Most people started out playing RPGs when they discovered D&D. It's almost a ritual on gaming forums, to brag about which edition of D&D you started playing. I am surprised at how many people who put the "box set with the red cover" as their introductory edition. (It's a little depressing, because it means that so many people using these forums are old; I wonder where all the 20-something gamers are these days.)

What I am wondering here is what was it that made people stumble upon other RPGs, and made them want to keep playing them. To me, having played many non-D&D RPGs is what marks someone as a "hard core gamer." So, what was your first non-D&D RPG and what made you start playing it?

For my part, I can't even remember if it was Gamma World or Rolemaster. I loved the premise of Gamma World and I bought the second edition boxed set after reading about it in TSR's catalogs. Rolemaster was more or less the same deal; I read their page 3 ads in various issues of Dragon magazine and liked what I read. I slowly got all the books and gave it a go.

I still vividly remember playing The Edge of Darkness, one of the scenarios in the Call of Cthulhu 5th edition, at a small rpg-event at the local library in the early 90s. It was just so great and different from the fantasy we had been playing up till then (Drager & Dæmoner, a acandivian variation of Stormbringer/BRP and yes, red box D&D) and I was blown away... and my private investigation almost had his head torn off by the lurker in the attic. I bought the CoC book at the next visit to the not so local game store, and Call of Cthulhu has been my favorite rpg ever since and by far the game I have played the most.

My first game and love 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.
After that I brought the rule book along with the RQ box set miniatures from Derby's Co Op.

I got my start with "black box" D&D, circa 1992.

The history of RPGs in Spain is a bit odd, so my gamer career. The basic D&D come to Spain in 1985 and never met a big success until the publication of the AD&D in early 90's. So, a LOT of spanish gamers were introduced to RPGs by non-D&D games: the most played, as I remember, were Call of Cthulhu, Runequest and MERP. Personally, my first game was Aquelarre, a medieval-demonic spanish rpg. Later come RQ, CoC, MERP, James Bond RPG (as I said, it's an odd history) and finally, AD&D.

I got my start with Red/Blue box D&D (Mentzer) after having paged through a friend's older brother's AD&D books and looking at all his minis and maps, etc. in 1985.  

  As far as "Gateway Drug" goes, however - I thought the best RPG to fit that description was the original 1987 West End Star Wars RPG.  Why?  Because it uses only D6s, has a very straightforward system, has a ton of almost pre-generated templates in the back most of which have a distinctive Star Wars flavor, and most of the Free World has seen Star Wars.  It has not been a tough sell for me to get non-gamers to try to sit down to a game of Star Wars, and I've been successful in luring a good number of them to the Dark Side... erm... gaming.

My first RPG "experience" was as the annoying little brother as my elder brothers were playing the Marvel "FASERIP" system.  I have to give them credit for including me, even if I was essentially just playing the NPC robot creation of a legitimate superhero.  I remember being thrilled that I was able to pull out a KO'd ally from an otherwise very compromised situation.  Other than that, I mostly sat on my thumbs and smiled and listened.

When I asked for the same inclusion one of my brother's AD&D games I got a resounding "No."  But, again, I'll give him credit for either buying me or talking my mom into buying me the same box that The Butcher just attached.  From then on, I sort of developed a "I'll show him" attitude and formed my own group.  As a young person trying to figure out where all the Basic game was, though, it was a bit turbulent.  I ended up mixing stuff out E,C,M (as I could find them) and AD&D books before I even knew that a Rules Cyclopedia existed.  But it all seemed to work back then.

So, while Marvel FASERIP was my first experience and D&D Basic was sort of "referred" to me, the first system I picked out on my own was GURPS.  It started a long love-hate relationship that I will never forgive myself for but I'm better now that she's gone.

Actually, my first self-purchase might have been Ghostbusters.  Which did, and still, kicks ass.

I started playing with the French basic D&D box set which I ordered through a catalog and was a bit disappointed when I realized it wasn't a boardgame and there was no figurine in it. A few days into reading it and the amazing potential of the game dawned on me. But I think I got bored of D&D and its American fantasy cliches after about a year. Then I think I discovered Chronique de Linais by perusing a Parisian hobby store. Not a very good game really but made me realize that other games were around. And then it was Legendes Celtiques, Appel de Cthulhu, Paranoia, Bitume etc... Never been able to really enjoy any D&D game since then, even though I try every few years...

