# It's D&D's 40th anniversary.  Tell me your D&D history, and what it means to you!



## Morrus (Jan 25, 2014)

Tomorrow, January 26th, is researcher Jon Peterson's best-guess for the 40th anniversary of_ Dungeons & Dragons_. "For  all the reasons listed above, it's probably impossible to narrow in on  one date and say with any certainty that this is when the game was  released. But if we need to celebrate somewhere in the neighborhood of  late January, then the last Sunday of the month (this year, the 26th)  seems like the best candidate. As the El Conquistador advertisement  above notes, Sunday was the day when Gary invited the world to drop by  his house, at 1:30 PM, to have a first experience of Dungeons &  Dragons. Since it's a weekend, many of us can clear our schedules to  revisit some classic tabletop. So this coming January 26th, 2014, do  take the time to celebrate the birth of Dungeons & Dragons and  role-playing games."

I started playing D&D nearly 30 years ago.  I was about 12 years  old, and played the B of BECMI at lunchtime with my friends at school.   One day somebody turned up with some hardcover books called "Advanced"  Dungeons & Dragons, which we promptly switched to. The following  years were filled with avid consumption of Weis & Hickman's _Dragonlance Chronicles_ (and later, the_ Legends_).   I had a bit of a break round about the time I went off to university,  but soon fell in with a new gaming crowd and AD&D 2nd Edition. I  remember one rules dispute which had me look up the phone number of TSR  UK to ask them a question - it was about a lion's claw attacks and  offhand weapons or somesuch.  A nice lady took my phone number, saying  everyone was at lunch.  Half an hour later, my phone rang and a chap  from TSR UK (I wish I knew his name) called to help us with the rules.

In 1999-ish I stumbled across a website called Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News.   It transpired that a new edition of D&D was in the works, and I  devoured every snippet of information coming from a remarkably candid  development team at WotC.  Since then I've played 3E, 3.5, 4E, and _Pathfinder_; and later this year we'll see the advent of _D&D Next_ (or whatever name they go with).

D&D has been an enormous part of my life for nearly 30 years, and I suspect it will be for many years to come. 

Plenty of news organizations have mentioned this occasion, including the Guardian and USA Today. This year, _Community_ (the TV show) will have a D&D 40th-anniversary episode.

Happy birthday, *Dungeons & Dragons*!


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## DaveMage (Jan 25, 2014)

For me, D&D (now Pathfinder) has always been my creative outlet.

I started with the basic set then quickly moved to AD&D as well.  I devoured the 1E Player's Handbook, DMG, and Monster Manual and have been smitten since.  I still remember the sheer joy I felt when walking into Waldenbooks and seeing the 1E Monster Manual 2 when it first came out.  I read that thing form cover to cover immediately.

As a 10-14 year old kid at the time, the game really expanded my vocabulary and introduced me to the whole fantasy genre (thanks, Appendix N!).  I appreciated that the game was not written for children.  

I quickly moved to 2E when it came out, but hated the loss of demons & devils (what the heck is a tanar'ri?).  Unfortunately, my gaming group dissolved near the end of 2E because the rules became so imbalanced that it stopped being fun for some.  I was hesitant about 3E at first, but since they kept the fluff (for the most part), I was very jazzed up when it released and loved it immediately.  I liked the changes in 3.5, but was unhappy that it (along with Osseum's implosion) killed one of the main d20 companies I admired: Bastion Press.  

Never tried 4E as the timing, marketing, and changes were all big turn-offs for me (and, most importantly, I was *happy* with 3.5).

So now it's Pathfinder, which I think they've done a super job with.

I don't need Next, so the only way I see me getting any further D&D product is if it's usable with Pathfinder (such as an adventure).

Still, I love what D&D was to me as a 10-38 year old.


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## GMforPowergamers (Jan 25, 2014)

in 1995 I had made friends at my new highschool with a family of 5 brothers, they had gotten me to a reinfair that year, and a LARP, and we played RIFTs once...

right before Christmas I was at a book store and found a beginner box set of D&D and bought it. One of our friends had played 1e long before with his uncle and walked me through setting up a game.

Christmas holiday we started. I bought folders for each player, and put a green character sheet a few sheets of lined paper, a few index cards and a sheet of graph paper in each. 

We started with a Human Ranger (anikin) an Elven wizard (Dalimar) a Human Bard (Mcbride) an albino elven fighter/theif (Shadar Doom) and a human cleric (Benard). Three or four games in another friend joined as half elf Cleric/WIzard 

The friends I made have stayed with me all the way through the years...

I think I should call them today... but not to game half of them play pathfinder, and I will never do that again.

I am looking forward to NEXT, and can hardl wait to read the new PHB just like that starter one almost 20 years ago


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## HardcoreDandDGirl (Jan 25, 2014)

I was 8 years old, and Bobby down the street liked me. My mom thought it was so cute I had a 'boyfriend'. (Years later she didn't think at 15 it was cute I had one though) Bobby and I were at his house watching an old VHS of King Kong when he told me about this game his dad played.

When his dad got home that night we begged him to let me play. My first character was a half elf Fighter named ‘Lady Knightstar’ She died only a few hours into my second game. I was heartbroken, but itwas my own fault I charged a group of bugbears…

Bobby was my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my first timeskinny dipping… but I will always remember him as the guy who taought me toplay the game I have played for 18 years now…wow I feel old


D&D to this day is my favorite pass time. 

Thank you Gary and Dave, thank you Morrus


Tommorrow I will be playing Myth and magic a 2e retro clone


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## D'karr (Jan 25, 2014)

HardcoreDandDGirl said:


> My first character was a half elf Fighter named ‘Lady Knightstar’ She died only a few hours into my second game. I was heartbroken, but itwas my own fault I charged a group of bugbears…




But did you scream, "No, Not Lady Knightstar! NO, NO! I'M GOING TO DIE!"

If not, you couldn't have cared enough about the role-playing...


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## edemaitre (Jan 25, 2014)

*What D&D means to me*

I started role-playing back in high school in the early 1980s with the boxed sets and "BECMI" edition of _Dungeons & Dragons_. I've been running my homebrew "Vanished Lands" campaign setting for about 30 years now, with hundreds of Player Characters and dozens of role-players over the years.

Through gaming, I met lifelong friends in college in Upstate New York. In freshman year, I even got my entire floor in the dorm to try gaming. Through those AD&D circles, I met the woman who became my wife.

When I had the good fortune to teach for a year in New York City, most of my students participated in my AD&D2 games, including some who later got married themselves. D&D has given my friends a common interest and language.

In the 1990s near Washington, D.C., and in the 2000s around Boston, D&D3.x and other tabletop RPGs helped me build new circles of friends. I've never had difficulty recruiting players, with groups as large as more than a dozen people at a time.

EnWorld has helped me stay in touch with the larger community and follow trends in our hobby. I'm currently running two adventuring parties using the _Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game_, a D20 retro-clone, but I hope that D&D "Next" is successful. Long live RPGs!


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## Whizbang Dustyboots (Jan 25, 2014)

In 1979, at National Wildlife Federation summer camp in North Carolina, a kid in my cabin had the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook and, at a picnic table outside one afternoon, helped several of us create a group (I'm pretty sure I was a half-elf ranger, since I made several more of them over the next few years) and ran us through the "adventure" on the cover of the book. I was the only one to avoid being slaughtered by the lizardmen in their temple, although the adventure ended with me hiding around a corridor, trying to figure out how I was going to escape.

My family moved after camp that summer (my parents needed us out of the house to pack everything up without us being underfoot) and in our new town, we found an experienced middle school DM and a family of kids up for playing. We played AD&D (with Basic and Expert modules as well), Villains & Vigilantes, experimented with Runequest and Traveller and even Toon.

My brother and I played two-person games once we moved again, and I mostly drifted away from it until after college. I started an online game via Java chat window embedded on my home page with some friends, playing 2E D&D (and using stuff from the 2E Diablo adaptation, probably making me the only person to have used that stuff) online for a few months, until we heard about a new edition coming, which I followed closely on Eric Noah's site.

Another group wanted to start playing D&D with the third edition, but this time, we were wanting to use this new Ptolus book I'd preordered. But we started a warm-up campaign at the other end of the empire, before the book came out, intending to shut it down and switch over to Ptolus once I had the book in my hot little hands. Eight years later, that campaign is _just_ wrapping up now. The next campaign will be set in Ptolus, although it'll likely be run in Castles & Crusades, which brings back the 1E flavor I started off with and many of the D20 improvements under the hood.


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## Zardnaar (Jan 25, 2014)

Started in 1993 after playing Eye of the Beholder and reading the 1st ed MM, FF, UA, OA and DMG. We had no PHB and eventually started using a very old Red Box and some modules. 1st campaign I played in was BECMI as one of the guys bought the RC. Switched to 2nd ed in 1995 and  3rd ed in 2000. Went back to 2nd ed and retroclones end of 2012.

 D&D as a brand name is basically dead to me though. Not that interested in D&DN for me and the local RPG club seems to have rejected it already so no other DMs will be using it that I know of.


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## qbalrog (Jan 25, 2014)

Thank you for the call out on the anniversary! As with you I started about age 12 but I'm older so it has been closer to 37 years that I've been playing.

My first exposure to it was at West Point, where my father taught math. A friend invited me to try it out. We played in a musty basement of one of the old officer's quarters houses with my friend and 4-5 cadets. I was rather nervous in their presence and the game was a mystery, since I did not know any of the rules. I still remember the character: a dwarf fighter with 2 hit points and can still remember the cadet-referee describing us walking down a wooden passage covered with hay. One of us fell through a hole. There was much more to it b ut that's all I remember after all the years.

Regardless, I was hooked at the time. I already played a lot of wargames (this was the golden age of hex war games) so I was no stranger to games but this game was very different, with its figures, open ended play, game master, even little oddities like using the Outdoor Survival map (in the very early days).

For the next 30 days I played continuously, daily when younger, moving to weekends in college and post college gradually becoming less frequent. These days, sadly, we only play every few months but I'm starting to look for a more frequent gaming group.

I've played all the editions, from the original 3 book game, then with the original supplements, through 4E although I have since moved to Pathfinder but am not sure I will try D&D next, at least not without finding a group that is playing it. These days, I do a lot more table top gaming than RPGs, although that's more a matter of path of least resistance.

Cheers to D&D!


