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Just a goofy little poll I thought of while reading the recent Holmes thread on RPG.net.

Basically, choose the decade you started playing D&D and the option for how you learned the game. Please choose "by the product" if that mostly the way you learned the rules, even if you first played a game before reading the book(s). Likewise, even if you bought the rules first and read through them before playing, choose "by my group/osmosis" if it was through actual play that you learned the rules. Basically, no matter what your first contact with the game was, what was it that made you say, "Okay, I got this down."?

Edit: While the poll says D&D, feel free to vote even if you broke your cherry with a completely different game.

1981.  I convinced my brother to join his B/X game of KotBL group.  I went over to his friend's house with him and saw the game on the table.  I have a bad memory, but I still vividly recall looking at the blue d4 and thinking it was a cool dice.  When I saw the minis and the blue/white map and Rosloff's illio of the owlbear?  I was hooked.

Played B/X for about a year or so before moving to AD&D, although it wasn't an instant transition.  We had begun mix-matching AD&D stuff with B/X stuff together before that.

1980. Holmes for short bit, Moldvay by the time I got my own set. Played B/X until 83 when I got huge stack of AD&D books for my birthday.

1981. Got introduced to D&D with the Holmes set, playing a session with my brother and his friends. Got a copy of Moldvay Basic as a Xmas present that year and played it for the next year or two before moving on to AD&D.

'78-79, I was in the school chess club, played wargames since mid-70's with my father, such as the Russian Campaign and Squad Leader; then my sister and her friends brought me in because they needed an extra player.

It was 1986.  We were at the state fair and I was finished with showing my guilt, so we wound up hanging out in a friend's camper while the vegetable judging was happening.  I was handed a hastily-written sheet of notebook paper and was told I was "like the guy from the hobbit".  We were in a maze being hunted by a minotaur (B2).  I tried to fight it and everyone else ran away.  I died horribly.  I thought the guy running the game could have explained better, so I later asked my mom for my own copy of the rules.  Christmas had a Red Box under the tree.

Late 80s, probably 88-89. Picked up the core 2e books in a walden books after reading it while waiting on my mom and begging her to get them for me and my brother.

I pretty much didn't play with an "established" group, instead just building from my own group of friends, until I was in my late teens.

D&D specifically? Late 80s, after I'd cut my teeth on Warhammer Fantasy and MSH. Had a group of friends in school that indoctrinated me, mainly because I wanted to play RPGs and they refused to play any RPGs except D&D. And Car Wars for some reason.

Roleplaying Games in general? By myself, at the age of 2.

Started on HeroQuest in 89-90 then moved onto full AD&D 2nd edition once i found a group in school, group imploded as they do so i got a copy of the black box D&D game and started my own.

1981 during a Boy Scout campout, I watched a few of the guys playing AD&D and asked if I could join in. I was handed a character sheet for a henchman and began. After the campout, I took my allowance money earmarked for Star Wars figures and bought Basic D&D. Taught myself the game and have been playing since.

(Of course, it wasn't until a few months later in 1982 that I found the Love Of My Life, Traveller and we have been having a whirlwind romance since then.)

Quote from: Emperor Norton;703642Late 80s, probably 88-89. Picked up the core 2e books in a walden books after reading it while waiting on my mom and begging her to get them for me and my brother.

I pretty much didn't play with an "established" group, instead just building from my own group of friends, until I was in my late teens.

Looked it up, had to have been 89, because I know it was still the 80s, but 2e didn't come out until then :P.

1981(?) (age 9). Got the Moldvay Basic box for Christmas. My wee brain knew, just from looking at the box, that this was something magical. That afternoon I got my 5 year-old brother and had a go at B2 - I recall he made a cleric. I had no clue what to do, but there were maps, monsters, and dice.

I just ran B2 last year once again. The magic is still there.

1982, on a rainy day for recess the teacher was giving out board games, and somehow my table got handed a basic set and KotBL. I was the DM, picked up the book and we tried to play.