Quote from: boulet;408603I think I got bored of D&D and its American fantasy cliches

That's interesting.  D&D always seemed to take its cue from European folklore and pulp novels from all over, so I never thought of it as peculiarly American.

Quote from: Hairfoot;408621That's interesting.  D&D always seemed to take its cue from European folklore and pulp novels from all over, so I never thought of it as peculiarly American.

The source might be European folklore but its treatment/filtering/focus feels very American to me.

My "gateway drugs" were board games (chess, Risk, Diplomacy, Conquest, Sid Sackson, Alex Randolph, the book case series by 3M and Pelikan ...) and comic books (mostly French style, Lt. Blueberry, Valérian, Luc Orient, Spirou, Jughurta, Comanche, Tanguy & Laverdure, everything from Moebius and Rich Corben, Pini's Elfquest and both Buscema's versions of Conan and Weirdworld...)

It was a board game magazine (SpielBox) where I learned about "this revolutionary gaming concept from the US", and it was a comic book store where I found (the German aditions of) Red Box D&D, the Fighting Fantasy game books, Tunnels & Trolls, Das Schwarze Auge, and Midgard - which I bought in probably that order. Followed by English language editions of Palladium, Rolemaster, and AD&D, all in very short order.

After those I lost track. I would buy just about any game I saw, any book about games (there were two paperback books describing the new hobby: Das große Buch der Fantasy-Rollenspiele by a publisher near to the German D&D licensee, and Knaurs Buch der Rollenspiele by DSA co-publisher Knaur; they detailed many of the games that were available at that time, whether they were available in translation or not), early fan-made small press games (Magie und Macht), and any magazine and fanzine I could find.

Of course, I had to slow down when the import distributors caught up with the US back list - ten years of product that has come before Red Box...

Quote from: boulet;408622The source might be European folklore but its treatment/filtering/focus feels very American to me.

Same here. To Europeans, many American RPGs feel either like the Western genre with knights and lances (D&D = borderlands, gold/treasure rush) or pseudo-medieval Super Heroes.

Among the few games that felt different were EPT, RQ, and Ars Magica.

And that is also the reason why of all (A)D&D modules I like the UK series best - those modules were closer to European sensibilities.
This can also be felt in games that were written abroad - Dragon Warriors, Fighting Fantasy/Dungeoneer, Maelstrom, Warhammer FRP (in first edition more than in second).

Quote from: boulet;408603But I think I got bored of D&D and its American fantasy cliches after about a year.

I played AD&D a lot longer but I simply ignored the implied cliches, and built my own ones (which were closer to Tolkien).

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;408633I played AD&D a lot longer but I simply ignored the implied cliches, and built my own ones (which were closer to Tolkien).

Ain't got no love for Tolkien personally, so I didn't even have that last branch to slow down my fall from D&D flirtation. Notce though that most French gamers don't have the issue I have with D&D tropes.

I got started around 1991 or so with the Heroquest board game.  My friend's older brother had one and we'd play it everyday.  When I got my own copy I noticed a brochure for expansion packs, and those expansion packs came with brochures for Advanced Heroquest.

By '93 or so my buddies started playing D&D, but I was hooked on the GW stuff.  Advanced Heroquest led to WFRP and from there the wargame.  I played WFRP with another group of friends as my folks were caught up in the anti-D&D craze.  Oddly enough they had no problems with the demon filled world of Warhammer, and bought me Realms of Chaos for my 13th birthday.

Eventually West End Star Wars replaced Warhammer.  I found the Death Star technical manual, and from there went on play Star Wars for several years.  The same group of friends who played D&D also played Star Wars, and I started playing with them my freshman year of high school as the rest of my friends stopped playing altogether. By '98 I was playing AD&D 2e, and by the time 3e came out I was regularly running games for my buddies.

Since then it's been a whirl of rpgs - WW stuff, GURPs, HERO, 3.x and it's spinoffs, Riddle of Steel, and WFRP to name the big ones.  Throughout it all D&D and WFRP have remained the constants.

My gateway RPG was 2e Gamma World in 1985 as a senior in high school.  The school year had just started and my friend Todd introduced me to a new transfer student from Arizona named David.  He introduced Todd and I to role-playing with GW.  We played at lunch in the school library.  My grandfather introduced me to reading fantasy and science-fiction at an early age, so when this came around I was primed and ready for role-playing.