol.  My dick caught fire and I took damage- the rest we shall say was history!

Quote from: Nexus;941114How did you get started in odd hobby?

Y'know, that's a pretty boring question compared to the one in your thread title.

Quote from: Nexus;941114What got you hooked?

Now THAT's an interesting question. What left you ready to crawl over broken glass for the next hit?

For me, it was exploring the labyrinth. Torches and lanterns, ropes and spikes, poles and sacks. Mapping twists and turns.

I still want to see what's around the next turn, behind the door, at the other end of the T-intersection. I want to search for the end and never find it.

First year at University, someone on our floor said he had a game that he played where you could fight orcs and stuff, we had a go and did Gringle's Pawnshop and something just clicked. It has stayed clicked for 35 years now.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;941201Y'know, that's a pretty boring question compared to the one in your thread title.


Now THAT's an interesting question. What left you ready to crawl over broken glass for the next hit?

For me, it was exploring the labyrinth. Torches and lanterns, ropes and spikes, poles and sacks. Mapping twists and turns.

I still want to see what's around the next turn, behind the door, at the other end of the T-intersection. I want to search for the end and never find it.

Good point! My addiction turning point will sound (and perhaps was) stupid, but it did the trick. My first 1E AD&D session involved writing up a couple of characters, wandering into a dungeon and immediately getting murdered by some grubby humanoids in the first room. But I remember taking in all the crazy new elements of what was going on: the discussion of the room; the sense that there was a semi-infinite space underground that I could delve into; the look and smell of the player's handbook; the lead figures and dice. It just seemed so cool, like something totally different and more immersive than any of the games I'd played or movies I'd watched.