I got to reminiscing about my first couple games and thought I'd share. I was also curious where, or how others got started.
My first couple games of D&D were played amongst other 10-12 year olds playing from the original red D&D box set. My older brother talked me in to it and to be honest - I was intrigued but it wasn't played well. We had no clue. lol!!
I found by accident an ad tacked to a bulletin board at the apartment complex up the street from my house for a game looking for players. The ad was posted by a couple adults (I was 11 at the time) but I gave them a call and the following weekend a couple of my friends and I went to play.
I have those 2 guys to thank for opening up a world to me. Munch and Chuck were their names and they brought the entire D&D experience in force. The campaigns and dungeons were gritty and realistic - my first character, a dwarf fighter/ thief died and was reincarnated as a kobold. I didn't know it at the time but later on as I learned more I found those games were based in Greyhawk!
It's been almost 30 years since then so I can no longer remember many specific details but, again - thank you to Munch and Chuck!
Similarly to you, pdxwinn, I began at 12 years old when my parents bought my younger brother (10 years old) and I the red Basic box and the Blue Expert box for Christmas. 'Twas 1981, I believe.
We were too young to understand the rules and my mother, after reading a few pages, refused to read any more without being given college credit for it. So, being the oldest amongst our small group of friends, I began as the DM, making up maps and inventing rules as they became necessary. I couldn't, for the life of me, understand what a Saving Throw was until at about 13 or 14 it just hit me. I distinctly remember a light going on inside my head when I finally grasped the concept of Saving Throws. At that point, I felt like I had graduated to true DMing.
Of course, when Advanced D&D came out, we all believed that it was the next step up from the Expert rules. I never did like Psionics as they were much too over-powered in AD&D. Maybe that's what soured me on them in a fantasy setting for ever after.
I do have a couple of High School teachers to thank for showing me true depth in DMing skill. Playing as a character in their campaigns demonstrated to me how lacking my skills were and so many ways in which I could improve by immitating their styles.
"I couldn't, for the life of me, understand what a Saving Throw was until at about 13 or 14 it just hit me. I distinctly remember a light going on inside my head when I finally grasped the concept of Saving Throws. At that point, I felt like I had graduated to true DMing."
LOL!!
Thank you for sharing - excellent story.
My 6th grade math teacher let us take over his room during lunch hour to game. He was a cool teacher.
I remember Return of the Jedi had been out, I was 9 and everyone was crazy about the toys. Me and two friends were really bored with that and one of my friends said let's play "D&D".
We ran inside and rolled up characters in the kitchen so we could play right away. I played an elven thief (doesn't everyone?), my other friend played a Human fighter and my friend who suggested playing was DMing.
No matter what my friend DMing said to me, I just couldn't understand what "Charm" did. Was it a trinket? Was my character just a smooth talker? It was like a spell? So what did it DO?!
I could hear my friend's mom laughing from the other room. So she comes over to the kitchen and she tried to explain it to me... and then I got it... which only frustrated my DM friend even further.
I remember being fascinated by the illustrations on everything which sent the creative sparks flying, causing me to draw dragons, knights, wizards casting spells for years. I'd kill to see that stuff again just for a laugh.
It drove my parents nuts wanting to stop for my first of many visits to the hobby store and started spending my allowance on the books. I'd spend hours upon hours pouring over the books and maps and building dungeons, imaging places for people to adventure in, graph paper and just having at it.
I'm glad to be getting back into it again all these years later.
It was 1987 and I was 11-12 years old and my best friend's older brother had a 1st edition campaign he'd play with his friends. We kept pestering him to let us play too and, of course, they didn't want us kids mucking up their game but they finally gave in. After that we most Saturday mornings for years in that old garage hacking monsters, pretending to be heros or villians, and generally having a great time. By late 1993 I had mostly stopped playing with my final games being in early 1994 but since then I've enjoyed many RPG baed books and video games though I honestly have no interest in 3rd or 4th editions.
