Was the First RPG You Ever Played D&D?

[UnplayedRanger]

Technically, it was a heavily house ruled adaptation of 3rd edition. (Though I didn’t know it at the time). So… yes?

 

[MoonHunter]

I was an oD&D player in 76/77, quickly merging into AD&D. I was not part of the cool (nerd) kids D&D Group, but I played in the store demo campaign. However, I did more gaming than everyone else. I was willing to play Boot Hill, Empire of the Petal Thrones, Adventures in Fantasy, John Carter of Mars, Traveller, Top Secret, and everything else. So any gamer who wanted to try something else, I would fill in that game. (Each one of the cool nerds tried these other games once or twice.)

So I was never really tied to (or liked) D&D and the whole Dungeon Fantasy Bit. I then turned to GMing. I became The Fantasy Trip GM, Bushido GM, Top Secret (which had urban fantasy twists) GM, and most notably The Champions GM. Then everyone else wanted to be in my games.

 

[Baulderstone]

Since people are mentioning game books, I played Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Forest of Doom and Citadel of Chaos shortly before I got my Moldvay Basic Set. Given that I started as a GM without having played before, the experience with those books prepared me for understanding D&D. I suppose you could say that Fighting Fantasy was my equivalent of the Mentzer Red Box.

 

[Gabriel]

I guess I'll get into these weeds.

As I posted before, my first "formal" RPG was Moldvay D&D, but I had already been doing something that would have been recognizable as diceless or freeform RPGing for a considerable period of time before that.

When I was small, I wasn't allowed to have any friends over. My home situation was such that my only socialization with my peers was at school or on the park playground on whatever summer afternoons I was taken there. In second grade, I had a "best friend" at school, but he changed schools at the end of the school year, so I no longer had a reliable in-person playmate.

Every once in a rare while, we would meet up and get to play in person. By "rare" I mean that it might happen on each of our birthdays, and that was it. Since we couldn't hang out in person, we started just talking on the phone a lot.

When we were together in person, we would play "Star Trek." This was standard childhood cowboys and indians except it would be kids pretending to be Kirk, Spock, monsters of the week, or Klingons. Once we started our phone conversations, we started playing "Star Trek" without the running around the playground or using the monkeybars as the starship Enterprise. We would just pretend to be Kirk an Spock and do stuff. We'd have long phone calls where we'd play pretend.

We soon invented a sort of GM role. Sort of organically, one player would start being a sort of narrator and guy who presented the situations. I suppose the role existed in kid's playground play too, but it became more distinct and formalized now that we were doing this purely by conversation. In a short time this evolved into one of us having a turn at being Kirk or Spock while the other was a guy running the game. At this point it was definitely a recognizably GM sort of role, but it wasn't a strict divide. It was a sort of agreed upon role with significant back and forth. This was probably 1978, long before either of us had even heard of D&D or similar RPGs.

Soon, we wanted to do something other than play Kirk or Spock or the adventures of the Enterprise crew. We wanted to play Battle of the Planets or Star Wars. Almost simultaneously, we wanted to play OURSELVES and interact with the fictional worlds. So, we'd play ourselves, fictionalized, idealized versions obviously.

Shortly thereafter we started inventing our own fiction rather than dropping ourselves into existing fictional worlds. Then my friend wanted me to run a "superhero game." I didn't read superhero comics at the time. My only knowledge of superheroes came from the Super Friends cartoon and a bit of Superman lore. But this is the point where I think it became recognizable that we were creating RPG characters. We were still playing "ourselves" but this is where a recognizable sort of character creation routine entered our play pattern.

All of this was diceless. We didn't have what anyone would recognize as "stats." I guess at a total stretch you could say that we had something like Fate Aspects. We had mutually understood descriptions of our characters.

At this point we were pretty much playing RPGs. We'd play sci fi or superheroes. I know we were in full swing by 1980. So we were playing something recognizable as a diceless RPG for years before I ever saw a D&D book.

"Sandbox" wasn't a thing. The guy who was the GM was definitely a storyteller. The player reacted to that story or would take things in new directions. It was very improvisational. The GM would have an idea and we'd see where it would go. If it went off into the weeds, then the GM would make shit up.