It was a disaster - a 10 year old trying to learn and run an entirely new type of game on the fly inside 30 minutes, but I somehow got hooked anyway. I'd just read narnia and then the hobbit/lotr (and abandoned shanara) and this game was even better!

None of the above.

Probably 1976-78. First played in a session with older brother and his friends, then later with my own friends. I realized pretty quickly that my friend who was DMing wasn't interpreting the combat charts correctly, so I borrowed the booklets and puzzled through them.

1991 - Rules Cyclopedia and the Hollow World Box Set.

Learned the rules by reading the RC.

Late 70s/early 80s. Bought it. Learned it. Got the B/X and Gamma World stuff first since it was on department store shelves and affordable. Then a year or so later finally got the AD&D and then Star Frontiers when it came out.

1972.

After a miniatures game in Don Kaye's garage, Rob Kuntz said to Don and me, "Gary's got this cool new game called Greyhawk.  You're a bunch of guys exploring an old abandoned wizard's castle full of monsters and treasure and stuff."

While I had someone "run" a game that resembled D&D at school, sort of "I heard of this game and made up my own..." version, I was inspired to pick up D&D when I learned that was what such games were called. I got the basic set in 1981, and learned from there.

ca 1984, but like many Brits I learned via Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory RPG. I remember running rules-free stuff age 11, then FF, then graduating to AD&D age 12.

1977 for D&D. We had a Jr. High School wargaming group already, and would spend time after school and on weekends playing SPI and AH wargames. I had been playing wargames since 1974.  

Correction... 1972!
That was the first year I bought the little Airfix 1/72 toy soldiers boxed sets from a German Hobby Shop in Frankfurt. It cost 1 Deutsche Mark for a box of 40-50 Airfix minis, which was about 25 cents at the time, U.S.

By 74 I had hundreds of the little buggers, as well as an awesome collection of 1/72 Hasegawa German and American tanks, armored cars, halftracks, and Jeeps, including AT guns, Artillery, and the dreaded German 88's, as well as Airplane Kits. Japanese Zeroes, P40's & P51's, ME-109's. Even had a 1/72 JU-52 model painted in a summer camo pattern.  I had all that painted and was wargaming with no rules at all, just playing in the dirt. In 1975 I remember buying and building a 1/72 B-25, An English Vickers Wellington Bomber, and the German Heinkel HC-111, British Mosquito & Spitfire, P-39,  FW-190, Me-262, and a Tamiya F4-U Corsair, as well as the little Hasegawa Japanese fuel trucks.

One weekend, very early in 77 my best friend Paul invited me to join a game that was being run by a college guy who was home on break. That game turned out to be Whitebook D&D. By the time school was out, we had played D&D and Traveller in plenty of sessions, and I had a boxed Bluebook set, and some Judges Guild stuff and was running regular games, and busy creating dungeons of death in between wargame sessions with our newly released AH favorite Squad Leader.

My mum used to lecture at a 6th form college, at one of her parties in 1980 the 10 year old me was talking to these 18 year olds about D&D and the next week one of them lent me his books for a week. After that I started secondary school and bought the Holmes Blue book. Had no idea how to play and so drew out a whole map on A1 sheets of 2cm graph paper we just happened to have in the house (my dad was a graphic artist) and used minis on that like a board game.
3 of the people that played that first game in the classroom were still my gaming group when I left the UK for Singapore a year ago.

At Christmas that year I bought the AD&D books and the rest is as they ludology.

Quote from: dragoner;703639'78-79, I was in the school chess club, played wargames since mid-70's with my father, such as the Russian Campaign and Squad Leader; then my sister and her friends brought me in because they needed an extra player.

Squad Leader wasn't released until school was almost out in 1977. The favorites for us at the time were Panzer Leader, Panzer Blitz, Russian Campaign, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Bltzkrieg, Ceasar's Legions, Luftwaffe, Alexander The Great, & Tobruk, and, of course, SPI games such as Barbarossa, Modern Battles Quad, Korea, The Mobile War 1950-51, Oil War, Outreach, Red Star - White Star, Starsoldier, 30 Years War Quad, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler . I had a subscription to SPI and remember getting Gondor: The Siege of Minas Tirith.