I started in 7th grade which would have to be 1979? I started with the original blue basic set that came with B1 with the original cover and the coupon in the back for a free set of dice at your local game store. The first character I played was a magic user. We made it through most of the top level of B1 and then fell through the water pit into the lower level. We had finally found the Stairs to get back up but at that point everyone but my mage were down to 1 hit point, we were all first level. Blocking our escape to the upper levels and the outside were 4 orcs. Somehow My mage who only had a dagger with 4 hit points and no spells left was able to slay all 4 orcs. however he died as he thrust his blade into the last of the fell beasts. I think that's how everyones first experience should be. Soon after that we got the Advanced books and had moved on to that and other games. I even briefly owned my own game store. But I still play to this day and have been running a 3.5 Greyhawk game for the past few months and this weekend get to play First edition Advanced D&D with a few of the players playing via webcam from Canada. LOL
Seems those red and blue basic and expert boxes sets were a starting point for many people, and I am among them. My younger brother and I got them for Christmas. Must have been 1981 or so, but we had been playing D&D with friends who had other rules for a year or so. The first time I remember seeing any sort of D&D books was around 1978, and the books were the small pamphlets like Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and such. I was already a collector and painter of medieval/fantasy minis, so those pamphlet books appealed on that basis alone. That led to D&D soon enough, then to AD&D, and then to Greyhawk in few years time. _________________ - Moderator/Admin (in some areas)/Member -
After more then a year of lurking and slightly less then a year of, occasionally, posting here I have to say this is the best thread on this forum I have seen. Too much good stuff.
Blue box and B1 for me, too. I have no idea how I ended up being DM other than it was me who bought the box set.
Then, AD&D PHB and MM. I vividly remember reading the DMG on a long car journey and being totally blown away by the possibilities. I'll also always link it with the BBC's radio version of Lord Of The Rings which was being broadcast at around the same time.
The sessions of those times were probably very primitive by today's standards and expectations; but what a time .
I was introduced to 2e while spending the night at a friend's house. Began playing then and, pretty much never quit. Funny part is, I am back to playing 2e again. _________________ Agape,
I get to play a 1st edition game this weekend that we only get to do every few months or so. Believe it or not I am finally getting to play the Keep on the Borderlands which I have never played or dm'd before.
I get to play a 1st edition game this weekend that we only get to do every few months or so. Believe it or not I am finally getting to play the Keep on the Borderlands which I have never played or dm'd before.
LOL - it's been so long since I played either 1st ed or the Keep on the Borderlands - I don't remember either one.
I received my first RED BASIC BOX for Christmas of '84. Man that was the best Christmas ever. We had been playing D&D for a bit before that but from bits and pieces of photocopies that we managed to piece together from friends.
Our first "proper" adventure was Palace of the Silver Princess. Dont step into the red light!!!
Battles against skeletons, evoiding those nastly little dart traps, deciding when was the best time to use your only potion of .... wait! What's the bottle!
By the time it got to going back to school, we had amassed an army of characters ranging from levels 1-3.
House Rules were starting to take shape so that we could advance to level 4 and then it was Christmas all over when we got our D&D Expert Box a 2 months later.
It wasn't until recently that I went back and really thoroughly read my ist edition DMG. Wow was there a lot of stuff in there. What amazes me the most was we would always complain about something not being in the books or they didn't think to pout that thing in there while all along it was. All we had to do was actually read the whole book and not just the parts to play the game.
It wasn't until recently that I went back and really thoroughly read my ist edition DMG. Wow was there a lot of stuff in there. What amazes me the most was we would always complain about something not being in the books or they didn't think to pout that thing in there while all along it was. All we had to do was actually read the whole book and not just the parts to play the game.
That's funny because my friends and I were just the opposite - we all read through every book, from cover to cover.
If we couldn't remember a rule exactly right (i.e. couldn't agree on its interpretation) or needed to look up all the appropriate bonuses/penalties for a particular action, we pretty much knew exactly what page in what book the information was located on.