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## rom525 (Jan 25, 2014)

*What D&D means to me*

My first game of D&D took place over 30 years ago in an empty classroom at the Bronx High School of Science.  A kid I met in my sophomore year told me about this older student that ran this game called Dungeons and Dragons occasionally when they could find an empty classroom away from the faculty. It was a wonderful combination of sneaking around, rebellion and the reward of being able to play a game all at a school that was pretty intensive academically and very competitive.

While I sort of lost track of our Original Dungeon Master, I still keep in touch (sort of) with the guy that brought me to my first game. Thanks Peter, thanks to Gary Gygax and to all the people that help create a world that I still visit today. I have played many characters but the Paladins have always been my favorites.

Mr. Gygax, R.I.P. Sir.


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## gurpsgm (Jan 25, 2014)

*I may call myself "gurps gm", but...*

Hi!

I started with the "White Box" in about 1975, and quickly added the "little brown books".  

By the end of about 1976, I had the whole nine yards of Original D&D and was playing it with area teens.  I quickly developed a snail-mail relationship with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, to mention a few.  

In late 1976, I became a long-time Judges Guild Judge (Game Master).  I bought almost every D&D related project they ever made, except, for some reason, the "Inferno" book.  Although I continued my relationship with Judges Guild to the bitter (original) end, I also started working with AD&D 2nd edition.  

I continued to buy TSR material through 3rd edition, and 3.5.  But I bought very little of 4th edition, having switched over mostly to Pathfinder.  

I also play =many= other RPG's - Sci-Fi (especially "Star Trek"), Fantasy (I got into Runequest and Earthdawn in a big way), Horror (mostly "Call of Cthulhu"), Modern (mostly a blend of "Spycraft", "Shadowforce Archer, and Stargate"), Victorian (a lot of "Space 1889"), and boatloads more.  

I now play almost everything, but a LOT of GURPS - and 3.5 and Pathfinder.  

I also play board wargames such as "Squad Leader" and "Panzer Blitz", miniatures games (I like "Kings of War" right now), card games (I have done "Magic", but I like "Warlord" and "World of Warcraft" better).  And I also do regular board games such as "Settlers" and "Carcassonne".  

That's about (plus or minus) 39 years of gaming.  I will celebrate my 40th anniversary of gaming in 2015.  I've never seen anything that involved my creative juices better than a good RPG.  I enjoy working with both the "old-school" gamers and the new blood.  I've done volunteer work for a couple companies and participated in tournaments.  Ask me about the time I did a demo of "GURPS: Imperial Rome" in a church...


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## Ian Danton (Jan 25, 2014)

*D&D History*

My first experience of D&D was watching a group of friends playing after school and thinking it looked like fun. One of them lent me a copy of the First Edition Players Handbook which I then read that evening, and if I am honest was completely bamboozled by. I knew however that I wanted to play myself and have never lost that desire (much to my parents initial chagrin). That was in 1982. I still get the thrill of excitement from picking up the Player's Handbook, even though I understand it (a little) more now......


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## KirayaTiDrekan (Jan 25, 2014)

“It is the year 2005…”

Except it was actually 1986 and I was sitting in a movie theater, hearing those words from Transformers: The Movie.  I was staying with my mother for the summer and she had the Dragonlance Chronicles , which I devoured hungrily.

A few years later, my older step-brother from my father’s new relationship showed me the Red Box.  I remembered seeing an ad for this game in the Dragonlance books and remembered watching the D&D cartoon sometimes while waiting for Transformers (I’m still a Trans-fanatic after all this time).
My first character was “The” fighter in the Red Box, in a homebrew campaign that included the Isle of Dread, run by my step-brother.  I quickly decided to DM and put together a group of middle school friends.  We quickly moved on to 2nd Edition when that came out (I skipped 1st Edition entirely, except for the Monster Manual and Monster Manual II which were just awesome to read through, even though I didn’t understand the stats).

When I joined the Air Force in ’94, my time with D&D diminished as World of Darkness and Palladium took over my gaming time and the group I ended up with.  I managed to squeeze in a few more 2nd Edition campaigns, though, before D&D and my life took a sudden left turn.  I’ll spare you the personal details, but suffice to say that 3rd Edition was a big change to the game as big changes were happening in my life and I found a great deal of comfort and refuge in D&D at that time.  I joined the Navy and finally managed to run a campaign from 1st to beyond 20th, using the loose adventure path-ish series of The Sunless Citadel through Bastion of Broken Souls.  3.5 came out just as I was leaving the Navy.

I didn’t discover EN World until 2004 and mostly lurked until 2007 when I started doing play-by-post.  4th Edition came along as my involvement in the online community (via Gleemax and EN World) was at its height.  I ended up taking a break from 4E and being online for a bit and took up with Pathfinder and tried a few other games.  D&D Next has brought me back into the fold and I am quite eager to see what the final version looks like.
D&D has been a refuge and safe haven for much of my life.  Many of us are familiar with the trope of the outcast kid, always bullied, never fitting in – well, that was me and D&D kept me mostly sane.


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## RichGreen (Jan 25, 2014)

Great thread! 

I started playing back in 1980 with the softback AD&D Player's Handbook and Monster Manual and a bright yellow cardboard DM's screen made by Judges' Guild for OD&D. I didn't have a DMG until my 13th birthday that summer - we used photocopied combat tables stuck to a piece of card - and I remember making a spinner because I didn't have a d12. My friends and I played through most of the classic modules during our time at school – GDQ, S1-4, the A series, Ravenloft, Dragonlance and Oriental Adventures.

I taught my girlfriend (now my wife) to play at university in 1987, luring her into the game by getting her interested in painting miniatures. We played a one-to-one game set in the Forgotten Realms for many years together using the Old Grey Box. It was a fun way to spend time in the years we didn't have any money. We saved up for the 2e DMG by putting 1p, 2p & 5p pieces in a jar until we had enough. Back in 1992 I was thrilled to have an adventure published in Dungeon magazine. 

When 3e came out in 2000, I asked my old school-friends if they fancied playing D&D again. They did and we've been playing every month ever since, moving on to 3.5, then starting a new campaign with 4e set in Parsantium, the city setting I'm about to publish. It's been a great way to make sure we all get together and have fun on a regular basis.

Although I've played many other RPGs, I keep coming back to D&D. This year my wife and I are going to GenCon to celebrate 40 wonderful years. I can't wait!

Cheers


Rich


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## Highland Raider (Jan 25, 2014)

I first started playing AD&D back in '79 or so, during an afternoon when my best friend, David, and I decided to check out a "gaming group" holding session in one of the classrooms after school. The group was running AD&D and the DM informed us that  his dad had just purchased these new books for him, so he wanted to start a campaign. David and I hopped in and rolled up characters--he ran a human ranger and I ran a trusty, ax-wielding dwarf fighter named Borak. The games in those days were Monty-Haulish to the Nth degree and by the time Borak was retired he was somewhere in the neighborhood of a 99th level fighter/63rd level Thief/something-level cleric. 

Yeah, I know, you're probably rolling your eyes, but we had fun. 

I dropped from that group over the summer and later, in high school, joined another group playing AD&D (much more conservatively and closer to RAW)--the core of which I gamed with up until my "retirement" from RP-ing last year, though I have been gaming some with my kids. I've played all editions of D&D, even tried out the first couple of rules sets for D&D Next (though I really didn't care for them), and while I've found other systems better at some things, D&D is still, I think, one of the easiest to introduce new players to . . . if you limit things to the Player's Handbook. And it's the game that got me hooked on role-playing in the first place.

Happy Birthday, D&D.


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## Olgar Shiverstone (Jan 25, 2014)

Happy Birthday! Break out the silly hats and crackers!

I got started in D&D via a friend about 1981, with the Moldvay BD&D pink box -- I had gotten into fantasy via Tolkien's books about two years prior after becoming a huge Star Wars fan.  Moved into Cook Expert from there and then AD&D, switching between the variants seamlessly, along side playing a large number of tabletop wargames.  I got out of tabletop for a while when I went off to college about the time 2E rolled out, though I kept playing the video games -- Gold Box and Eye of the Beholder -- and toted my D&D collection around everywhere, though eventually marriage and career intervened.

In 2000 my wife and I were at a computer game store and I was looking at a box for a game called "Baldur's Gate" when my wife said "Remember when you played those in college? You should do that again." Buying the game box, I discovered inside a flyer for the "New 3rd Edition of D&D", and shortly thereafter found Eric Noah's site and joined the DND-L mailing list ... which convinced me to pick the just-released 3E rulebooks up.  I've been hanging around here in various incarnations ever since, though my tabletop play time has declined pretty significantly since I returned from overseas at the end of 2009 -- career getting in the way again.

D&D remains a fun escape and a way to exercise my brain as well as meet a lot of neat people, but its long-term influence on me goes much farther than that.  I think I owe J.R.R.Tolkien and Gary Gygax a debt of gratitude -- it if weren't for them, I would not read as much as I do, wouldn't have developed the vocabulary I have, and wouldn't have developed the interest in math that I have, all of which led to better education, career, and opportunities than might have occurred otherwise.

Oh, yeah, and I didn't spend all those years playing D&D and not learn a little bit about courage.


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## Halivar (Jan 25, 2014)

It was 1999. A college friend invited me and I reluctantly accepted out of peer pressure. I didn't want to go, because D&D was this creepy satanic thing where kids killed themselves in steam tunnels. It probably had something to do with Wicca or whatever.

The guy helping me make my character (an RPGA judge playtesting "Third Edition", he tells me; had no clue what that meant) suggested an elven Ftr-Mu. The DM said I had to make a level 1 character, even though the party included a level 20/20 cleric/psion. I had no idea what any of this meant. Whatever. Scary nerd people doing and saying scary nerd things. And probably satanic.

I rolled my stats in order, 3d6. First roll, 18. Weird (but surprisingly amiable) Judge of Satan's Game freaks out. "Roll a percentile!" he says. "Do wha?" He hands me a couple more occult dice, and I roll them. One says "0" and the other says "00". The whole room freaks the heck out. Whatever. I write 18/00 on my sheet as instructed.

Throughout the session, I died three times. The third time I ejected from a volcano and hurtled halfway across a continent (???) and was dying in a tree. The fellow who invited me, playing a necromancer, pokes my dying body with a stick until my spellbook fell out.

The game ended with me trapped in a queens throne room while the rest of the party battle griffon riders on the castle wall (as in, they are walking on the wall; how cool is THAT?). I just killed the archmage with a lucky critical hit. The queen stares me down, the guards are moving in, I got ONE chance!

And, the session's over. What? NO! We can't end here!