Got SPI's Lord of the Rings in 1978. Really wish I had that game now, as well as Strategy I. Both phenomenal good!

Quote from: dragoner;703639'78-79, I was in the school chess club, played wargames since mid-70's with my father, such as the Russian Campaign and Squad Leader; then my sister and her friends brought me in because they needed an extra player.

Squad Leader wasn't released until school was almost out in 1977. The favorites for us at the time were Panzer Leader, Panzer Blitz, Russian Campaign, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Bltzkrieg, Ceasar's Legions, Luftwaffe, Alexander The Great, & Tobruk, and, of course, SPI games such as Barbarossa, Modern Battles Quad, Korea, The Mobile War 1950-51, Oil War, Outreach, Red Star - White Star, Starsoldier, 30 Years War Quad, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler . I had a subscription to SPI and remember getting Gondor: The Siege of Minas Tirith.

Got SPI's Lord of the Rings in 1978. Really wish I had that game now, as well as Strategy I. Both phenomenal good!

Losing our D&D virginity?

1978 - my mom heard from another mom about some weird game based on fantasy and mythology. I was already a fantasy, myth and horror junkie as a kid so mom figured I'd like it. The other kid was a truly terrible DM and I got TPK'd in the Village of Hommlet, but it was absolutely mind-blowing awesome.

Then mom heard from religious freaks that D&D would force me to worship Satan!!! So she bought me the original Holmes Blue book and a bunch of dice for my 9th birthday.

'78. My friends had older brothers that played OD&D in college, and when the PHB came out, one of them started a game for us, explaining everything and DMing.

I'm between two eras, late 1980s and then again early-mid 1990s. I'm a cusp child, and therefore quincunx to various groups.

1982, B/X, and I had to learn by the book because I was the first one to introduce it to my peers, although I did have a great primer in the way of "What is Dungeons and Dragons" by Butterfield et al. Never moved on to AD&D.

We had no contact with other gamers except for one visit to a convention, but that was quite a way into our gaming and we were just mystified by all the strange rules they had at the table, like thieves not being able to use longbows, half-orcs and half-elves, those big hardbacks, etc.

I learned D&D from a (then new) rulebook in '81. It was extremely poorly written, and the rules were a bunch of haphazardly slapped-together nonsense. The whole thing was a rather pointless bait-and-switch; throughout the text there was this bogus narrative about how you could create any character you could imagine, and how awesome he was going to be upon reaching the pinnacle of his advancement... in reality the character creation rules and gameplay were all about randomly rolling up a bunch of decidedly mediocre wimps with no resemblance to the "hero" I intended to play, and serially murdering them in every way imaginable after about half an hour of table time.

It's a miracle I continued gaming, really.

I bought the Mentzer Basic and Expert sets along with the Forgotten Realms original campaign boxed set all together at Toys R Us in 1989. Learned from those three boxed sets and then bought the 2nd Edition PHB and DMG and learned from them.

'70s, taught by a friend, who was taught by a junior high school teacher, who ran a house-ruled white box in a class to teach math.

About a year later, got Holmes and then the PHB when it first came out. That's when I learned about the differences from what I was taught.

199...8? It was at the end of high school in a friend's stingy basement apartment surrounded by drugs and alcohol. Rather than getting up to some other kind of mischief, we played 2nd Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

On my very first Statistic roll ever in my life, with a 3d6 I rolled a Strength of 18. That makes me happy looking back on it. Thinking on the game itself all I remember is a confusing mess...and I thought it was tremendous fun.

//Panjumanju

1979, age 10, Jew Camp.  Cabin at night, older bunkmates were playing, blew my mind.