After spending a summer in England, I came home and found my friends in one of the guys' basment playing a strange game. I wasnt a big fan of board games at the time, and thinking this might be something similar I wasnt too eager to join in. However, I had just read the Lord of the Rings and when one of the guys told me I could play an elf, I was convinced. One gaming session later and I was hooked for life. Started out with BECMI, which is still my favorite edition, although I have played most editions out there.
Summer 1981...... I was 11 years old. A friend of mine at junior school had long talked about a game called Dungeons and Dragons that he played. In my minds eye was and epic board game, with several levels of boards, one on top of the other, and gaming figures to put on the board..... Yep, I really could not grasp the concept. I was then invited over to my friends house, and sampled the game. I was absolutely blown away. The books were the original soft-bound AD&D books, the illustrations awesome, and I was hooked then for life.
In time my parents bought me the old red box set circa 1981, and I carried the game to my friends in the neighbourhood. Within a year I held copies of the AD&D books for myself. I still get nostalgic over those seemingly endless school holidays, where modules like B4 'The Lost City', The Desert of Desolation series and ultimately Temple of Elemental Evil carried us to new and exciting worlds. Greyhawk always stuck for me. I got a copy of the original boxed set in 1984, and suddenly no other setting seemed satisfactory. Since then, it has always remained my roleplaying home, even through its oft neglected periods.
As for my first character, it was a Druid, that didn't last very long, but was buried with honour with his hammers crossed on his chest. My Ranger proved more hardy, and became long-lived and a true favourite.
As for struggling with the rules...... hmmm, yes before I got my Basic rules, I was the proud owner of B3 'Palace of the Silver Princess'. Now that was true car-crash DMing, looking at a stat block and guessing what some of the abbreviations stood for!! Nothing if not memorable.
Nowadays I DM at a local games club here in South Wales (UK), where a new swathe of innocents have been introduced to the 'pleasures' of TOEE using the Pathfinder rules. I still have a real fondness for those old AD&D rules, the cranky psionics, the weird Weapons v AC modifiers and all. I don't think I would ever tire of taking one of those characters into an old-style dungeon, no matter how the game has developed. But at heart i guess I still love to game, whatever the system. The gift of fellowship around a gaming table, the ability to imagine a world in which we could immerse ourselves has been of a value that I cannot calculate. To all those that made the game what it was I owe my thanks. To those who get the sheer enjoyment that I do from it I say Hail Friend! Welcome
I was 13 and was recovering from dislocating my shoulder on a tackle I made playing football. Some acquaintances I knew were talking about a game they played their DM at the time wanted a break and so he trained his friend Randy how to DM. I asked them about the game they told me about a world with dwarves, elves, trolls, barbarians, archers and wizards.
Well I was a fan of three billy goats gruff and Conan comics , books and the movie. Besides also being a fan of Claw the unconquered. Trolls where always my favorite race I always wanted to know more about them. I had seen the cartoon movie Lord of the rings and had not read it at that time.
So I was invited to roll up a character using AD&D rules first edition. I rolled up my first character a Half-Troll Barbarian from the Lands of Frost. Funny I did not know of GH at the time. As you can tell many rules where not known to this group. Heck someone stole most of the rulebooks the group acquired.
The DM that wanted a break Eddie set up house rules and we used d6 to make attack roles and everything else. He rolled up a Grugach elf ranger we had a MM with the Grugach and Valley elves in it. Well DM Randy constructed a Dungeon in which every run we entered had a fire bat or an Ice elemental in it.
Eddie apologized for the session and invited back to play in his game. We started over with the same characters. Spent 10 hours going through a dungeon for some elders of a town. I found a magical sword and we ended the session against a hydra to which i set the magical blade on him. The sword would leave my hand and fight by it self for a while.
Most of my party injured and I broke my axe on the Hydras scales. Left the magic blade to fend off the hydra so we could escape. Two more sessions after that and I had amassed a basic and expert box set plus the 1st ed dmg and phb created a city and offered to dm. I also got us the proper dice and enlighted everyone to what the rules actually where.