I spent the rest of the week obsessing with what my character does next. Do I have a verbal battle of wits with the evil queen? Do I grab the table runner cloth, tie it to a table leg and leap out the window? Do I fight the guards and capture the queen?

Anyhow, I never made it to the next week. My mom had something to do and couldn't drive me to the game. It would be two more years before I picked up my own copy of 3E, brought it to bible study, and let my friends in on the adventure.


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## Jester David (Jan 25, 2014)

Dungeons & Dragons and I were almost fated to be, given how I kept bumping into related things. 
Growing up a child of the '80s, I loved the cartoon. In the '90s I read comic books that had advertisements for D&D starter games (never available anywhere near me) and campaign settings, including a _Ravenloft _ad I remember fascinating me. 

Here's a couple of the ads, scanned from the backs of my comics:
  


For my 12th birthday (1991) I received the _Dragonlance _Chronicles trilogy. In the back of the first book were some notes on how the novel had its start in the game, with Raistlin's character inspired by the player who brought him to life and scenes in the book (Tas in the Wicker Dragon) coming from playtest sessions. (Which basically meant the first _Dragonlance _books were fanfic.) 
The idea of a game where you could play characters and improv situations like climbing into a wicker dragon fascinated me. But I had no idea how that would work. 

During a sleepover a year or so later, a friend improved a game for me, using number guessing in place of die rolls. It was amazing fun and I finally realized how the game worked. I continued to devour _Dragonlance _books and even started reading _Dragon_ magazine (which my school library had a subscription to). I still had no idea how to play or where to get the books until I stumbled across someone reading the books and asked, and he directed me to a local comic/games store. I slowly saved the money to buy the books over the course of many months, slowly getting the three core books over the course of my birthday and Christmas. This would have been 1993. 

I met most of my friends in Jr. High and High School because of D&D. I might not have had any friends had I not recognised books and started talking to them. 
After University, in 2005, I lost half my friends as they were "school friends" and the other half moved elsewhere in the country. I turned to D&D to meet to new people, getting involved in Living Greyhawk. When 4e was announced and LG died, we started a homegame, which I'm running to this day. There's been a few changes and some turn over but it's a fairly solid group. The one newcomer I met via D&D Encounters and has become a really good friend at or away from the table. 


D&D used to be one of my hobbies. I've always had addictive hobbies. In the early '90s I collected comic trading card. I still have most of them, tucked away in boxes somewhere. I think. Then it became comic books, and I identified as a comic geek for much of my life. I learned to read in part because of comics books and as I type this in my office, I have several thousand comics in boxes behind me. Then, late in jr. high I started buying D&D. But I still spent most of my money on comics and only bought the occasional D&D product. I didn't really start spending until I got my first job and started buying used _Ravenloft_ products in a comic/games/curio shop (My favourite setting.)
D&D slowly moved from an occasional hobby to a major part of my life during late 3e when I started playing LG. It got me out of the house and interacting with people. I bought more and more books to use them at the table. And, slowly, over the last four or five years, gaming has become my main hobby as I've bought fewer and fewer comic books (after growing disenfranchised with Marvel and DC).

D&D and gaming is how I met almost all of my friends. It's my main hobby that I spend money on. It's one of my main methods of social interaction outside of work and family. It helps me relax and keeps me sane in a world of stress and work. As I do a gaming webcomic and blog, even when I'm not gaming it's how I recreate. 
And having dropped comic books, most console gaming, trading cards... it's the only hobby I have left.


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## dracomilan (Jan 25, 2014)

> I've always had addictive hobbies.




I agree... It all started in 1991, when after playing a gold box Mac game I entered an hobby shop in Milan called Unicorn (I guess) and bought the D&D black box. Before that fantasy had been Fighting Fantasy books and Shannara and the Lord of the Rings... After that it became Dragonlance and Faerun and Dark Sun...
I of course had to DM, so I quickly moved my friends first to the Rules Cyclopedia, than to AD&D.
years later we switched to 3.0, I developed my original setting (Alfeimur, which is currently available on RPGNow) and...
Well, to sum it up we still play regular weekly games using 4e (with lots of house rules) and we still enjoy the hobby, despite jobs, careers and other addictive hobbies.
Thanks D&D, you turned escapism into a fine art!


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## HardcoreDandDGirl (Jan 25, 2014)

D'karr said:


> But did you scream, "No, Not Lady Knightstar! NO, NO! I'M GOING TO DIE!"
> 
> If not, you couldn't have cared enough about the role-playing...
> 
> View attachment 60373




No, I was too busy drawing up my Dwarven Fighter/Thief   Diamond to notice. I was going to totally bethe toughest knife fighter ever… 
Although I have seen it before chixtack never stop making me face palm thinking Do people really think this?


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## cthulhubryan (Jan 25, 2014)

*AD&D*

I started about the 3rd day of high school in 1979. Since then Dungeons and Dragons has been a part of my life. Everywhere I lived it was my introduction to new friends.
"Concerned" friends gave me things from "Playing with Fire" to my first "Chick Tract" of Dark Dungeons.
While I never got to one of the Lake Geneva Gencons, I went to Cons from Maryland to California and finally met the EGG once and have a signed game from him, Alas it was not AD&D but was instead Lejendary Adventures.

Happy Birthday to (Lord this sounds geeky) my oldest friend.


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## grafikchaos (Jan 25, 2014)

*What D&D means to me.*

I think it was 1981.  I was at a friend's house, and he had a neighbor friend that was a few years older than us.  I was 11 at the time, and I think his friend was 14 or 15.  My friend said something about a game that his friend plays, where you fight dragons and goblins and stuff.  We went to his friend's house and he handed us each a character sheet, and then we did a combat with a dragon, rolling dice, and him describing the action.  It was the coolest thing ever.  My friend and I ended up getting the basic red box set, and we would play almost every weekend.  I can't even remember my first characters.

I showed the game to some friends in school, and we played obsessively.  I remember someone mentioning the advanced version, and my parents took me and one of my gaming friends up to a book store that carried the books.  We both bought the players handbook that day, and it opened up a whole new world of D&D for us.  It was Advanced, and we loved it!

I played all through middle and high school, and found a group in college.  Shortly after I left college, I met some of my very best friends through gaming circles.  I continued to play through my 20's.  When 3rd edition rolled around, I played it some with those friends.  I fell out of the hobby for some 11 or 12 years, and got back into gaming through board games around 2008.  I stumbled across the playtest for Next, and got to thinking about starting another group up, which I have, and I'm really glad to be back.  I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of Next in a complete package.

I've met some of my best friends through D&D, and even though I don't live around them any more, we still stay in touch through facebook and the like.  They all became my brothers because of a shared love of this hobby, and that is what D&D means to me.


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## Lwaxy (Jan 25, 2014)

Picked the game up when I was around 7 or so from the US Soldiers in our village - good way to learn English, too. My parents actually encouraged us playing because not only would I pick up another language faster, but it also limited the time I'd spend just reading or watching documentaries. 

It kind of did look weird though when we turned my old sandpit into a dungeon crawl  Our first dragon to kill was build out of twigs and leaves and we had an assembly of toys for PCs and monsters. Of course in the end we ended up rescuing the dragon from the bad wizard who had made it do bad things. 

Rules were secondary when us kids played without the grown ups, which is probably why the above example didn't end in a TPK. 

Happy Birthday D&D!


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## Serendipity (Jan 25, 2014)

I was first exposed to D&D by among the first of those comic book style ads for D&D in the back of an otherwise forgettable Star Trek comic in the fall of 1980.  Shortly I was gifted with the Holmes Basic set and it's been a long strange journey of exploring the uncharted number of "weird and idiosyncratic worlds where nearly anything is possible with only your wits and your fellow players to rely upon." (Which is what I view as the soul of D&D to me.)   Now it took me til the following summer, and the assistance of an older friend, to 'get' it but damn it's been a fine, fun journey.   
Across many editions and many many other fine games that wouldn't be here save for D&D, I happy say happy birthday Dungeons & Dragons!


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## Thornir Alekeg (Jan 25, 2014)

For me it was 1979 and four guys had set up a table in the local hobby store.  Tom the DM was running a game of D&D.  One of the players, who had a fighter with 2HP named Sir-Run-a-lot explained to myself and a friend that what really mattered for the game was having cool looking dice, a nice clipboard and a fancy mechanical pencil.  When he was killed after getting burning oil splashed on him, he showed us how to roll up a new character - a fighter with 1HP named Sir-Die-a-lot.  

My friend and I got our own copies of the Basic Set, learned to play and joined Tom and others at the hobby store for several years.  I played with different friends for many years until shortly after 3.5 came out.  Since then, it has been only occasional games of D&D as we all had kids and our time became more and more difficult to coordinate for a regular game.  My son has played 4e, but I personally cannot stand that edition and only play it once in a while with him.  I am holding out some hope that D&D Next will be a game we can both enjoy and I can start a new group with my friends and their kids.


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## Elf Witch (Jan 25, 2014)

I discovered the game with the three brown booklets. I played at a con and had a blast. I didn't get to play again until Advanced. I remember my first character a fighter named Bunny. I had rolled godawful stats. So I expected him to die quickly. He didn't he had amazing luck. I played as a goof ball as someone who thinks he is the worlds greatest fighter. When Joxer the Mighty was introduced on Xena I wondered how the writers found my old character sheet.  I loved gaming but I hated the misogyny  that went with it. I was usually the only female at the table . Between that and being a single mom I dropped out of gaming. I played the odd game here and there but never DnD. Then in 1996 I walked into a comic shop and met a guy looking for gamers. I decided to give it a try and I have been playing regularly ever since. 

I have every edition sitting on my shelves. I really don't like 4E and to be honest I am suffering some burnout from DnD these days. But gaming it self will always in some way be a part of my life. I enjoy reading setting books and making up monsters and magic items.


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## Ahnehnois (Jan 25, 2014)

I did a sort of magnet arts education as a small child and was well-versed in drama and film before age ten. When we fell upon hard times and had to move, I lost all that and was utterly miserable. While my IQ is high enough to do anything that requires it, only creative pursuits ever brought any satisfaction.

When a couple of friends tried to get me to try this "Dungeons and Dragons" thing, I didn't know what it was, and I rejected it because it sounded kind of sketchy. Eventually they convinced me to give it a shot. I started with 2e, having no books and a DM who basically made our characters for us. It was kind of fun, but mostly for the social aspect.

After a couple of years, 3e was released, and we talked it over and switched. I got a monster manual as my first D&D book (clearly my parents did not understand that it made no sense to start there). I was hooked into exploring the world and the mechanics. Eventually, our DM started to lose a hold on us, and I decided to give it a hack.