I'm using the term "GM" but we didn't call it that. I don't think we had an actual title at all. We'd just say, "it's your turn" and we knew what that meant. Oh, we called these games "crazies" and playing one was "going crazy." So it would be something like, "It's time for you to be crazy."

We often had maps. I seriously wish I still had some of the many deck plans I drew for starships we dreamed up. But the idea of keyed encounter areas never occurred to us, and needless to say the idea of crawling around a map grid would have struck us as ridiculous. We couldn't share the maps in real time. We would make hand copies and mail them to each other sometimes, but they were really more about color and just fun activities rather than game aids.

Then later, the same friend pushed D&D on me as "a better way" to do what we were doing. I eventually conned my mom into buying me the basic set on a visit to Sears.

I don't think that D&D set was entirely a good influence on what I already had.

 

[T. Foster]

First rpg was D&D (1983 Basic Set). “Graduated up” to AD&D and added Star Frontiers both within about 6 months (can no longer remember which of those came first), and Gamma World at some point thereafter. Started branching out into non-TSR games maybe 18 months later (I think Stormbringer was my first non-TSR rpg).

 

[DeadBob]

I guess I'll get into these weeds.

As I posted before, my first "formal" RPG was Moldvay D&D, but I had already been doing something that would have been recognizable as diceless or freeform RPGing for a considerable period of time before that.

When I was small, I wasn't allowed to have any friends over. My home situation was such that my only socialization with my peers was at school or on the park playground on whatever summer afternoons I was taken there. In second grade, I had a "best friend" at school, but he changed schools at the end of the school year, so I no longer had a reliable in-person playmate.

Every once in a rare while, we would meet up and get to play in person. By "rare" I mean that it might happen on each of our birthdays, and that was it. Since we couldn't hang out in person, we started just talking on the phone a lot.

When we were together in person, we would play "Star Trek." This was standard childhood cowboys and indians except it would be kids pretending to be Kirk, Spock, monsters of the week, or Klingons. Once we started our phone conversations, we started playing "Star Trek" without the running around the playground or using the monkeybars as the starship Enterprise. We would just pretend to be Kirk an Spock and do stuff. We'd have long phone calls where we'd play pretend.

We soon invented a sort of GM role. Sort of organically, one player would start being a sort of narrator and guy who presented the situations. I suppose the role existed in kid's playground play too, but it became more distinct and formalized now that we were doing this purely by conversation. In a short time this evolved into one of us having a turn at being Kirk or Spock while the other was a guy running the game. At this point it was definitely a recognizably GM sort of role, but it wasn't a strict divide. It was a sort of agreed upon role with significant back and forth. This was probably 1978, long before either of us had even heard of D&D or similar RPGs.

Soon, we wanted to do something other than play Kirk or Spock or the adventures of the Enterprise crew. We wanted to play Battle of the Planets or Star Wars. Almost simultaneously, we wanted to play OURSELVES and interact with the fictional worlds. So, we'd play ourselves, fictionalized, idealized versions obviously.

Shortly thereafter we started inventing our own fiction rather than dropping ourselves into existing fictional worlds. Then my friend wanted me to run a "superhero game." I didn't read superhero comics at the time. My only knowledge of superheroes came from the Super Friends cartoon and a bit of Superman lore. But this is the point where I think it became recognizable that we were creating RPG characters. We were still playing "ourselves" but this is where a recognizable sort of character creation routine entered our play pattern.

All of this was diceless. We didn't have what anyone would recognize as "stats." I guess at a total stretch you could say that we had something like Fate Aspects. We had mutually understood descriptions of our characters.

At this point we were pretty much playing RPGs. We'd play sci fi or superheroes. I know we were in full swing by 1980. So we were playing something recognizable as a diceless RPG for years before I ever saw a D&D book.

"Sandbox" wasn't a thing. The guy who was the GM was definitely a storyteller. The player reacted to that story or would take things in new directions. It was very improvisational. The GM would have an idea and we'd see where it would go. If it went off into the weeds, then the GM would make shit up.