1992, with a "friend" of my mother's-- she later married him-- and his children. Theoretically, we were playing first edition AD&D, but the game we played didn't have much to do with the book at all. The DMPCs had special abilities that made Unearthed Arcana look tame and pale in comparison, and my first AD&D PC was an Elf Monk. (My first RPG was actually Gamma World.) You get ability score increases by level, but only from certain classes and... yeah.

It was interesting learning how to play D&D "by the book" with real people.

Quote from: Mistwell;7040291979, age 10, Jew Camp.  Cabin at night, older bunkmates were playing, blew my mind.

they really called it Jew Camp? In an unironic way?

so what did we learn from this ?

the RPGsite has 80 active members 85% of whom have been playing RPGs for more than 25 years ?
Didn't we know that already are we trying to build on our angry old grognards web persona ?

Some school friends played D&D at university and knew that I played RQ so invited me along. I played AD&D for a couple of years, but it always was second best for me.

I started playing Steve Jackson's Melee and Wizard in 1978. Moved on to Traveller and Runequest and it wasn't until about 1980 that I first played true D&D with some guys in school who were heavily into Iron Crown settings: City State, etc.. Gotta say I was underwhelmed with the system and blown away by the ICE stuff. Went back to Steve Jackson when he published The Fantasy Trip (have purchased almost every edition of GURPS since, including Man to Man, but balked at 4th edition -- enough tweaking already!).

In 1981 I bought one of the very first box sets of Call of Cthulhu (printed in brown ink -- which I later heard was a mistake, but absolutely fitted the product to a T) and it has been my go-to system ever since. (I have five editions of it on my shelf including the leather bound 25th anniversary edition and the d20 edition.)

I did purchase the AD&D books some time in the early 90's but never really spent time with the system. When 3.0 came out I played it at a Con and decided to give it a try. Generally I like the support material and the artwork, but having rolled more than half my life to score under the target number, d20 just feels like driving on the wrong side of the road.

I splurged the other day and bought Chaosium's BRP fat book to get over the limit on Amazon for no cost shipping. Should have just stayed with my CoC and 2nd edition Runequest. I still trawl the local comic emporium for new games, but it takes something startling for me to buy anymore, especially with so much free content online.

Quote from: jibbajibba;704065so what did we learn from this ?

the RPGsite has 80 active members 85% of whom have been playing RPGs for more than 25 years ?
Didn't we know that already are we trying to build on our angry old grognards web persona ?

I think the osmosis/book larnin' split is more importa . Here, more people learned older editions by osmosis than by reading rules, while the newernewer editions are the reverse. On RPGNet, more people learned by the book than by osmosis, except for the youngest group. On both sites, the youngest group is small.

Apparently, this poll was run on ENWorld, too, although I don't go there and don't know the results. On RPGNet, someone claimed the poll proves conventional wisdom is wrong and most people learn by reading the rules.

1991 for me.  I saw the "Black Box" Basic set at Toys R Us.  I always wondered about it, due to familiarity with the 80's cartoon as a kid.  It looked a lot like the video games I loved at the time (Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Zelda), but you could play it on the table with friends.  I brought it home and devoured the solo adventure that same evening, then proceeded to spread it among my friends, much like lycanthropy.

I feel my entire childhood conditioned me towards D&D due to the popularity of sword & sorcery/science fantasy in the 80s.  I was already steeped in things like fantasy movies (Conan, Clash of the Titans, Krull, etc.), cartoons (He-Man, Thundarr, D&D), comics like The Warlord, and so on.

Even before D&D, I was already experimenting with DIY fantasy board games.  I cobbled one up out of a shoe box and board game parts I called The Tower.  I think it was a ripoff/hack of Fireball Island, but I don't remember the details anymore.

Initially learned from the Holmes D&D, with some other kids in the neighborhood.  (Circa late 1970's).

Later picked up Moldvay basic and started to learn how to DM my own games.

1984 for me, and I learnt from a game because I didn't know anyone who played RPGs.

