Started with RPGs when this came out: (Picture not working? Moldvay Basic)



1981 so when I was 9 or 10 (in August of that year). Sold it to a friend to get them playing and intended to buy another but couldn't find any

Wrote a game (Dragonsword) based on D&D with loads of classes and basically it was junk but got a newbie group to play it and from there we went to pretty much everything in the early 80s, with the majority of play being AD&D 1e, BECMI, MERP and Marvel Superheroes (replaced by DC Heroes) but tried pretty much damn near every game that came out because I spent most of my pocket money on whatever I could find and one of the guys in the group had rich parents so he was spoilt rotten and bought all the pricey stuff.

I remember him thrusting Rolemaster plus pretty much every splatbook at me and telling me to learn it so I could GM it next session (the day after). I did so but it made my brain burn. I wrote so many homebrew games back in the day I lost track. Every time a new cartoon show came on, a game was scrawled out for it. Thundercats, Space Ghost, whatever.

These days the idea of learning a new game makes my brain burn.

Still running a play by post (since 2009, despite various real life calamities) using a very modified DC Heroes ruleset (scrapped tables, use D12s, ditched reliance on hero points, speeded combat up no end) but haven't played face to face in decades and probably never will again, which saddens me.

That said I got re-acquainted with school mates/old group members a few years ago and they made noises about getting me to run something. Ummed and Ahhhed about it, then covid arrived so all plans were cancelled but maybe next year?

Let's see, it was around 1979 at the latest, so, that Dundeons and Dragons Basic Set was...I was thirteen.

12 years old in 1982 Moldvay B/X

11 years old. Knew about it by seeing it in Christmas Catalogs and in the Toy Box in the Mall (B & X) and hearing about it at school. I got on a bus to go to a hobby shop I knew had some stuff after seeing it there because the hobby shop was near a movie theater and we'd go look at the hobby shop while waiting for the movie to let out and then open up again. I had $60 saved up and stuffed in my sock to get some miniatures (LEAD pewter lumps) and hardback AD&D books which I think were $10.99 then.   

1983 in early April I think.

The guy in the Hobby Shop was nervous because the MM had nudity in it, and he didn't like the game or the crowd so he was trying to talk me into cars, planes and trains models instead. 

Went to Austin Books later that summer to get into other games and board/bagged long box comics and weird indie comics not in the 7-11s,  and also got into an anime store called Alpha Sector and went to my first Sci-fi con that year Armadillo Con as anSFI trekkie or at the time I think it was Trekker. Don't even remember the name of the ship anymore. I stayed in that and went to meetings at Mr Gattis or the Bowling Alley or public library conference rooms right up until TNG came out. 

11

Quote from: petron_age on November 04, 2020, 07:23:47 AM
hey everyone . i was wondering how old were you when you started gaming ?

12 or 13 in the '70s. Before AD&D.

I was about 10 and had been playing wargames with my dad from about 5.

Growing up in the UK the RPG scene has for me always revolved around the club scene.  I started playing at a wargames club in Bradford before moving to a London and joining SELWG and then starting a string of clubs in and around South East London.

I am not sure if clubs are peculiar to the U.K. but it seems to me that the rise of the VTT and discord has split the hobby into two different camps.  Online and IRL.

Lockdown has convinced me that offline IRL is most definitely the style of play that I prefer.  It's the social side of getting together one night of the week not bound by technology, bandwidth or the constraints of a screen which for me make my game play so much more nuanced and fun.

My current club Dragons Keep Roleplay Club has been back in IRL for about 7 weeks now and I can't believe the effect it has had on my happiness.

IMHO tabletop RPGs are best played face to face and I know I will be trying to keep that dream alive till the day I die.

I started with RPGs when I was about 11, with "Drager og Demoner" a Norwegian translation of the Swedish game, itself based on a version of Runequest.

Started freshman year in HS 80/81 so I was 14.  Got the Moldvay Basic set, followed closely by the AD&D Players Handbook and Monster Manual.

I got the Holme's D&D box in 1977, making me 13 at the time. Id seen the original D&D box set for a while but it just didn't leap out at me. I was still collecting comic books and gaming stuff started showing up at the one time best comic book store in town.

12 years old, 1977.

Since 1988 at the age of 13.

Did others have a significant gap between when they were exposed to D&D versus when they started playing? I'm curious if that relates to how people took the game.

As I posted earlier, I learned about D&D in preschool around 1975. My best friend's older brother played OD&D, and older brothers were cool so to us, D&D was cool. So my games of "Let's Pretend" for a while were all about D&D, even though I never actually played. It was many years before I actually got a Basic Set and got to play.

My son also grew up knowing his parents played D&D (along with other RPGs), and we've had a good relationship, and he's now a dedicated player and DM.

Started when I was 8 back in 1978 I think. That's what I have been going with anyway.

I had my first contact with "Choose your own adventure" books when I was 10, and fully fledged RPGs when I was 12.

Books were really hard to come by here in Brazil, so we did what we could. I was one of the few guys with a full set of the three AD&D core rulebooks, and they got used pretty hard. Most of the time people had xeroxed copies until the 90s rolled around, our economy became a lot better and imported books started showing up a lot more often and for far more reasonable prices.