DMing opened up a whole new world. Daunting, both in the amount of thought required and in the need to please an audience in real time. After I stumbled around for a while, eventually it hit me that this was a new creative medium, with different features than the stage or the screen, some compelling. Real time improvisation was creatively exciting to me. I pushed boundaries, and pissed off some of the old guard in the process, but I was fine with that as it showed me who my real friends were and whittled our bloated group down to something manageable.

I came to look at D&D as the road not taken, a way to produce artistic work for all us frustrated pragmatists who dreamed of being stars but where redirected to boring professions. As a hobby and not a career, D&D enables its participants to have jobs and make money while doing something more challenging and serious than passively consuming fiction or trying to create it alone. Rather than one specific set of rules, the thing that defines the idea of D&D is shared creativity.


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## TrippyHippy (Jan 25, 2014)

I just had my own 40th birthday party last night - so I am literally as old as D&D - and 30 years of those has been how long it's been since my first game of D&D. I guess you can say it's a significant part of my life!


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## Grazzt (Jan 25, 2014)

Started with the B of the BECMI series, so like 30 years ago or so. My dad bought it for me for my birthday that year. Played it with my brother, sister, and friends in the neighborhood. My mom had gone back to college and noticed a guy in one of her classes playing D&D. Invited him over. He introduced our group to AD&D and joined us until he graduated and moved away (1986 or so). We never looked back.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jan 26, 2014)

I was 12 in the fall of 1975 and already an avid wargamer when I started to hear rumors of this "ultimate game" that was like nothing that ever came before, you could do almost anything in Dungeons & Dragons. The idea of an RPG was like a bolt of lightning, but none of my friends had rules. Finally we pestered the 'big kids' in Boy Scout Troop 71 to let us play with them. So there we were, out in the woods on a campout, at a picnic table in the dark with a couple of Coleman Lanterns. The atmosphere was rich with the scent of the unknown. We knew nothing about the rules, had no idea what we would encounter. We were indeed just exactly like a batch of neophyte adventurers about to embark on our first adventure! 

Honestly I don't recall what happened next. I think my character was the cleric (I wasn't cool enough to be in the favor of the big kids, so they gave me the 'crappiest' character no doubt). Did we live or die? I don't even recall. All I remember is our characters descended into the dark dungeon by torchlight while we sat around the table in our own pool of lantern light, with trees close all around. I don't know if the DM was good or bad or anything else, just the feel of playing.

Needless to say one session was NOT enough, a LIFETIME was not enough. We couldn't buy the rules, they were hard to find and $10 was a fair amount of money back then. So my sister and I actually wrote our own rendition of the rules based on what we knew, plus whatever we could steal from various fantasy authors. I think we only played a few times before Holme's Basic showed up, and soon we inherited the full rules from some older kids that weren't interested, etc. I still have the Holme's Basic book, or the remains of it, complete with our own homebrewed rules written on lines paper and stapled to the back of the book! 

There have been some periods in my life when D&D wasn't part of my everyday activities, but the books have always sat on my shelf, and the campaign notes I scribbled out at age 14 are still in the back of one of the binders I have kept, along with tattered maps of 1970's dungeons. Somehow I'll never get the thing out of my head, nor do I want to.


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## Baron Greystone (Jan 26, 2014)

I've been a fan of F&SF since the 60's. I frequented the NYC conventions in the 70's, where I watched a few OD&D games played. I was a subscriber to S&T, and sent away for some orc miniatures from an ad in one of the issues. At a con I bought the Dungeon boardgame and Traveller's Snapshot, which I played with my little brother. Next, he bought the Holmes box, and we fooled around with that. I went away to college, and met a guy who DM'd and invited me to a game he was forming. He had the new 1st ed AD&D Monster Manual, but still used a lot of OD&D rules as there wasn't a DMG yet. And some Judges Guild products. I lusted after EPT in the game store near campus, but couldn't afford it. I did buy my own 1st ed AD&D books, and that summer when I got home I started my own campaign. And some Judges Guild products. I picked up the little Traveller boxed set at the Compleat Strat in NYC. This was followed by Call of Cthulhu and Runequest. Did some SCA, and some LARPing. My friends and I tried a lot of different games over the years. We didn't make the move to 2nd edition AD&D. On a semi-regular basis we played Stormbringer, FASA Star Trek, Paranoia, Star Fleet Battles, Arkham Horror, Awful Green Things, dabbled in a lot of games I wouldn't touch today, and gave most of what was published afterwards a miss. Since we enjoyed the games we played, and didn't see the need for the changes as editions came and went, we just kept on playing what we liked. There are a few games that I'd like to see more of, but those are the main ones.

I've met tons of good friends through D&D. It led to a few other games I really like, too, but I've played more D&D than anything else. Roleplaying games are a way to live out the fantastic fiction that I enjoy so much in books and movies, and much more fun than the computer games I've played.


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## Gilladian (Jan 26, 2014)

I've told this story here before: I was 11 in 1976 when my brother learned to play in Boy Scouts. He loved it so much that he wrote his own set of the rules, then taught me to play. Later that summer, we finally got a copy of the Basic rules, and gaming took off in our lives! I still remember my first character - a cleric - got stung to death by giant bees. My third character was a dwarf named Gilladian (he had a 6 INT and a 4 Wis). 

I've played DnD ever since with my brothers, my parents, and my husband (we met at a gaming club meeting). I've played every edition of Dnd, but my favorite is 3.5, E6 version. Right now, we're not playing, as life has been in the way, but when my big brother gets back from a long trip to China in about 6 weeks, we're going to start up a new campaign. 

I do intend to try 5th Edition when it comes out, but it will take a lot to usurp my current favorite game's place.


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## Rygar (Jan 26, 2014)

The first time I played D&D I was at my cousin's house,  who was 4 years older than me.  He tried teaching me how to play by running me through the module "The Gem and the Staff" (I would learn the name years later when I saw the pictures again).  As I was about 7 or 8 years old,  I was fairly incompetent.

A year or so later,  we were on vacation with my Cousin in Virginia Beach.  We stopped at a bookstore,  and my cousin and I chose a module each.  I bought "Blizzard Pass",  and played it on the car ride home.

A couple of years later,  I saw in the back of a comic book one of those "Become a seller for us in your neighborhood and receive prizes!".  I was around 10 years old at the time,  and did it.  The prize I chose?  The Red Box!  I was hooked.  My friends and I played,  and bought the other BECM sets.  I owned B, E, and C,  my friend owned M.  It was great fun,  we didn't understand campaigns yet,  so it was just an endless series of dungeons.  We were young kids,  we couldn't afford modules.

A few years later,  I acquired my first AD&D books.  My friends and I played all through our teenage years.  We hit 21-ish,  and playing slowed down for awhile.  I still bought the occasional product,  but we really didn't play.  Then 3rd edition released.  My Mtg group dedicated Friday nights to 3rd edition D&D instead of Mtg.

So how big a part of my life has it been?

The day the Challenger exploded,  I was sitting in my mother's restaurant reading the Dragonlance comic book with Sturm's uncle in it when the news announcement was broadcast.  

I have all of the Dragonlance novels,  I've spent countless hours playing the D&D video games (Never did beat Pool of Radiance now that I think about it).  Even during the years I didn't play,  I still was receiving Dungeon.

32 years it's been now,  my only regret was my late 20's when I decided that my D&D books were why I was single,  and ebay'd them.  Years later I would realize it wasn't the books,  it was the women I was dating,  and even today I'm still trying to reacquire what I foolishly lost.


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## Fox Lee (Jan 26, 2014)

I know not everybody will agree, but for me D&D is like Pokemon - it always seems to get better with each new version, even when I didn't necessarily expect it to. I don't always love every change, and I understand why this or that edition isn't to everybody's tastes - but for me it's always been a net positive, and there are always reasons I never want to go back. I'll even give Next a try, despite the fact that I expect 4e to be where I stay - because there was a time I thought that about 3.5e, too. No mater how dubious I am, I feel like D&D has earned the right to a fair shake, because it hasn't disappointed me so far.

Really, D&D has always been _the_ RPG in my mind - whichever edition you like, for its time it was probably (in my opinion) the best at being a solid, practical, mechanically rewarding system. Other systems have been more creative or experimental, have been more dedicated to a particular tone or genre, have excelled where D&D is weak... but for all-round excellence in the areas that matter to me, D&D has always been where it's at. For me, D&D has always been where I fit, and it's only become a better fit with each new edition.


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## Lwaxy (Jan 26, 2014)

Fox Lee said:


> I know not everybody will agree, but for me D&D is like Pokemon





Aaah the comparison! Need to slap with nerf bat arising


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## scottie4442 (Jan 26, 2014)

*D&D since the beginning, almost*

I have been playing d&d since 1976, a friend of mine got the OD&D set and handed it to me saying "you like to read so figure this stuff out and we can play."  I have been RPGing ever since.  The thing my present group find funny is until about 3 months ago I have never "played" D&D, I was always a DM.  I have played in other systems but never D&D.  One of the guys is running a Pathfinder campaign and I am finally a player, interesting contrast from DM/GMing.  I actually played a short campaign years ago with Gygax at a con, didn't know it was him at the time, and he was a pretty nice guy.  I have gotten my son into RPGing and he and his group play Pathfinder.  Thanks Gary and the rest of the guys for making D&D so the geeks could have a "sport" to play.


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## DM Howard (Jan 26, 2014)

I started at 12 years old as well actually.  I first bought the AD&D Boxed set that TSR did with the red dragon on the front which was essentially set in Dragonlance.  I got a lot of mileage out of that set, and by the time I decided to take the next step with one of my friends in 5th Grade it was 3.0 and the rest is history.  I would say that D&D has probably been one of the most important things in making me who I am today.  That may sound weird, but it helped me develop my imagination, learn to love reading, and introduced me to all the wonderful games and hobbies that I now enjoy today.


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## Henry (Jan 26, 2014)

1981, at a Circus World toy chain store. Saw the Erol Otus Cover,  Moldvay Basic box set for the first time. Looked like a fun board game with sorceresses and manly fighters on the cover fighting dragons - I believe it was the art that hooked me, it was funky-looking, unlike anything I had ever seen before. I bought that, and (thanks to the TERRIBLE TSR marketing) the AD&D White Plume Mountain module -- and tried to figure out how the dice worked, and how to fit that higher level adventure together with that low level basic box. For the first three years, I never did figure out how the dice worked for the game -- I just made up whether the attacks hit or missed, whether the spells worked or not, etc.