It was their first non dungeon adventure in the 3 years they had played before I joined the group. I was now the fulltime DM Eddie and the others took some of my ideas and DM'ed me every once in a while. Though I was lucky to get a session or two before the duties where back to me. I had everyone give me a history of their character most went a paragraph if that. I took all our histories and meshed them together so that are characters had a reason to be together. This all took place in their game world . Once I found the 83 GH box set I incorporated are campaign into a greyhawk one. Now Argon had a home though I had to alter the trolls to meet the original concept for my character. Vikings sourcebook 2E is a good idea of what Argon was a Trollborn Barbarian.
My first time playing was about 1984, the summer between my 5th and 6th grade. My neighbor, older than me by a couple years, was learning AD&D with a friend of his. He did not own any books, so my first actual experience was with a piece of paper, a pencil, and 3d6 from a Yahtzee game! My first character with him was pretty much a rip-off of Hank, from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, 'lighting' bow and all!!
I soon acquired the blue Expert boxed set and it came with the Isle of Dread and I purchased A3 Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords. My other friend, in the same grade as me, started with that. We must have played those two modules a hundred times. We soon got the 1st Ed Player's Handbook and used a mixture of the Basic and AD&D systems. We had loads of fun.
My first major character was a female elf from the Expert set. But, we still sort of used the AD&D books too. My first real intro to AD&D, I used the elf, but the DM corrected me and helped me convert her to a Fighter/Wizard. It was all game-on at that point.
Picture this: Cincinnati, Ohio, 1980/81. I was only about 8 or 9 at the time when I was first introduced to the game by an older kid (13) who, along with some friends, played first edition (obviously).
I dimly recall the old boxed sets, and, of course, the first edition PH and DMG (the one with the red devil on it). The DM ran a campaign of his own design. I remember our characters getting captured by some cultists or warlord (this is all so fuzzy) and the lot of us getting chucked into a deep pit wherein we had to fight an ogre with our bare hands and feet. The ogre, of course, had some type of weapon, either a battle axe or some type of polearm. The details are all foggy, and I am not sure if we survived or not, but I recall liking the creativity of the fantasy realm. I guess you could say at that point I was hooked. I began to collect as much of the material that I could get from my parents, starting with the original Monster Manual, then the other hard-backed tomes, and later on, some of the modules. My DM-friend gave me a set of dice, which, happily, I can admit that I still own to this day and use...pardon the expression...religiously. I still have my old books and modules and all the great memories, but enjoy making new ones, too.
Thanks for the question, and a long, circuitous path down memory lane. It's getting dark down there!
Oh goodness.. I remember buying a D&D computer game with a sorceress and a dragon on the front and muddling through it on my PC. I then remember buying a much larger boxed computer game with a red dragon on the front, but my mom decided that the dragon on the front of that one was the devil (no joke) so she made me throw it away.
I first learned there was a role playing game where you pretended to be characters or at least described their actions when I was at Girl Scout Camp. The two girls in my tent were Star Wars nerds and constantly quoted the scene where Luke is hiding from Darth and he's probing Luke's thoughts ("...so you have a twin sister...").
Their parents played D&D and we got along pretty well so I actually got to hang out with them some after camp was over. Sadly they were only interested in role playing Star Wars stuff and I wasn't very into that (this must have been around 12 years old or so).
Then I met some role players in high school (at around age 15), but they only liked White-Wolf, though one of them had family who played D&D. I felt like I was cursed. I joined them for Vampire: the Masquerade because I figured if I couldn't enjoy the fantasy genre I was craving I may as well have some fun.
Around a year later one of the players from the White-Wolf group ran a small D&D 3.0 game for me and one other in which I played an Elven Druid named Mere Kahain who had a wolf for an animal companion. In the first and only session she picked up a scimitar they found in one of the dungeon rooms and was spoken to directly by the goddess Wee Jas, who gave her the choice to serve her or die. The scimitar grafted itself into the druid's arm.
