I believe I gotl the original basic set for Christmas of 1978. I ordered the PH, MM and DMG from the ad in the back of the book. Unfortunately, I had assumed it was going to be $12, like the other two books (the DMG was released in 1979) and so the Dungeon Hobby Shop sent me back a credit for $12 and I had to get another money order for an extra $3 plus shipping before I got my first DMG. LOL, that was 41 years ago, and I turn 55 this month1

September 7th, 1978. My friend's birthday party.

No dice. Just the little chits. I was hooked. May as well handed me a needle and let me tie-off right there. I've long since caught the dragon, now I'm riding it to the end.

A friend got the Holmes blue box for Christmas 1978. I subsequently got the MM, PHB, and DMG when they came out. Also played just about everything that came out between 1978 and 1982.

January 1991 on a Boy Scout campout...rolled up a half elf ranger in AD&D...still playing 31 years later, though WWN, SWADE and Cypher are my preferred systems

'87 with WEG's d6 Star Wars

Seeing all the years mentioned in this thread ... 1983, 1978 ... it gets me thinking ...

Thinking back to what the world was like back then. Imagine it. Imagine how people looked. What life was like, how different things were in the pre-internet era. Imagine all the kids everywhere in schools, all over the world. Imagine them at friends' houses after school and on weekends, at sleepovers ... in so many countries. Imagine all the things that have come and gone in your life since you were, say, 7 years old, or 12. Yet, the dice remain.

It's amazing to be a part of a hobby that was born in the 70s and is still going. It is simultaneously far away and close. Imagine ... we've been a part of this almost all of our lives (many of us). So many things change in life, yet here we are, still rolling the same dice, killing the same monsters .... It's really remarkable. We are part of a shared experience. I can't see myself ever giving up on this special hobby. It's a gateway both to the past -- to our youth -- and to fantastic lands where things are as we should like them to be.

What the heck am I saying? Sorry, a bit stream of consciousness, there.

Whenever I am tempted to chase novelty in game design, whenever I think I could devise a better, more elegant system, I somehow find myself coming back to the classic D&D three-roll system (init/att/dmg), 3d6 abilities, and the dungeon (or wilderness) framework. It just works. For 50 years, it just works. Moreover, by continuing to play the classic system, I feel that I continue to acknowledge and honour those two men and their amazing creation -- what they gave to the world, to all of us. I feel that I show gratitude and keep their memory alive. (You know, the terrible memory of two cis-hetero, racist old white men -- men whose writing is so problematic that disclaimers must be slapped on their works by those who continue to profit from them -- *those* men! hahaha. Fuck you, SJW faggots!)

... continuing ...

It feels like: you maybe could create a new language that is better and more rational than, say, English, (pretty sure people have tried this -- Esperanto?) but ... there is a benefit in staying with the old ways, which have been proven and time-tested and may work for reasons we do not entirely understand despite apparent contradictions and shortcomings. I like to maintain this link to the past -- it provides continuity in life, a connection, where often it is hard to find that in many things in life.

(I don't mean staying with corporate D&D, of course.)

Although I discovered Fighting Fantasy books from my school library first (and was kinda confused and ignored the system entirely and just chose what I wanted to do), I started RPGs in ... 1989 ... for the record, in a friend's dark basement around a table. Gamaworld and AD&D1e, quickly followed by 2e.