I'm using the term "GM" but we didn't call it that. I don't think we had an actual title at all. We'd just say, "it's your turn" and we knew what that meant. Oh, we called these games "crazies" and playing one was "going crazy." So it would be something like, "It's time for you to be crazy."

We often had maps. I seriously wish I still had some of the many deck plans I drew for starships we dreamed up. But the idea of keyed encounter areas never occurred to us, and needless to say the idea of crawling around a map grid would have struck us as ridiculous. We couldn't share the maps in real time. We would make hand copies and mail them to each other sometimes, but they were really more about color and just fun activities rather than game aids.

Then later, the same friend pushed D&D on me as "a better way" to do what we were doing. I eventually conned my mom into buying me the basic set on a visit to Sears.

I don't think that D&D set was entirely a good influence on what I already had.

Man, all of that seems so familiar (with a dollop of CYOA books on the side for me). Was there just something in the air culturally at that time?

I do recall that, as a kid, very early on one of the ways teachers would check for our reading comprehension was by asking "What would you do/have done?" type question about the simple stories we were reading, which made one of the most common things a GM does ( as I would find out later) already an activity we were familiar with even before encountering D&D.

 

[Imaginos]

Gamma World 1E, then Traveller LBB, then Basic D&D, then AD&D.

 

[Ossian]

My first RPG was “The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons” box set from 1991, which used BECMI. We escaped from Zanzer’s Dungeon, and I haven’t looked back.

 

[Lofgeornost]

OD&D because there was no other option. Soon went to RQ, Traveller and Chivalry and Sorcery

Same here, though the transition began with Empire of the Petal Throne, Metamorphosis Alpha, and Boot Hill. I'm not sure I saw a non-TSR rpg until I started college, but soon I was playing Chivalry & Sorcery, TFT, and Traveler more than D&D. In the early 1980s I was involved with a long-running AD&D 1e campaign, but I think by 1985 I'd played 75%+ of all the D&D sessions I ever have--more if you discount variants like AiME and the D20 Game of Thrones.

 

[Picaroon Jack]

This was mine in 1980.

I think we switched to AD&D (1E) by 81.

 

[opaopajr]

Technically yes, but not by my initiative. And I didn't like the dungeon crawl aspect, so quickly rejected it. But to this day Dieties & Demigods is my siren's call to world mythogies and retrying D&D.

I came back to TTRPGs after over a decade and many, many, many non-D&D systems. I finally got it and loved it for what it was. Another twenty years thereafter of wandering, I still call TSR my spiritual home for it holds my happiest gaming memories: not too much of this or that, just an easily adjustible porridge for 'Goldilocks' here.

 

[Vargold]

Holmes Basic in 1980.

(We had no clue how to run it. Went to the high school kids who were playing AD&D for help. When Moldvay Basic came along a year later, it was like the sun came out.)

 

[AsenRG]

So do gamebooks count? Or "labyrinths" populated with monsters from game books that your character could explore? We created those in high school.

I mean, I'd played Warlock of the Firetop Mountain, a host of other FF books, Bloodsword 1-5, Way of the Tiger, and about a 100-150 others before I even knew what RPGs were. That's got to change my answer...

 

[Dammit Victor]

First game I ever read (and read and read and read) was Moldvay/Cook in the late Eighties; my mother had a friend who owned both boxes. I knew I wanted to play that shit something fierce, but I didn't know how to make that happen.

First game I ever played... could have been Gamma World, but I'm pretty sure it was AD&D 1st Edition. Would have been 1993... I was running AD&D and Gamma World within the year. By '95/'96 I was playing anything I could get my hands on, mostly CoC and Shadowrun but some early World of Darkness stuff, too.

 

[Endless Flight]

So do gamebooks count? Or "labyrinths" populated with monsters from game books that your character could explore? We created those in high school.

I mean, I'd played Warlock of the Firetop Mountain, a host of other FF books, Bloodsword 1-5, Way of the Tiger, and about a 100-150 others before I even knew what RPGs were. That's got to change my answer...