I had one good friend in those days that I shared D&D with -- we probably played non-stop for three years -- until he turned 15, married his girlfriend and ran away from home. (He had kind of a rough home life, in hindsight I think that's why we played so much.) But though I had lost my one player and good friend, I was hooked -- I came up with stories by myself, wrote fiction, wrote modules (TERRRRIBLE modules), read DragonLance -- all until I came into knowing some friends in High School who reintroduced me to the wide world of D&D players again, and told me I wasn't alone in this crazy hobby, and that I wasn't really a closet Satanist, that there were plenty of people, girls and boys alike, to share this geeky hobby with. 

How in the Hell did we get by without an internet back then? 


Thank you, Gary and Dave, for all your work in giving us the keys to Fun.
Thank you, Emory, for being the one crazy fool who played D&D with me back then.
Thank you, Mom, for reading the game, seeing it wasn't anything harmful, and going against the rest of the religious family members who didn't like it.
Thank you, Dad, for bankrolling one Hell of an expensive hobby.
Thank you Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams, Jeff Grubb, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Keith Baker, Erik Mona, Lisa Stevens, and about 100 other people who took a game into a Lifestyle.
Thank you, Eric, for birthing the community that gave me some of the dearest friendships I still have.
Thank you, Russ, for midwifing this community of misfits into a cultural Institution.
And God bless RPGs and may the tabletop never completely disappear.


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## Cadence (Jan 26, 2014)

By some point during 5th grade in 1980/81 LotR had already swept through school (I remember one girl in particular was devastated by a character's pin-cushiony-death), I was hearing about D&D from some of the people on the youth soccer team , and saw it at the toy store in the mall. 

In 1981 I got a copy of Moldvay and read through it on my own for several weeks.  On one of the fairly rare occasions when my folks went out, the sitter knew how to play and DMed for me.  I made a dwarf (Alexis) and halfling (Antares) that I played for quite a while after - I think I still have their final character sheets boxed up downstairs.  In that first adventure Alexis lost his hand in an unfortunate incident with a cursed sword, but at least they lived.   After that there were several of us in the neighborhood who played.  I want to say for some of the first games on our own we reversed whether low or high was good on the saving throw table.

Within a year or so we stumbled upon the game at the neighborhood comic/collectible shop. It had between 8 and 20 people playing one night a week - some using OD&D, some of us using B/X, and some using AD&D, all at the same time.  That was my gateway to AD&D.   I can still remember that my curfew in middle school was about the time the game usually ended... so I would have to leave a bit before to make it the 4 1/2 blocks home in time and a friend would play my character for me.  Sadly that meant I missed the death of at least one of them (an elven cleric one level from retirement - perhaps my first AD&D character).  In those early years we also played quite a bit of the original Gamma World (I might have purchased it at that comic shop) and I started picking up Dragon around issue 64.

Played D&D along with some other games through middle and high school (with Star Fleet Battles being the biggest secondary game), a bit in undergrad, a lot in grad school (with VtM being the biggest secondary game), and then pretty regularly since (mostly D&D). 

I don't think it's possible for me to overstate the value of the friendships I've made or strengthened over the years at those weekly D&D sessions.

P.S. - My 4 year old knows the breath weapons of each of the five chromatic dragons!


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## Monte At Home (Jan 26, 2014)

I heard about D&D for the first time in Sunday school. Two brothers were talking about what they had done the night before and their conversation involved graph paper, a magic crown, some kind of monster, and traps. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I knew I wanted in. That was 1977. 

I played with them using the original booklets, but eventually moved to 1E (AD&D) and at that point the game became a huge portion of my life. It defined and solidified my friends in junior high and high school--friends, thanks at least in part to D&D, that I'm in touch with today, other than my friend Jay--one of my favorite DMs of all time--who passed away last year.

I was about 14 when I was in a B. Dalton bookstore and noticed a new D&D module on the shelf--Dwellers of the Forbidden City. It looked cool, but what caught my eye was the name of the author. It wasn't the so-familiar-I-stopped-noticing name, "Gary Gygax," but "David Cook." When I saw the last name I thought, of course, "hey, that's my name." Which quickly led to the realization in my 14 year old brain that it was someone's job to write this stuff. Until then, I guess I hadn't thought about it much. I suppose I just thought that there was this untouchable, unapproachable genius out there somewhere (I had no idea where Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, was at 14) creating all of this stuff. But seeing someone with my own name made it all much more real and approachable. It was a real guy's job to write this stuff. "I want that to be my job someday," I said to myself.

I started working in the rpg field in 1988 (still in college, which means I never had a real job). I started working on D&D products in 1993, writing a portion of Elminster's Ecologies. In 1994, I moved to Lake Geneva and started at TSR full-time. Through a (very appropriate) coincidence, it was David ("Zeb") Cook who recommended me after I had met him at a convention in Denver. Very soon after starting there, I met my (now ex-) wife Sue at TSR writing Glantri: Kingdom of Magic. I helped get one of those junior high lifetime friends--the supertalented Bruce Cordell--a job there in 1995. I made new friends--many of which I'm still very close to today.

When WotC bought TSR in 1997, I moved to Seattle to stay with D&D, and most of my friends who also moved with the company. Soon thereafter, I became one of the designers of 3rd Edition D&D, a process of three years, which were some the best years of my life. It's certainly one of the high points of my now 26-year career. Even when I left WotC in 2001, I still continued to work full-time on D&D compatible products thanks to the d20 License and my own company, Malhavoc Press. (Although I played a lot of D&D from 1977 to 1997-- usually once a week--from 1997 to 2006, I played at least 2-3 times a week, and that's not counting the 2-4 times a week when I would play in a playtest during work hours. I once estimated that in those 10 years, I probably logged somewhere around 10,000 hours at the table, above and beyond writing for the game 40-50 hours a week. That's a lot of d20 rolls.)

In short, D&D and roleplaying games have been the dominant factor of the last 37 years of my life. I turn 46 next week (so I'm exactly 6 years older than the game), and I can't think of anything in my life that has defined my path more or has been so constant. It's been my major source of entertainment and fun, the genesis of the vast majority of my personal relationships, and my career. 

A few years ago, I got a letter from a young guy. He wrote that for much of his life, he'd had no friends. He was awkward around other people, and didn't know how to fit in. But then he started playing D&D with some other kids and now soon found himself with a group of real, close friends. Friends that he will very likely have for a long time. He wrote to thank me, not for a game, but for friendship and a way to connect with others. What does D&D mean to me? It means that kid and his letter, which I still have on my wall. It means all of us. It means spending our time immersed in a hobby that encourages friendship, cooperation, interaction, imagination, problem solving, and a thousand other deep, true things that are so much more important than a die roll, a rulebook, or a character. More important--_much_ more important--than a play style, a preferred edition, or a publishing company. 

Happy 40th, D&D. Happy 40th, Gary and Dave. Happy 40th, Zeb. Happy 40th, Jonathan and Skip. Happy 40th, Rich, Bruce, Colin, Ray, Sue, Thomas, Steven, Michele, Ed, Wolf, Lester, Tim, John, Sean, Miranda, Chris, Erik, Keith, Andy, Jesse, Jeff, Stan!, Charles, Rob, and dozens of others. And Happy 40th Bret, Bob, Rich, Bruce (again), and in particular, Jay. You've all made my life better as we've all played and worked on this one, unique, wonderful game.


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## cavalier973 (Jan 26, 2014)

I remember starting with the Black Box, which was a mistake, because it was the one that introduced real spellcasting, and I accidently turned my sister into a toad.  My parents were NOT. HAPPY.  But we had fun until Buddy's character (also named "Buddy") got eaten by a dragon.  The DM had this rule that if your character died, you had to kill yourself.  Well, Buddy wasn't going to do it, and so the DM told me I had to hunt him down and kill him.  Well, I sort of liked Buddy, so I killed my neighbor's dog, instead (using magic missile; it must have taken like four days, because I kept having to rest up and rememorize the spell, you know), and took its liver to the DM, who ate it and got worms.  Good times.








Just Kidding.

What really happened was that I was quite interested in the game, but was prevented from playing it because some people think that stories like the above are true.  I eventually purchased the 3rd Edition Basic Game a few months before 4th edition was announced.  Then I bought a lot of 4th edition stuff (especially Essentials), which I play with my kids on the rare occasions I feel up to it.  In fact, I pulled the game out tonight, and played a little bit with the kiddos, not realizing that it was the 40th anniversary of D&D's creation.  Freaky.

We had fun, until my daughter turned her brother into a toad.  She is so grounded.


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## Shemeska (Jan 26, 2014)

Compared to many folks around here, I'm kinda new to D&D (and all RPGs) since I didn't actually play the game till sometime in 2000. I was introduced to it by a good friend in college (first time she invited me over she had a 3e PHB sitting on the bed in her dorm room), and with her as the metaphorical crack-dealer I joined a game shortly thereafter.

Now that was not my first introduction to the game, but only the first time I played, and the first time anyone actually explained it all to me. My first introduction was of course the 1980's D&D cartoon, and the mid-80s AD&D 'Endless Quest' books. At some point in the 80's I also did character creation at a friend's house though we never actually started a game, but I did end up buying a copy of the MM2 at the local Waldenbooks because it just looked cool. But I tucked it under my arm and didn't want my mom to see it because of all of the 'it leads children to Satan worship!' panic from the time period (and yeah, my mom did ask me 'That's not something you shouldn't have is it?'). I think that book got sold at the next garage sale we had. I truly don't know. But at least for a month or so it was amazingly awesome to look at and just get inspired by the monsters.

Fast forward a bit to 2000 again. Around the time I started playing 3e I also discovered both Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment. Both were awesome, and the latter made me seek out 2e Planescape material with the joy of a child opening presents on Christmas morning. Within a few years I'd played in a few very abortive FR games (dysfunctional group), a horrendous 'Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil' campaign (horrible DM), and a really enjoyable FR/Planescape/Homebrew mashup. I think around 2002/2003 I started running a game over the Xmas holiday with the players in that RttToEE campaign as a oneshot. Well... the "oneshot" ran for the next three years, the RttToEE game never restarted, and since then I've played in a number of 3e and 3.5 games, as well as a large amount of Shadowrun and a few other assorted systems.