Like a lot of Brits my gateway drug was Fighting Fantasy game books. Through them (possibly through the magazine they published for a while) I learnt about the concept of RPGs, and was able to persuade my mother to take me to Games Workshop and buy me a copy of Car Wars.

I think I may have ended up with that specifically in large part because it was cheap. Of course, it wasn't an RPG. I never did play it, actually.

Anyway, on second attempt, I save up my pocket money and bought myself TSR's newly released Marvel Super-Heroes. I persuaded some friends to give it a go, and we commandeered a classroom and got a campaign going a few lunch times a week. Things were rough and ready for the first few sessions, but we figured things out as we went, going with what made sense when we had rules issues.

That campaign fell apart after a few months, but by then I'd made contact with the other role-playing group in my year at school. They didn't have a classroom to use at that point (in Britain at the 80s playing outside in bad weather was seen as character building, and so kids outside of sixth form weren't allowed indoors at lunch - finding classrooms we could use was a never ending battle), so they started using "mine", and I joined that group. They had previously been playing AD&D, but at this point they'd "outgrown" that, and were now playing Palladium FPRG.

I didn't actually play AD&D at all until 1989. When 2nd Edition came out I managed to persuade the group to give the new edition a shot, on the basis that most of their cool gaming stories related to the old AD&D campaigns. I GMed a series of adventures published for Dragonlance shortly after 2e launched. All I really remember about them now was gully dwarves, our Paladin drowning in a swamp, and a really epic final battle with lots of dragon riders.

1990s for the RPG industry from a book. Star Wars d6 from WEG specifically. I swear I'll seriously play it someday.
2003 for actual play with my Traveller group - which has been going strong for most of 10 years (aside from a couple of little hiatuses*), and 2008 for D&D 3.5 with another group - and I'm now in a Pathfinder group which has been campaigning for over a year.

Quote from: GameDaddy;703764Squad Leader wasn't released until school was almost out in 1977. The favorites for us at the time were Panzer Leader, Panzer Blitz, Russian Campaign, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Bltzkrieg, Ceasar's Legions, Luftwaffe, Alexander The Great, & Tobruk, and, of course, SPI games such as Barbarossa, Modern Battles Quad, Korea, The Mobile War 1950-51, Oil War, Outreach, Red Star - White Star, Starsoldier, 30 Years War Quad, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler . I had a subscription to SPI and remember getting Gondor: The Siege of Minas Tirith.

Got SPI's Lord of the Rings in 1978. Really wish I had that game now, as well as Strategy I. Both phenomenal good!

'77 was a good year. SL also had a role playing element in that you had a blank leader chit which you could play up through the scenarios. Ah, Diplomacy, Afrika Corps - I still have a stack of Generals somewhere, Blitzkrieg, I had the slip cover Panzerblitz with the special all PB General tucked inside, it's gone now. First Game  played by GDW wasn't Traveller but Drang Nach Osten, I found out about Traveller from a GDW catalog inside Imperium, bought it in '81 after I bought Gamma World.

Moldvay. Sold that so friends could play (I lived in another town) and couldn't find another copy, so wrote my own game which got played to death till Mentzer set came along. After that tried everything put out from late 70s to about 1987 as the group tracked down every kind of game. Call of Cthulu was one of the least successful, as was T&T and Runequest. They just didn't get much of a run.

Played mostly BECMI, AD&D 1e and supers games.

Quote from: GameDaddy;703764Got SPI's Lord of the Rings in 1978. Really wish I had that game now ...

Huh.  My copy gathers dust.

1977, freshman year of college.  I'd had high school friends who had a D&D circle -- and, since some of them were on the yearbook staff, they put a lot of the interior illos from OD&D into it!  Anyway, I stumbled onto a copy of the original Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes in the Northeastern University bookstore, thought "Huh, this is that game Marsha and Denise talked about," and picked it up.  It sparked my interest, and I picked up the original boxed set at the FLGS.  Started doing solo runs with my younger brother, and I cringe at how clueless I was.

