Weekly Question: How did you start Roleplaying?

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2009/11/06 – 08:00 -

Every Friday we’re going to open up the comments and our forms to asking you, the reader, questions. Then the next Friday we’ll highlight the best comments from the previous week’s discussion. Got a question you would like to pose to us or the public at large? Let us know!

As it’s our first week of our weekly questions we don’t have anything to highlight from the previous weeks post. Want us to highlight your comments next week? Leave us a comment letting us know how you started roleplaying!

How did you start Roleplaying?

Jeff Carlsen: This question brings back memories best left buried. See, when I was very young I loved dragons. LOVED them. This is well before I knew what statutory meant, and my torrid love affair forced my parents to buy me a board game called Dragon Strike. Turns out, this wasn’t really a board game. It was a gateway drug produced by TSR to lure supple youths like myself into the dark realms of Dungeons & Dragons. The rules were stripped down, and it used pre-printed maps on standard monopoly style boards, but the rest was all there. Polyhedral dice, plastic miniatures, pre-built adventures, a DM’s screen, and pre-printed character sheets. But most evil of all, it came with a cheesy introductory video that showed you how to…(gulp)…roleplay.

When my uncle, a veteran roleplayer, discovered that I was playing this game, he took me under his wing. He started introducing rules like initiative and locations not on the supplied maps, and before I knew it, I was playing D&D. He ran a couple of games within my family, but his greatest gift to me was showing me Shadowrun. In one session, he turned my desire to play a game with dragons into a desire to build roleplaying games. I’ve been doing it ever since.


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  • When I was little I used to come up with all kinds of stories. I tried to write them down, but never had the interest in going too far with them. Having played a few cool board games at my families homes, I realized that I could do as good if not better on my own. So I began creating board games (Which I still have some of today. O.o! ).

    As time went on, I tried for more and more depth in my board games, which quickly became a lot of work. My brothers and I played "Pretend", and even expanded on the worlds of my games while playing them, so having heard of this "Pen and Paper" style of gaming (But not having the money to buy the books and try it out), I decided to create my own. I never went back to board games. ;P
  • River
    I spent middle school and most of high school watching my older brother and his friends play D&D and Warcraft in our basement. I was never invited to play (yes, childhood trauma revealed!) but I was intrigued by the idea of roleplaying.

    As a freshman in college, I ran into some guys who played a weekly game. I showed up for one of their sessions, but was COMPLETELY out of my depth.

    A year ago, there was an opening in a friend's campaign and I mentioned my interest. I'm still in that game.
  • @Katharyn I can see easily how you would enjoy less math-based games. From here forward, I'm going to try to teach new players simpler games, such Savage Worlds, in order to get them more into the role playing and less into the math. Thanks for your story.
  • @Lysander I love how you have it down to the exact time you started playing! I have a friend of mine who actually used dice to make a decision in real life. After which she promptly sent me a text message saying she needed to be institutionalized. Thanks for sharing your story!
  • ORIGINALLY, I started playing 2nd addition D&D because the people that I was spending my weekends with were playing. There were too many people for me to really figure the system out (they just did the math for me) and the DM and I had a bit of a falling out so that was the end of that for a while.

    Then at a BBQ I bumped into an old family friend Warren, 15 years my senior who having heard that I had started to play D&D wanted to know how I was was enjoying it. After hearing that I had stopped playing he inquired as to why and (having watched me grow up struggling with dyslexia)his face fell in shock at the word THACO. "THEY WERE TEACHING YOU SECOND ADDITION? WHY WOULD YOU TRY TO TEACH SOMEONE WITH DYSLEXIA SECOND WHEN THIRD IS OUT?"

    Determined that this not be the end of my RPG experience he made arrangements for his wife to pick me up from work on Friday nights so I could role play with them. Already well into the Campaign of the Rods he wanted to started me off as low level so I could better learn the system, and thus had me play a wear-tiger so I would still be as powerful as the slightly higher level characters.

    After a three year (more or less) hiatus with RPG's I have quite recently returned; finding my Nosferatu lust well saturated by Vampire the Requiem, which led playing more D&D and Savage Worlds. I find I'm greatly preferring the simpler systems of WOD, VTR, and SW to D&D.
  • Lysander
    1978. San Antonio Texas, 2:00pm, 4th grade (Yes, I'm that old). Elementary School. Mrs. Jonnie Heirholzers class (Yes, that's her real name). She had not been feeling well the last couple of days. She said, "Free time, do what you want, but do it quietly."

    My friend John says, "Hey Mike, you like gladiators?" (Really! This was before the movie Airplane, where it has a a completely different connotation) I said "sure!."

    Out comes a Microgame from Steve Jackson called 'Melee'. It was simplistic, it had dice, maps and cool action figure picture/pieces. But to a 9 year old, it was 'WOW'. I was hooked. John addicted me to this, which laid the foundation for D&D. Ever since them, my school work and personal relationships suffered, 'cuz I'd be playing or writing or thinking of things for RPG's instead of studying or trying to meet girls.

    That's my story. What a ride! Can't wait to see what's over the next rise...
  • @Sam, thanks for taking the time to respond back to our question. Are you still an avid roleplayer? What are your favorite games to play?
  • Sam
    I was really into video game RPGs in high school and college, but I didn't really know much about tabletop RPGs, or really have much interest, until I started reading Order of the Stick. I started reading the forums and trying to learn to play through play-by-post games but I really wanted to try a real game. Being a poor college student though, I couldn't afford d&d books, so I roped a couple friends into trying some free systems I'd found online. Then, Christmas of my senior year, one of the aforementioned friends got me the d&d players handbook and dungeons and dragons for dummies for Christmas. He knew even less about the game then I did, and certainly wasn't interested in playing, but I think he just wanted me to shut up about it. I eventually convinced some friends at home to try the game with me, and the rest is history.
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