In grad school, around 2004 I think, while running that Planescape campaign I started writing fiction just on a lark, and shortly thereafter started my first Storyhour here on Enworld, and a little after that I tried pitching material to Dragon magazine. The Storyhour is I think well over 1-2k pages in Word last I checked, and still ongoing (it's about 40% through that campaign now). At some point Wes Schneider at Paizo wrote a tiny bit of my storyhour fanon regarding the fate of Mercykiller Factol Alisohn Nilesia into an article he worked on in Dragon. I emailed him and then pitched a ton of stuff their way. Eventually a few things got picked up in both Dragon and Dungeon, and then once the magazine's ended their printed incarnation I started writing material for Paizo's Golarion setting, both the 3.5 and Pathfinder version. I've also done a number of 3PP things for PF as well.

Because of D&D I have an amazing hobby and it pointed me into what has been a damn fun second job at times with freelance work, plus pushing me to write more straight up fiction. Plus as it turns out, my wife and I ran across each other at an NC Gameday around a year before we were introduced by some mutual friends. She also made it into Dragon magazine herself a number of years prior to me. It has provided me and my friends a metric ton of enjoyment, many laughs, one point where I made my players actually cry at the table (and threaten to hurt me over an NPC's actions), and just been a really awesome and enriching thing in my life.


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## Lindeloef (Jan 26, 2014)

Shemeska said:


> Compared to many folks around here, I'm kinda new to D&D (and all RPGs) since I didn't actually play the game till sometime in 2000.




Can beat you there ^^

I started buying D&D(4e) stuff in September 2010 (easy to remember thanks to EnWorld). I watched a group streaming their Sessions online and was hooked. So I bought some Books and ran a face-to-face campaign for some friends once a month on a sunday with 8-10 hour sessions. Man I was horrible as the DM, relying on published Adventures and Dungeon Magazines. Sure we had fun, but it took a long time to get the rules right (though the monthly gaming didn't really help). I also did a lot of "Bad DMing" mistakes including Deus-Ex machina save for the party. But we had fun until half of the group couldn't make it anymore and the group fizzled out after a year.

After dipping in playing like 3 Sessions of "the Dark Eye" in a face-to-face group, I started to recruit people for an online game in 2012 (including yours truly [MENTION=20307]Jan van Leyden[/MENTION]). And that group is still going (66% of founding members are still in it).


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## billd91 (Jan 26, 2014)

I first heard of D&D in about 1979. A classmate of mine had a couple older brothers who played and were teaching him. I didn't quite understand what it was at the time but it lodged in my brain enough that when I next heard about it the following year from another friend (who had started playing in the local Boy Scout troop) I was interested. He got a copy of the Holmes set for Xmas that year (1980) and we would pour over it on the bus to and from school. That next summer (1981), I made up my first party of PCs and played my first adventure - with my friend as DM and me as the only player with 6 1st level PCs, names all stolen from John Carter books (Carthoris, fighter, and Tars Tarkas, cleric, survived longest). I was pretty much hooked.

Not long after that, another friend got a copy of the Red Box edition and I started DMing for him and another friend. I'd ride my bike from the boonies into town and we'd play on Saturdays. Around that time, I bought my own first D&D book, the 1e AD&D Players Handbook. I got it at Waldenbooks in the local shopping mall and ran out to the car to start reading it. Other books slowly trickled in, mostly via Xmas presents from my parents (who were pretty cool about the whole thing). In the days before I got a DMG and PCs were leveling up above 3rd level, I would look at the book in the bookstore and crib out the combat tables on pieces of scrap paper. Needless to say, I was pretty happy when the game evolved away from the attack matrices. We also encountered our first religious-based bigotry against D&D when the player who owned the Red Box edition was unable to continue playing because his church's minister convinced his parents they shouldn't allow him to play.

The groups I played with morphed a bit through middle school and high school but, no matter who I played with, we played a lot. Most weekends, sometimes on both Friday and Saturday, for 6+ hour sessions. We played a lot in the kitchen of a friend's mother's trailer because that friend took over many of the DMing duties. He was crap with some of the math, but fantastic with Conanesque adventures and portrayals of NPCs. He really helped bring the game alive for me. We also played a ton of Villains and Vigilantes in those days, some Indiana Jones, some Chill, some Star Frontiers, and some Traveller.

2e rolled around while I was in college. I was a little skeptical of it but the preview in Dragon magazine helped allay worries and I came to the conclusion 2e was a pretty good clean-up of the 1e rules (with a few exceptions like the hash job the ranger suffered compared to the 1e version). But at that point, I usually played mainly 2e with 1e materials worked in since the two were so highly compatible. I ran a lot of Oriental Adventures at the time and played a lot of Al-Qadim run by another friend.

By the time 3e was announced, I was skeptical again. The Player's Option: Skills and Powers book had been so terribly conceived (in my opinion), that I didn't think they had the mojo to make a good new edition of D&D anymore. But then Eric Noah's site came along and, as I learned more about 3e, I came to appreciate the design. By the time it finally hit the stores, I was well interested. I started running a Classic Modules campaign to see how well it handled old 1e adventures. It did admirably. Some things were different (advancement was faster, some level-expectations of adventures had to be adjusted) but things played reasonably true to the originals in so many other ways that none of us older school players minded.

When 4e was announced, I was generally excited. WotC had written a good D&D game before, I thought things could get better. But my trajectory with 4e was the opposite of the trajectory I followed with 3e. I went from being initially optimistic to being disappointed as I heard more and more about the system. By the time it was released, it was really more of a curiosity than an object of hobbyist passion. We played for a while but the magic that we experienced with 3e was thin when it was there at all and, after several months, pretty much completely gone. I decided to focus on Pathfinder for my D&D gaming since Paizo seemed so much more in tune with what I wanted as a D&D player.


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## darjr (Jan 26, 2014)

Ed Greenwood on the 40th.
[video=youtube;uuFVl20FFCM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuFVl20FFCM[/video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuFVl20FFCM


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## Odhanan (Jan 26, 2014)

Here's what I had to say about it on facebook: 

"It is likely that today is the anniversary of the reveal of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game in late January of 1974, the first Sunday when game designer Ernest Gary Gygax invited people to come to his house and play his and Dave Arneson's brand new game. 

I always was curious and inquisitive as a child growing up between Normandy and the French Ardennes. My parents were very good to me, instilling in me a critical mind, spirit, a will to go out and be myself, answering my questions about all things, or pointing me in the right direction to find them out on my own. It'd be hard for me to say that the Dungeons & Dragons game taught me all those things. But surrounded as I was with the castles of Robert the Devil and Richard the Lionheart, inspired as I was by fantasy as well as the world around me, I think that my discovery of the game on that fateful week-end of November 1988 in Vendresse, France, where my cousin Carlos Sacré ran us through his version of the Village of Hommlet, had the effect of a lightning bolt on me, bringing all these elements into a whole that would define how I would shape both my imagination and personality from then on.

I owe it in no small part to Dungeons & Dragons to know what words like "eldritch" or "dweomer" or indeed "marmoreal" actually mean. Heck, I probably wouldn't speak English every day if it wasn't for deciphering the books on my own with an Harrap's dictionary as a young lad. I might not have plugged myself into Ancient History on the internet, might not have met Nerissa Montie at all. I might not have come to live here in Canada, nor met so many wonderful friends and played with them over the years. I wouldn't be where I am today, creating new content for those who love the game as I do, enjoying the partnership and friendship of one Ernest Gary Gygax Jr.

Today, I am celebrating, remembering the many games, the many laughs, the dice rolling, the role playing, as I work my way through our latest manuscript. This is a preview of what is to come, intended as an exclusive for those who attend the Gary Con Gaming Convention a few weeks from now, using some of the materials I once came up with in my advice to build the mega-dungeon, but retooled to work in concert with The Hobby Shop Dungeon and campaign, and expended upon in concert with my friend and writing partner. 

This is a fitting way to celebrate I think, and I can't help thinking about Gary as I do so, typing away at his machine, as Ernie described to me more than once, giving birth to a framework that would soon allow millions to have fun and explore the realms of their own imaginations. 

So, here's to you, Dungeons & Dragons. Happy birthday, old friend. To the many years of fun games that are now past, and to the future, many bright years yet to come."


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## Lord Mhoram (Jan 26, 2014)

My D&D journey started back in the summer of '77 with the Holmes basic. I was 10, and the summer between my 5th and 6th grade. My best friend who's family moved to Kansas and back brought it with them. His older brother was the GM. My mage type died in a hedge I think.

I purchased Gamma World, and ran that for a short while, then picked up the Hardcover AD&D books. I was hooked, and it became my primary hobby. Reading Dragon magazine, tinkering with rules, creating characters. I was aware of Boot Hill and Top Secret, but was not into Westerns and Spy stuff, so I never played them.

That was the extent of my gaming - D&D and Gamma world for years. I also enjoyed Battlesystem.

Then I went to University in '85. Found Rolemaster, Ringworld (oh I wish I still had that set), and most importantly HERO system. HERO fit my approach really well, then D&D moved into second edition. A lot of things I liked were gone (Monks, Demons, Devils) and a lot of stuff I really didn't like were still there (Level limits and other things). So I pretty much ignored 2nd edition rules. We played HERO, and my wife and I played our houseruled AD&D. 

As an aside - if it wasn't for D&D/gaming I never would have met my wife. She got into D&D about the same time I did, and started HERO in '81. We met because she was GMing the game I joined in late '86. 

I bought my favorite published setting ever - Spelljammer, and the Waterdeep/Undermountain stuff - but kept using our houseruled AD&D.  While we game in a group every week that is HERO, the wife and I do solo play of another system, more often than not D&D. It went that way for years, then 3rd came out. I was skeptical given my reaction to 2nd. Then I read the multiclassing rules, and pretty much decided it was for me. I played it until 4E came out, played a little of that, stopped, then started up with Pathfinder (I just found the edition that was right for my tasted).

So D&D has been around in my life for 37 years, in one way or another, and led me to this hobby, which has become a lifelong passion.

Happy 40th.


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## Jan van Leyden (Jan 26, 2014)

I came aboard in '83 with a Moldvay Basis Set, which I ordered by accident. I wanted to order Dungeon - The Board Game, but entered Dungeons & Dragons on the order card. Formerly, I had only read in a German boardgame magazin about this curious RPG thing, but couldn't make heads nor tail from it.

After reading the basic set I was hooked and decided that having human fighters, and mages, and thieves, but only one type of dwarf or elf was stupid. The next order card listet the AD&D DMG and asked for an adventure suitable for beginners. Imagine my terror when no rules whatsoever about charcter classes, and races, and stuff were in the DMG. Time for the next order card.