After the first of the year, I was visiting another high school friend out at UMass.  The guy across the dorm hall from her wanted to try out Empire of the Petal Throne, so we hauled in another HS classmate of ours on campus and played for ten hours straight on each of three straight nights.  That really jumpstarted my interest, and I turned into a fanatic fast.

Part of my quick evolution into homebrewing was that one of the Boston-area FLGSs carried a few copies of The Wild Hunt and Alarums & Excursions.  I followed the former for about a year, but it was a local product much devoted to swapping stories of local campaigns, which didn't hold too much interest.  A&E, however, was huge, multinational, and heavily devoted to mechanics and rules discussions.  I loved it, I quickly became a contributor for several years, and became a gaming iconoclast overnight.  Never really did stop doing that.

Quote from: Ravenswing;704298Huh.  My copy gathers dust.

Mine too although I played the Fuck out of it when i was a kid. Of course the Saruman thrid player option is broken...

Would be a good game for FFG to do a reboot of with some minis and a little simplification of some of the hunt and capture rules.

It would have been 1975 for me. I picked up a copy of OD&D at my local model shop when buying some Minifigs wargames figures, and learnt to play using only the orginal rules. I can remember that it wasn't until Greyhawk came out that we figured out spells could only be cast once a day - until then we though a magic-user could cast the spell they knew any number of times!

2000s and by the product

I never understood a single AD&D 2nd rule (first RPG I played back in 2003) until I sat down and read the book. Before that I just rolled a d20 and hoped to score high, with no idea how THAC0 (or GAC0 in Spanish) worked.

I also learned that the DM making me perform an Intelligence check every time I wanted to cast a spell (that is, 1d20 with a number lower or equal to my character's INT score) was a very dick move. Not to mention that the "one free Wish every time you level up" was something he made up as well.

Still, it was a very cool gaming table, one of the best I've ever had (more focused on roleplaying that the system).

I answered "1970s and by my group/osmosis", but that's not exactly true.

I learned about D&D because the older brother of my best friend in preschool played. This would be around 1975. However, they never let us play.

I learned the rules from the Basic Set in 1978 or so. Still, those were early grade-school games and were borderline just "Let's Pretend".

Quote from: jhkim;704480I learned the rules from the Basic Set in 1978 or so. Still, those were early grade-school games and were borderline just "Let's Pretend".

D&D is pretty much a "lets pretend" kind of game. :)

Late 1979 for me. In the beginning, I only remember the Blue Book (Holmes), but soon afterward, the MM. PHB and DMG followed. I didn't get a copy of the blue book until the following year. I remember using the chits instead of the dice, which for some reason were hard to find at the time.

At first I started playing because my older brother had to take me wherever he was going. The older kids (ages 13-17 IIRC) weren't too keen on having so-and-so's little brother (I was 9) tagging along. That changed pretty quickly: Apparently the DM and I read most of the same books and watched most of the same movies because I could figure out how to spring the trap/find the gold/kill the monster more often than not.

It was the 80s, and technically by product right at first (a school friend bought the game and asked me to figure out the rules).  But within a couple of weeks at most I was playing with established groups and doing learning that way.

I accumulated a Mentzer Basic set and assorted other materials during grade school and junior high but only got to play a handful of times. I was already into gamebooks (Starship Traveller!) so I mostly taught myself by reading and rereading the rules (on the down-low, as my parents tragically bought into the Satanic scare crap; they got over it pretty quickly*) but those few early games no doubt gave me a big head start. 2e came out shortly after I started high school and that's when I really started getting serious about it.

*Mind bondage spells ftw. Debbie was right!

Bought the Holmes Basic set in 1979. Found it unfathomable as a set of game rules, but full of mind-bending awesome nonetheless. Had a friend's older brother teach us how to actually play.

So introduced by the product, learned from buddies.

1989. After bouncing off MERP, Bunnies & Burrows, and the Batman Roleplaying game the BECMI Basic Set finally let me figure out what the heck I was supposed to do with all those rules.