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.