Since then I learned:


Players are a lazy bunch who don't share my interest in all those new games.
Bookshelves can hold only so many RPG books.
I'm a terrible businessman.
My mind can only hold so many game systems.
I can live without playing, but not without running a game.


Happy Birthday, D&D! My present to you is a year full of RPG sessions.


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## William Ronald (Jan 27, 2014)

I first began playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1980, with some classmates from high school.  My first character, Saruk, was a monk and the adventure was a bad rip off of the Lord of the Rings.  Still, I had fun and continued gaming.

Over the years I have met many friends through gaming and got to meet such people as E. Gary Gygax, Monte Cook, and Erik Mona at conventions. I have sent characters through many adventures, from 1st level to epic levels.  One character even had a history  of some 20 years in campaign time. (The joke was that he was so old he did not just know everything -- he knew everyone.)

Currently, I am doing some GMing for Pathfinder Society.  I am pleased to say that I see a lot of younger people getting into gaming and I think that our hobby has a bright future.

So, let me thank E. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Monte Cook, Zeb Cook, Erik Mona, Lisa Stevens, James Jacobs, Tracy Hickman, Margaret Weiss, and so may others whose works I have enjoyed.  Let me thank all those I have gamed with over the years.  Thank you for your time, your friendship and many good memories.  Here is to 40  years of Dungeons and Dragons, in all its myriad incarnations.  I look forward to the next forty years --- and more!


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## rjclark (Jan 27, 2014)

*D&D 40 years old*

I have been playing D&D in many forms since 1973, and the game had actually been out for a few months. I haven't been able to stomach 4th edition, and am looking at the new version with trepidation. But I'm still playing. I'm 57 now, and there have been times when it's been my only stress management. I've seen what role playing can do for kids, and it's always positive. It encourages reading, independent thinking, thinking outside the box, some social skills, like communicating with others. I hope I have a group to play with till the day I die.


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## Gatorsama (Jan 27, 2014)

*Holmes Boxer*

Christmas 1977. I was in 7th grade and my grandmother got me this strange game with a dragon on the cover of the box. I remember vividly reading the book and thinking what is infrared vision. I think it was talking about dwarves. I was soon hooked though and got other friends to play with me. No one in our little Iowa town had ever heard of D&D or roleplaying before. ................................................................................................ 	     My art teacher who had also that year gotten me and some others into civil war gaming decided to try this D&D thing out too and that helped us get a handle on things much better. I remember hearing about AD&D when it came out and I worked all summer detasseling corn so I could afford to go to the only game store in Iowa in Des Moines to buy the books. The whole thing felt like an epic quest let me tell you. I still have those original three books and I got them signed by Gary Gygax later at GenCon in 1985.  ....................................................................................................... 	     By high school I was running three campaigns for different groups and was loving every minute of it. My campaign world maps covered an entire wall of my bedroom from floor to ceiling and 20 feet long. Great times. Then things got dark in our little roleplaying heaven. We lived in a very religious town full of Dutch Calvinists and others. We were hit with the full force of the satanic panic and many people were forced to quit playing the game by their parents.  .................................................................................................	     At this point I only had one group left which was a bizarre mix of adult farmers, quaker college students and some vietnam veterans and their wives. Still the best group I ever dm'ed.     ...........................................................................................................After high school I joined the army and became an MP. I played rarely in the army and strangely enough even less in college after that. I kept my hand in mostly by reading Forgotten Realms books and playing things like Baldur's Gate and reading Knights of the Dinner Table.	....................................................................................................      I also owned a game and book store for awhile and played a lot of Warhammer and Napoleonic wargaming over the years.  ..............................................................................................	     Just recently I have started to play again using Dungeon Crawl Classics. The itch to start DMing again is growing in me all these years later. Its a good feeling.  ...................................................................................................... (Please excuse the gratuitous dots.  For some reason I can't make this thing show paragraphs)


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## sheadunne (Jan 27, 2014)

1983 - Baltimore - My Cousin's House

My cousin, who was in high school, ran myself and his younger brother through an A&D scenario. I was hooked. We moved to Norway soon after and I loaded up on gaming stuff as quickly as I could. It didn't matter whether it was Basic or Advanced, I had to have it (which was a bit more difficult living in Norway). I've played other games along the way (Elfquest, Gurps, Battletech, WoD, Shadowrun, etc), but I've always wandered back to D&D. 40 years is a long time for a game to be around and everyone associated with it should be proud. I just hope in another 40 years there will be old folks sitting around the retirement home rolling d20s and telling stories.


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## Anastrace (Jan 27, 2014)

I started in 1986. My parents bought me a player's handbook for my 6th birthday. I'd never been into outdoor activities or other toys really as a kid, I just read books but I devoured this book. When I learned the library had the DMG I read the holy heck out of that thing. I played my first game before I was seven. I think I died in my first encounter. It was glorious. I'd go on to have many fantasy adventures with others which helped my overcome my social anxiety disorder a bit. (Thanks D&D!) Though I'd go on to play many other rpg's, D&D is still my first love, I go back and play whatever edition is current because bumps and all it helped launch me into gaming, even with save or die, psionics rolls of insanity, I BECOME A BARD HOW?!, wait you can have 3 classes and I only get 1? But at least at level 9 or so, you got followers. Oh 1st edition, you were so fun to start with.   And 2nd edition, all the worlds to explore (mostly expansions to the realms but I digress), kara tur, maztica, al-qadim, spelljammer, dark sun, planescape, ravenloft whew. And the home of my favorite supplement of all time, the one I still use even in my pathfinder games. Aurora's whole realms catalogue. I mean, it's like a Sears-Roebuck catalogue in a fantasy setting. So Awesome.  3.5, you were great, and I loved you more as Pathfinder. No offense.  4th, hey I liked you. Might be a minority, not sure. I thought you were fun, and while we needed a grid to play you a lot of my friends who hadn't played before grasped it. Possibly because it's similar to a board game? Who knows. It was fun. Also fun was Amethyst and it's modern counterpart. They worked really well with 4e. (well, modern 4e was weird when one person decided to use a spellcaster, but we modified the setting to adjust)


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## AntiStateQuixote (Jan 27, 2014)

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in the summer of 1981 with the Moldvay red (pink?) box set. My parents were recently divorced, and I spent every other weekend at my dad's place with my sister. One weekend while looking at stamps in a stamp/coin shop in the mall (I can't remember which one), I saw some D&D miniatures and the D&D Basic and Expert sets in the window. I was fascinated. I stared longingly through the window at the box, and left with my stamps . . . but no D&D.

Two weeks later when I showed up at my dad's place there was the Dungeons and Dragons basic set! I was ecstatic, and I spent the entire weekend reading and drawing dungeons and begging my sister and dad to play. Alas, there would be no games for me that summer. Although they tried to humor me, neither my dad nor my sister could get interested in the ramblings of a 10-year old kid trying to learn the rules and explain them at the same time.

When Fall arrived that year I met some kids at school that I managed to wrangle into playing D&D. What a blast! Ten year old boys have vivid imaginations, and we were quickly burning through all of the challenges in the Basic Set including The Keep on the Borderlands and looking forward to the blue box Expert Set.

I don't know when or how I got it (maybe for Christmas), but eventually the Expert Set was mine. Before the following summer we had exhausted the full contents of both the Basic and Expert sets and had 14th level heroes storming around simple, nonsensical dungeons crushing and blasting everything in their paths.

Within a year or so I got turned on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons by another kid at school. He had the Monster Manual with the bare-breasted female demons and devils and the gynosphinx! I had to get it. I later found out I also had to get the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide . . . ah, yes, the joys of reading Gygax at his best . . . or worst. While the DMG was absolutely one of the worst organized books ever, it was probably my favorite RPG book. You could pick up this book, turn to a page at random and be almost guaranteed to see something you had not seen before. Random encounters in the city? We got 'em; complete with street harlots and vampires! WTF?!?!

Many years of fun followed.

Thank you, Gary and Dave!


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## Plaguescarred (Jan 28, 2014)

Happy 40th anniversary D&D! I started playing 25 years ago with my friends, which i'm still blessed enought to have around to this day, including my mentor, a rare thing i know. This game has done so much to help me as a young kid, it also helped me tremendously with my english, i wouldn't be working in aviation if it wasn't of that Thank you D&D! #LongLiveDnD


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## Hippy (Jan 28, 2014)

I played my first game of D&D in 1978.  I was nine years old and was shown how to play by my friend who was a year older.  I was a dwarf that was promptly killed off by Demigorgon, but I did not care.  In that brief session I was hooked.  I begged my parents to let me have the game, and by my 10th birthday I had the first two books.  I saved my allowance to buy the DMG that had just been released.  The salesman was a 30 thirty-something clerk who managed the FLGS in my hometown.  The store is now gone, but 25 years later I became re-introduced to this man by a mutual friend.  I joined their 3.5 D&D game and became fast friends.  He did not remember me, but after I relayed the story (I recognized him immediately), he did indeed remember.  He was surprised that a kid my age back then was interested in buying D&D products, and the memory stuck with him.  He has become a good friend; and while his health has declined (he now resides in a nursing home
 as a result of diabetes and heart problems) we still get together at the nursing home to socialize over gaming.

I owe all my close friends to D&D.  The game as a common interest became the catalyst to build friendships.  I still game with two of my middle and high school friends on a bi-weekly basis.  Thanks Gary and Dave for making a game that made life-long friendships.

Game on!

Hippy


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## Kaodi (Jan 28, 2014)

I am not sure of the exact chronology of the early events, but I will give it a shot:

[sblock=My Possibly Way Too Long And Thorough Version]My Sister and I had a regular babysitter for several years when we were young. She had three sons, two about four and five years older than me and one two years younger (my Sister is a year younger than me). I believe when I was eight or nine (born in 1984) I was introduced at their house to the Bakshi version of Lord of the Rings. I ended up reading the trilogy in Grade 3. I believe I was nine when it came to pass that a friend of two older brothers (who was also the older brother of a girl from school who was my age) would come by the house every so often and they would play D&D (the friend was DM), along with my Sister's best friend's older brother as well. Anyway, to make a long story short I rarely ever got a chance to try out D&D while I was there, but I did get at least one introduction from the friend. I am not sure whether I would have gotten into these things had it not been for that, but there is probably a very strong chance I would still have become a LotR fan and a not hopeless chance I would have become a D&D fan. I also am not sure whether they played OD&D or Basic. I avoid talking to most of those guys though, except the brother of my classmate, because they were rather terrible to me on the whole.

