Quote from: RPGPundit;463725Who was it, that first made you aware of the existence of RPGs?

RPGPundit

Strangely, I don't recall who or what first informed me about the existence of D&D.  

I just knew, around 1980, that I had to try it.  And so my parents bought me the Holmes 'blue box' for my birthday that year.

I figured out how to play on my own, before discovering a friend who also wanted to play (his older brother wouldn't let him join his games).

Quote from: RPGPundit;463725Who was it, that first made you aware of the existence of RPGs?

My best friend's mom.

My cousins, their mom made me read a fairly critical Church News article about it first.

Quote from: danbuter;463732A group of kids I knew at school.

This. Some other guys were talking about this great game.  I mentioned it at the dinner table, and to my surprise, my father went to his briefcase and pulled out a copy of the Holmes "blue book."  (He was an officer in the U.S. Army, at the time, and had heard about it at work.)  He ran an adventure for me (a first for both of us) later that evening.  D&D never caught on with dad, but he gave me the Basic Set he bought...and here I am, over thirty years later.

My mom read about this "new kind of game" in the newspaper, and suggested I pick up the Holmes box when she saw it at the store later that week.

It was my dad. He had played Chainmail back in the 70s along with Napoleonic miniatures and when Gygax came out with the first set of rules dad picked them up at Gary's hobby store in Wisconsin. I was 8 and I rolled up the first set of player characters in my dad's D&D world and I was pretty much hooked from day one.

Comic books...I bought a supplement for the Marvel RPG from a catalog ad in a comic book, not realizing it was a supplement until I got it...later made friends in High School who were into AD&D.

My brother. He's six years older than me. We used to watch the DnD cartoon show when we were kids. Then he met some friends who played a bunch of different games; Palladium Fantasy 1, TMNT, James Bond, Twilight 2000, Battletech, Harpoon, Car Wars, Air Superiority... those are my earliest gaming memories.

My friend Phil during summer break from school when I was 15. He had gotten the OD&D and Traveller box sets for X-mas from his parents and pulled them out one day when we were sitting around bored. We picked D&D (I had just read the Warlord comics at the time and he was the basis of my first character).

I did. I got my mother to buy me TMNT & OS when I was 8, thinking it was a TMNT comic or something.

In my case (not counting things like fighting fantasy books, which I'd read before), it was this kid, Chris, from my grade in school.  He had gotten the Basic Set, and didn't understand any of it.  So he asked me to GM it, what with my being the smartest boy in the class.  It turned out he was right to have done so.

RPGPundit

A year ago you said something different, Pundit.

As I said then,

It was a schoolmate, Jevon Desailly, who was introduced to me by a classmate friend, Paul Tyrell.

Jevon GMed. As I related here, for some years I looked back thinking it was B/X, but in fact it was AD&D. I certainly didn't understand the difference when I was 12-14.

The game group later expelled me in one of those strange turnarounds teenagers have. I got a new game group through putting a notice up at the library, and later changed schools and introduced my new friends to gaming. I brought my girlfriend into it, after 3 years with me she went off with the dweebiest guy in the game group, I was shattered, that took me into the Army where I brought more people into gaming, though they preferred military rpgs like Recon.

After that it gets complicated.

Having browsed this site for some while I thought I'd register and this seems like as good a thread as any to start on.

It was my brother wot done it. (So if he's a sonofabitch, I guess I must be too .)

He'd come across the game at university and told me about it - thinking (rightly) I might be interested. Then for my birthday (in 1977) he bought me the white box OD&D plus the Greyhawk supplement - and I was hooked.

My brother was - and remains - a keen wargamer who never really got into RPGs. I'd been bit of a half-hearted wargamer - and I much preferred small skirmish games to bigger battles. But when I realised what D&D offered - especially when I realised that as a player you could do anything, I never looked back.

My older Brother.

He was 4 years older then me and used to play RPGs with his friends (@ 8 years old). Then we moved to new town and he started an AD&D solo campaign with me. I was 5-6 at the time. I really wanted to play a Ninja, (which I think he just used the rules for a fighter-MU). After we made new friends, he stopped playing with me, but I got in to TOON and started GMing my own games.

The rest is history!

The year was 1991. A group of kids in school played it during recess, but they weren't too keen on explaining it, or taking in new players.

A few months later, a local magazine ran a huge feature on RPGs (this was our own belated and much smaller version of the American 1980s "RPG fad"). This was when I persudaded my old man to drive me to a local games store, and after looking down on the Portuguese translation of GURPS 2e (with the fugly bald androgynous purple-skinned humanoid on the cover), we picked up the "D&D Introductory Game" (a big black box with a Jeff Easley illo of a huge red dragon vs. tiny axe-swinging barbarian on the cover).

I was immediately hooked, but I still thought of it as a boardgame of sorts, until I got the D&D Rules Cyclopedia for Christmas, a couple of months later. Now that was an eye-opener.