I was sorely disappointed when the game never happened again even though I didn't much like my druid being forced into serving Wee Jas.
Eventually though (around age 19), the DM from that game got me in touch with Iressi, who is my favorite DM to play under so far (I openly admit I'm biased since we'll have been together for four years come September 1st) and who has given me much, much, much more opportunity to play the game than I ever had as a child.
I'm quite content nowadays, though the vast majority of my D&D experience lies in the realm of 3.0/3.5/4e and Pathfinder. Iressi says I have to try AD&D and 1st edition someday, and I think I'm up for that. _________________ Shadows and Dust; Just Another Soul.
Many of you have discussed numerous other gaming systems, but it seems that most of us continue to return to the one that pretty much gave birth to them all (opinion or fact? not sure). I, too, have tried out other games, including WhiteWolf (namely Vampire and Werewolf), Star Frontiers (boy does that go back in time!), Star Trek (only briefly), Star Wars (original system), Mech Warrior/Battletech, and GURPS.
There may be a few others that I've forgotten, but the point is that Gary Gygax really created an enduring legacy, and is the true (Grand?)Father of all Role Playing Games (does that make him a Greater Power to us gamers? Perhaps). Greyhawk is the first generation of that, and though the world is, sadly, dead to the market, I think we help to keep that legacy alive with these forums, our games, stories, and memories. Although many others (Forgotten Realms, DarkSun, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, etc.) have spun off the game, Greyhawk's rightful place as a hallmark, detailed, and historic world is assured. I have tried many of those aforementioned spin-offs, but am never satisfied, and always return to Oerth. I think I'm here to stay.
Thank you for hearing me out and letting me wax poetic...or is that prose (sorry, not an English major)?
Two Words: Hero Quest. When I was in gradeschool my parents brought me a copy of the Milton Bradley board game. I can’t tell you how many times I played through the game with my friends and family. An older friend of mine at school who had heard of the game invited me over to play in his D&D game. He said if I liked Hero Quest I would love D&D. I’ve been hooked since that first game. I guess I was about 9 or so at the time back in 89 or 88. My first game was in the first printing of 2nd edition of AD&D. Virtually all of my Hero Quest playing friends followed me into D&D shortly after that. I still use my rapidly aging copy of Hero Quest to introduce people to the concepts of a fantasy roleplaying game. You would be surprised how many people who refused to play D&D now play because they would play a “kid’s board game.”
I use to play many medieval fantasy games like D&D. Because we didn't have access to any D&D books, we made our own rules. We had lots of fun.
I'll always remember that my first D&D game was disastreous though.
When I got into my own first DMing session, it was great. I had to look at the rules from time to time for enemies stats and I didn't really planned anything. Though with the descriptions and all, I made those 1st levels look like epics.
I'm really into D&D since my first game though. And I like the wolrd of Greyhawk, the original campaign setting.
I was around 14 or 15 when I was pilfering through my oldest brothers closet (youngest kids will do that, you know). He was known to go from one hobby to another in rapid succession, so one never knew what might be in there. That was when I came across a particular box, still wrapped in plastic. I opened the box and what did I find inside?
Meanwhile, my best friend was wandering the aisles of the local toy store, when he came across the same Basic D&D boxed set. Within days, we shared our discoveries. We played Basic, Expert, and Advanced (1e) D&D for years, before college took us into separate directions.
Ah the days of yore when there was such a thing as a payphone, skate rinks, Bazooka gum, rotary phones, record players, casette decks, and the microwave. There was no PG-13, and the only fantasy we had was the Lord of the Rings....
My cousin, the bully, and conniver intoduced me to the Basic Set and proceeded to run me on many games of which he killed every one of my characters. I hated D&D!!! ...But the seed was planted and a couple of years later I picked up the notorious 'Red Box'. I didn't have any friends that played D&D and I sure didn't know how to DM at a young age but I tried and ran myself thru many games...well and my sister helped a bit too. After that I grew up and thought D&D had gone the way of the Dodo.