Anyway, I believe when I was 12 I had a very fortuitous Summer at garage sales. I found a set of D&D things, including the AD&D (1st Ed) DM, PHB, and MM, along with Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Oasis of the White Palm, and Conan Unchained, as well as character sheets, and a strangely out of place Palladium book on ninjas. Other than the books, the other things came packed in a Moldvay Boxed Set box, even though it was pretty much all AD&D stuff. I believe I bought that all for under $30. I also believe that was the Summer I bought my Snark at a garage sale for $30 and a set of used wooden golf clubs for $30 (it was just when metal woods started to become a big thing, I believe). I entertained myself for many years with the books I got at that sale, though I did not know anyone who was interested in D&D. I was pretty must the least popular kid in my class, and it was a country school.

My school library had few fantasy books to keep me going after Lord of the Rings, but it did have Weasel's Luck and I think one other D&D novel. I am not sure it was Darkwalker On Moonshae, or if I got that at a different library or in high school. I kind of think it was another DragonLance novel. Actually, now that I look at a list of DL novels I believe it was the Gates of Thorbardin. The other thing that happened when I was 12 was I got into MUDs. My first was ArcticMUD, which was based on DragonLance, and who by some bizarre coincidence was run by a patient of my Mom's cousin who lived on the other side of the country. Somewhere around the same time I must have found TSR Chat on their website, because I think I frequented it for at least a year or two before TSR was bought by WotC and it became WotC Chat. Anyway, it was on TSR Chat that I got my first real chance to start playing D&D. Most games were technically 2e I think, but I was able to wing it with my 1e books. I also met a couple people there who I still know to this day, including ToreadorVampire, Aeolius, and NiTessine, all of whom have been members here at one time or another. 

As a side note, various other things happened back in this time: I found my first ancient copies of Dragon at the local Goodwill, and I bought my first new module (Knight's Sword). I also read fantasy fiction voraciously when I was younger, building up a substantial collection of books, including a lot of D&D novels both DragonLance and Forgotten Realms, back in the day. I also bought a number of new issues of Dungeon.

Naturally it was on that chat that I heard about Eric Noah's website. It was a big time for me because when 3e came out it was the first time I was playing a version of D&D that was completely _current_ (something that is not so much a big deal for me now, but it was back then given 2e's age and my lack of material). I bought a number of books, though I quickly fell behind. I also bought a decent number of copies of Dragon and Dungeon (and /Polyhedron) during that time, though I have never had a subscription. Of course, a new edition did not magically mean I had people to play with that I did not have before. High school never really provided me with other people who would have been interested in playing D&D (though my friends and no less my friends for their differing tastes!). 

A lot of the stuff after that is basically the history of Eric's site and EN World, so I not think it all bears repeating (other than how I started reading PirateCat and Sagiro's Story Hours, which definitely form part of what I would aspire to in my dream campaign). But in 2005 I think I finally found my first real life D&D group, through here, actually. A poster by the name of Obscure was putting together in the local city, and I was working at the time and had use of a car so that I could drive in to play. Obscure and one of the other players were Masters students in Astronomy, and we played in the same building they were in, Sterling Hall on the Queen's University campus. We started the Age of Worms set in Eberron, and made it through the second module and into a replacement for the third before the game fell apart (amicably). 

It was not until I went to university myself (UWO, University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario) that I found another group in 2nd year, in 2008, once again through the Gamers Seeking Gamers section here. We started Age of Worms again, this time in Greyhawk. It was good, but the transition to 4e kind of messed things up. Our group fell apart again because of the Summer breaks I believe and other priorities (like, you know, academics). But the DM and I transitioned to a new group that I was in for a while held in the basement of a local game shop (as opposed to the previous game which had been held in the basement of his house). I think I fell off the boat on the latter group before the group itself petered out (if it did, I am not sure). 

Since then it has all been PbP with the occasionally game in IRC. I was in Aeolius' undersea game for a while (which I think he used to talk about even waaay back in TSR/WotC Chat). But it has been pretty dry. I am not sure when, or even if, I will get another chance for a RL group. Though I was initially enthusiastic about 4e, I have become a big Pathfinder fan, a game which I originally eschewed (despite opportunity with gamers in the Anime Club) for being to close to v3.5e to be worth it. I kind of wonder though if I can keep interest going on indefinitely with so little face to face game time. In 20 years I have *maybe* been in face to face groups for a combined total of a year and a half of actual meeting (so not counting Summer). 

Anyway, I apologize for all of the inane details. That was probably way too much. Did not set out to write that much, just sort of happened.[/sblock]

TL;DR version: Became interested ~1993, age 9. First got books around ~1996. Spent a lot of time in TSR Chat, from which I learned about Eric Noah's website. Bought the Core of 3e as soon as it came out. Have only been in RL groups ~2005 and ~2008-2009.


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## Raith5 (Jan 28, 2014)

Great thread. I started playing Basic when I was 11 in 1982 and like most players quickly moved on to Advanced. I have played every edition and have liked each a little bit better than the previous edition. Have played serious roleplaying games (2nd ed and 4th ed especially), casual dungeon crawling games (especially 1st and 3rd ed) and monty haul capers (1st ed) with hirelings carrying our magic items around. Good times!

Like others here I have met lots of interesting people though this game and have also enjoyed the way D&D has shaped and informed computer games and pop culture (except the D&D films of course...).


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## kunadam (Jan 28, 2014)

It was around 1989-1990. I heard about AD&D from some magazines and after playing some CRPG it was hinted that a paper based version also exist (without internet info spread slowly). There were no place in Hungary to buy foreign books.
I went to the UK on some language course and found a DMG and MC I-II in the local book store. I admit I did not even know tha DMG alone would not be enough to play. Then RPG books came into Hungary, albeit slowly and at a horrendous price. At any rate by 1991 we (borther and me) had a PHB.
From that on we played whenever we could. The best period was high school and early University time (93-96), when we could play at least once a week.
Later on, we established the tradition with some friends to go for a long weekend every summer to play (we still do that). We switched to D&D3.5 late (around the time 4th was already around the corner). We also play Call of Cthulhu. We have tried some more RPGs (d6 Star Wars, Shadowrun, Ars Magica, MAGUS (Hungarian RPG)), but mostly stayed with (A)D&D for our fantasy needs.


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## Aenghus (Jan 28, 2014)

I first attempted to run D&D in 1981, from the Basic D&D Red Box, dragooning my sister as a player. (It didn't go so well). Still, I bought AD&D, and continued to read the books despite the lack of games around.

I found it difficult to talk to people, and couldn't find any other players locally. Roleplaying is a social activity, so I was inspired to stretch my limits, and keep looking. It took a few years, as RPGs were less common in Ireland, but eventually I found other players and got a chance to play in other people's games.  It got easier when I got to university. I joined UCC WARPS, it's hobby gaming society, on it's founding in 1990, it's most popular RPG at the time being D&D. 

I got to play some AD&D and lots of 2e, mostly set in the Forgotten Realms.

I started running my own D&D campaigns about 11 years ago on the launch of 3rd ed, moving to 3.5 and then 4th ed when they came along. 

I have played lots of other games since, RPGs, boardgames etc, but D&D still remains my main hobby to this day.


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## skinnydwarf (Jan 28, 2014)

I started playing in 1993, when I was thirteen.  I had wanted to play even earlier, when some other Boy Scout kids were playing it at camp.  The senior patrol leader and DM was designing a tank for the game, and I thought that was awesome.  My mom wouldn't let me play though because, "Don't those D&D kids do drugs?"

A year or two later another (apparently more respectable in my mother's eyes) Boy Scout started up a game and I joined.  My first character was was a 1st level wizard, whose name escapes me at the moment. All I remember of the first game was we were in town, some orcs attacked the outskirts.  When it was my turn I fired my one magic missile, and then hid on the edge of the battle trying to throw daggers.

Eventually that campaign ended when I wasn't there. The DM apparently got frustrated, and had the castle we were exploring collapse on everyone. Yup, rocks fall, everybody dies it not just a myth. 

That summer the kid down the street started DMing his own game, and I played a dwarf fighter, thus beginning my love affair with the stout folk.  I still remember how proud I was to come up with such a great back story for my guy- he was an orphan because his parents were killed by orcs, and he wanted revenge!

The fact that there no orcs in Krynn (where the DM wanted to set the game because he loved Dragonlance) was kind of lost on us.


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## Storminator (Jan 28, 2014)

Long ago I went from Risk to Chess to Melee. We played a million games of Melee, then Wizard, then Death Test. Then one of the kids at school decided to run us thru his own adventure, with these AD&D rules. We went to a hippy grade school, where the kids were "allowed to design their own curriculum." Yeah, D&D, with breaks for football and Risk.

I missed the 2e era, coming back to the idea of gaming regularly in the late 90s. With no one else around I threw together a PBeM, and during PC creation I found this website by Eric Noah, and we converted the game to 3e. Been playing regularly ever since, and both my sons have started playing. This summer we move to Texas so my wife can work at Reaper Miniatures.

This past weekend I helped run a Scouting event where patrols of scouts come by and try their hand at various scout skills. The winning team at my station was called The Owl Bears. 

PS


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## Mark CMG (Jan 28, 2014)

In the early 70s my friends in the neighborhood and I were wargamers, Risk, Avalon Hill chit and hex games, as well as miniature wargames, and that included Chainmail when it came on the scene.  After D&D was released in 1974, most of us added that, and soon other RPGs, to our gaming rotation.  It's been a great 40+ years of gaming and D&D has been a huge part of it.

This was posted on the GM's Day Facebook page and elsewhere


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## ccooke (Jan 28, 2014)

Initially, a 3.0e game I play in was scheduled for Sunday. Unfortunately, that had to move a few weeks. 
Then a 4e game I run was scheduled... but that ended up being next weekend. 

So what the hell. I asked around and ran a 5e one-off via IRC. Well, it was supposed to be a one-off; we're meeting again to play more on Friday.


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## Toriel (Jan 29, 2014)

I started playing D&D in 1980 a few months before the release of the Deities & Demigods and I haven't really stopped since. There was this slightly older student reading the Basic Rulebook if I remember correctly. I asked him what it was. He replied it's a role playing game, would you like to try? I've been hooked ever since.

I can also say that D&D probably saved my life. I spent 5 year in high school, the last 4 of which were like a walk trough hell with almost daily bullying and intimidation. Thankfully I had D&D to take my mind off school.

So happy birthday D&D and thank you for all the good times.


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