One of my true loves in the mid 80s and I made homebrew games and maps based on the contents of these books:

 

[johnmarron]

The first RPG I ever played was Empire of the Petal Throne, which I got for my 13th birthday in 1976. In fact, I think D&D (in the form of AD&D 1E) was maybe the 4th or 5th RPG I played, after EPT, Metamorphosis Alpha, Traveler, Boot Hill, and maybe one more, and I only played it from 1978-1981, when I switched to Runequest. I never stopped playing RPGs, but wouldn't play any version of D&D again until 4E in 2008.

John

 

[EmperorNorton]

Looks like we are trending towards around 80% which is about what I was guessing.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

Looks like we are trending towards around 80% which is about what I was guessing.

80% and from the post it looks like most of us started early to mid 80s with a few outliers either side of that.

 

[ffilz]

Holmes Basic in October 1977.

I quickly branched out but by 1979 I was running a regular AD&D campaign. Stopped running AD&D in 1989 as 2e was coming online. Strictly didn't pick up D&D again until 2006, though in 2003 I started an Arcana Unearthed campaign so really D&D 3.x...

 

[Atelerix]

Mentzer Red Box D&D in 1983, then Star Trek, Cthulhu, MERP, Ghostbusters, Runequest in more or less that order over the next 4 years.

 

[Toadmaster]

AD&D 1E, started playing in the summer of 1978 which puts me at 11. I can remember having to wait for some of the books to be published so presumably the GM was using an earlier form for some of those very first games. The GM was a friend and he was borrowing his older brothers books until we had our own so could have actually been OD&D, but by the time I actually knew the rules it was AD&D.

 

[ORtrail]

Moldvay Basic set in 1981 was the first I owned myself. Pretty sure it was the Holmes Basic set I played first, the year before.

 

[saskganesh]

I was started on a homebrew version of T&T. So hooked, I then played my own neoclone of T&T with my best friend at the time. I was nine. Moved onto Holmes boxed set then, dropped T&T, and got in DEEP.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

I started on a game the GM billed as "Battletech". I played a robot. One of the players was some kind of lion mutant, another was a cyborg. I believe the game was Mech Warrior but I am not sure, as I never saw the book *(everything was in the GM's binder and he did most of the rolls for us). After that we did a campaign of D&D, which I believe was 1E (but it was so long ago, I can't remember very clearly, so possible it was basic or something else). I also remember playing Top Secret during this time and buying the boxed set. After that I moved back to Boston and picked up 2E, started gaming regularly with friends I met in Middle School, and for us the norm was to cycle through a bunch of different games (we played everything from 2E to Runequest, to Darksword, TORG, GURPS, Cthulhu, Vampire, etc). I would say D&D was pretty central though, taking up a little over half the games.

 

[Simon Hogwood]

I had been, you might say, "RPG curious" for some time up to that point, but the first time I actually sat down to roll dice it was playing 3.5E.

 

[gruagach]

I started with Holmes Basic in 1981. Had switched to AD&D by sometime in 1982. By end of 1983, I'd played the heck out of AD&D, Champions, Daredevils, Bushido, and James Bond 007 and Stormbringer. Warhammer 1st edition was added to the repertoire by the mid 1980s. By the early 1990s, I'd branched out to include GURPS, Vampire the Masquerade, Amber Diceless Roleplaying and Ars Magica. Then adulthood hit (jobs, family), and my gaming slowed way down until ~the 2010's.

I've got very fond memories of all the AD&D gaming from those formative early years. We never really played strictly by the rules. We didn't have older gamers, really, to teach us how to play, so we learned by (sort of) reading the rules and trying to put them into practice. It's from these early experiences that I think my obsession with house-ruling and hacking systems stems.

Each of those games from my pre-teen years through leaving college scratched a different itch, and I've got fond memories of all of them besides D&D as well.

 

[LikelyArrow]

I grew up playing a heavily cut-down AD&D 1e, both with my parents and on computers in the form of Pool of Radiance.

 

[JamesV]

Honestly curious what percent here started with D&D, and how many people started with something else.

I started with AD&D in the late 80s/early 90s (I was like 5-6 years old, so nailing down the exact date is pretty hard, it was when I was in Kindergarten though).

Interesting how similar it is. I was about the same age, it was just in the early 80s, and it was Moldvay Basic.