Then in the early 90's fresh out of high school I found a group of players that played D&D, but it was 2nd edition. ..Ah, heck...well I took what I could get and spent many years playing 2nd edition. We would start a game in my backroom in the evening, say maybe around 7 or 8pm and we'd play till 3, 4 or 5am. We played Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Planescape, and mostly Forgotten Realms. We did this for years!!! Even though D&D waxed and waned thru the years, many of us made the jump to 3rd edition and we spent years playing that as well. Some of us are still together, though many have left. Some of us still play 3rd edition, where as I still play OD&D, 1st, 3rd, and even some 4th.
Over the years I've gone back and collected the old modules and obtained many modules online. I have modules for all editions; OD&D, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. I both run and play D&D as I think it's important to not get burned out and a good balance is in order.
In fall of 1979 I was in 8th Grade and one day in the lunch hall the guy that sat across from me had the original Blue book and let me look at it for a few minutes during our lunch break. I was in AWE.
I got my parents to buy me the original blue book and dragon magazine the following weekend and I have been a fan ever since.
Brought the book to school on monday and became friends for several years with the guy you let me see his book
Greatest game ever !!!
Played a lot of 1st and 2nd edition. I like 3.5 and pathfinder but prefer 2nd ed. The edition does not really matter, its the group of people that you game with that make or break campaigns.
Still love Greyhawk because I feel Gary Gygax had the most imaginative and creative materials for any and all editions of DnD. I like Forgotten realms just not as much as greyhawk.
You found one of the most popular threads on this forum. Feel free to ask any questions and introduce yourself in your own thread on this forum like what brings you to canonfire. If your interested the link to your left will allow you to join in on the greytalk chats hosted on Thursday nights. (Greytalk Chat Now! with Java). As you can tell we have over 40,000 fan created articles here to peruse. Looking forward to seeing more of you on the boards.
The edition does not really matter, its the group of people that you game with that make or break campaigns.
For a Novice he already speaks with the wisdom of the Mystic Scholar
Welcome Gordin and as Argon the Barbarian has already said, you have found a Greyhawk Wellspring. Drink, be merry, and don't be shy to add your own perspectives and opinions.
Just found this thread. I was about 10 (so 1982) and my friend introduced me to it. Was basic D&D and my friend DMed. I remember having a halfling and he had an NPC to help me. We got into one heck of a missile fight with a small band of orcs, us firing down stairs and them firing up. Seemed like it went on forever as I couldn't hit any of them (bad dice roller I guess). I think it went south for my character in the end.
Either way, I was hooked bad. I bothered my buddy to DM every waking moment until he finally got pretty sick of me asking. Not wanting to give up, I bought the books and started DMing other friends. They got hooked. We played all through high school and college.
I actually started playing a different system before DnD. When I was 9 years old my cousin introduced me to G.U.R.P.S and ran me through a solo module, with a pre-built character. The goal was to sneak into a mansion and make out with as much treasure as possible.
It was a very fun adventure, I had to play it a few times cause I kept getting caught and thrown in jail :P I did manage to finish it three times over the next year, each time getting a different amount of treasure. I then played a game with him and two of our other cousins where I took my character from the module and started play with all that money he got from the fence. I really had a great time and they were pretty patient with me.
I found out about DnD in the sixth grade and played some second edition games with some friends. That group continued to play various campaigns all through highschool and a little while after, in fact the campaign I am currently in has one of our core group's players in it. Ah goodtimes.
I was eight years old and just finishing up 2nd grade (about 1979) when a new kid moved on the block, let's call him... Tim. (OK his name was Tim.) We struck up a conversation on the bus home and he was asking me about things to do when he mentioned a friend up the street from us who was going to teach him how to play D&D, and would I want to join? Having no idea what it was, but since there weren't a lot of kids in the area, I said sure. Well, the kid down the block, can't remember his name, has both the MM and PHB, had created a massive multi-panel dungeon and went on and on, we were blown away. We were psyched, here we were ready to enter an entire world of heroes, dungeons and... dragons. As luck would have it, the kid and his family, the next week, announced they were moving away, so we never started. Actually, we did start, we attempted to take everything we had seen and attempted to recreate everything we could, up to creating new monsters (with names taken from the back of a Lysol spray bottle). As you can guess we never got far.
Cut to a year later, Tim and I still had the itch to play D&D in any format, yeah we wanted AD&D but $12.00 for a book was crazy expensive to a 9 year old. So, since Tim and I had birthdays a month apart we would ask our parents for the Basic (Tim) D&D Set, and I would ask for the Expert Set. Bad part, my b-day was a month before Tim's so we had to sit around with the Expert Set until his b-day. That is how it began for me.
**So, we really wanted to get into AD&D, we were smart kids and like the idea of being advanced so the next summer we collected golf balls from a near-by golf course (balls were not in play) and cleaned them up and sold them back to the golfers, made enough to get the PHB from the local toy/hobby store and collected the rest of the books from there.** _________________ Chris Morris
Many of you have discussed numerous other gaming systems, but it seems that most of us continue to return to the one that pretty much gave birth to them all (opinion or fact? not sure). I, too, have tried out other games, including WhiteWolf (namely Vampire and Werewolf), Star Frontiers (boy does that go back in time!), Star Trek (only briefly), Star Wars (original system), Mech Warrior/Battletech, and GURPS.
There may be a few others that I've forgotten, but the point is that Gary Gygax really created an enduring legacy, and is the true (Grand?)Father of all Role Playing Games (does that make him a Greater Power to us gamers? Perhaps). Greyhawk is the first generation of that, and though the world is, sadly, dead to the market, I think we help to keep that legacy alive with these forums, our games, stories, and memories. Although many others (Forgotten Realms, DarkSun, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, etc.) have spun off the game, Greyhawk's rightful place as a hallmark, detailed, and historic world is assured. I have tried many of those aforementioned spin-offs, but am never satisfied, and always return to Oerth. I think I'm here to stay.
Thank you for hearing me out and letting me wax poetic...or is that prose (sorry, not an English major)?
yours in Oerth,
-Lanthorn
Which Star trek can I ask? Was it the old FASA one? That was a hellava game. _________________ Chris Morris
so the next summer we collected golf balls from a near-by golf course (balls were not in play) and cleaned them up and sold them back to the golfers, made enough to get the PHB from the local toy/hobby store and collected the rest of the books from there.**
My friends and I did that as kids too (selling golf balls to their owners :P ), but for me it was before DnD but we did spend our money of a game called weapons and warriors and had a lot of fun with that, and Battlemasters, we played the heck out of those growing up.
As I recall, our parents gave my brother and me a copy of the Players Handbook (or maybe one of us got it for a birthday). Partly thanks to Gary's distinctive writing style and those classy illustrations, we were hooked. Of course, our early ideas of how the game worked were very misguided since we didn't have the Dungeon Masters Guide. (Did Gary have a problem with using apostrophes in book titles?) Once we started playing with our friend who had a DMG (and was a much better DM than either of us) we did much better.
Yeah, we had no idea about saves, and our ideas of armor class and how to hit were all messed up. Did I mention we didn't have any polyhedral dice, just d6s? I eventually made a pair of percentile dice from paper. I don't know how I did it exactly, but I still have them around here.
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Canonfire! is a production of the Thursday Group in assocation with GREYtalk and Canonfire! Enterprises
So, being the oldest amongst our small group of friends, I began as the DM, making up maps and inventing rules as they became necessary. I couldn't, for the life of me, understand what a Saving Throw was until at about 13 or 14 it just hit me. I distinctly remember a light going on inside my head when I finally grasped the concept of Saving Throws. At that point, I felt like I had graduated to true DMing. 