 

[ScytheSong]

I'm not sure. In 1977 or '78, I was part of a group that the Youth Group babysitted in the basement of the church my family was going to during coffee hour. They were playing a game that involved space and smuggling and two six-sided dice. I played the ship's cat on a couple of Sundays. So I'm pretty sure I was "playing" Traveller.

But the first time I actually played a role-playing game and *knew it*, it was B/X. Which I got for Christmas in 1980.

 

[AsenRG]

I'm not sure. In 1977 or '78, I was part of a group that the Youth Group babysitted in the basement of the church my family was going to during coffee hour. They were playing a game that involved space and smuggling and two six-sided dice. I played the ship's cat on a couple of Sundays. So I'm pretty sure I was "playing" Traveller.

Getting a small child to play the cat is zn idea I like mord and more with each time I hear it. Hmm...

 

[Godfather Punk]

View attachment 49055

Oh, those spine breaking maps!

 

[Ynas Midgard]

After playing a few CYOA books, I heard about role-playing games from classmates and on the internet. The first RPG book I got in a second-hand bookshop; it was a local game, and I was pretty surprised it was different from what my friends told me. I realised then that there are more than one RPGs. Not much later, I had to run Shadowrun 3rd edition for my pals. They already had one session, but the GM was older and not around much, so I had to continue the game after they told me what had happened so far. I learnt the basics of the system and the setting from the local publisher's website. It was around 6th or maybe 7th grade, I think.

 

[Ravenswing]

I started GMing with OD&D in the spring of 1978 -- and very quickly transitioned to an increasingly heavy VD&D variant -- but my first experiences as a player were around November of 1978 with Empire of the Petal Throne.

 

[Stumpydave]

I started with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (Citadel of Chaos) 82ish? and my mum brought me the TSR Conan box set about 84/85. Then there was some Play by post but I didn't really start roleplaying properly till 92 with Werewolf:The Apocalypse and the rest of the WoD.

 

[Baulderstone]

I started with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (Citadel of Chaos) 82ish? and my mum brought me the TSR Conan box set about 84/85. Then there was some Play by post but I didn't really start roleplaying properly till 92 with Werewolf:The Apocalypse and the rest of the WoD.

Werewolf: the Apocalypse is probably the best choice for a first RPG out of WoD games.

 

[NinjaWeasel]

Well, if we're including Fighting Fantasy game books... then that was my first and that was around 1983. I was probably 6 years old. My sister bought The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (sans any FF branding at that time) and, after she'd played through it, she let me borrow it. My Mum soon realised that this was actually a good way to get me to read more and wasn't averse to buying me new books on a semi-regular basis!

 

[Teotwawki]

Been playing rpgs since the late 80s. Never played D&D. Never wanted to. The husband's been playing rpgs since 1977. He's played D&D exactly once.

 

[Zadmar]

The first RPG I ever played was redbox D&D, which (as best as I can work out) would have been around 1983. But I was only 8, the DM was another kid in my class, and we didn't get far before I lost interest. The first RPG I played seriously was Dragon Warriors, in 1987 -- I'd already played lots of Fighting Fantasy books by that point, so I got to grips with it pretty quickly, and I've played ever since.

 

[chuckdee]

The first RPG I ever played solo was D&D, but the first RPG I played with others was FASERIP, followed by GURPS and Rolemaster. Then I finally played D&D 2e with people.

 

[Arminius]

First RPG was the White Box plus supplements, initially in a brief session with older kids including my brother, then with kids my own age. All before the 1e MM was published, and after I’d started reading Tolkien, so I would guess around 1976-77.

I was playing wargames and Diplomacy starting a little earlier than that, and I moved on to AD&D as the books came out, somehow managing to fill the gaps until all three had been published. Also got into TFT and a little Traveller, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, and Top Secret before heading off to college.

From that point through the end of the 80s I was mostly playing various homebrews developed by GMs; in retrospect, I think they were based more on OD&D than on AD&D, which I think is kind of interesting. If that was the case, it illuminates an early “underground” that almost completely bypassed commercial (A)D&D/TSR development in that era.