How'd you get into D&D?

[Nstol]

I watched some kids playing AD&D at summer camp and was hooked.
I didn't get to play much but I learned to roll up my own characters and was in the Rulebooks whenever they werent using them.
Fiend Folio was a work of art!

[LtTibbles]

It's embarrassing but the Dungeons & Dragons Movie (2000) DVD my babysitter had. I watched the behind the scenes extras where someone was explaining what the game actually was and I bought the 3.5 starter set right after and forced my younger siblings to play with me.

[SuzukiStumpy]

For me, it was a natural progression from the old Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. There were a bunch of us at school who used to play through them, then one day I stumbled across the old D&D Red Box set in a branch of W.H.Smiths (a newsagent/bookstore in the UK for those who don't know). Picked that up and ... then never played it.

However, it did prompt one of my friends to start looking at the original Traveler books, so we had a quite active campaign running for a couple of years before moving off to Uni. By that time, I'd discovered AD&D and the University Role Players Society, so managed to find a seat at a table there for a number of years playing in an entirely homebrew campaign setting.

[Silk]

It was 1989(i think), and I was in junior high when a kid in my class that I rarely spoke too came up to me and said "I see you reading books all the time. Here." He gave me the Red D&D Box that was in bad shape and some worn down dice.

For nearly a month, my brother, myself, and two friends played the game in Study Hall until the teacher banned us from playing it because we were making too much noise. I still got that box and the dice somewhere in my house. Had to use Duct Tape to hold the box together.

[Bruja]

I was roped into a short-lived campaign in my senior year of high school. It dissolved because members of the group (a lot of them previously strangers brought together by the DM) hated each other too much for the game to be any fun.

[DaysUntold]

Some brutal honesty here... my husband told me that he used to play dnd on forums because his friends were too 'cool' to play it when he was a kid. Before pbp games he would just crank out characters for the fun of it.

We both played video games, but honestly I thought that tabletop RPGs was just something that I wouldn't enjoy. However, one of my three brothers tried to get a game together so I joined so my husband would have somewhere to play. Eventually, he introduced me to pbp as well, so here I am.

Now I'm hooked and I'm so glad that he introduced me to it.

[Zellus]

My best friend turned me on to D&D in the early 80s and it went from there. Most of the other guys we were growing up with at the time became part of the group. It's some of the best childhood memories I have.

[Exfilia]

I was in a bookstore run by a friend of my mother in the mid-1970s, and saw the "Caves and Caverns" geomorphs.

"What are these for?" I asked the proprietor.

I started a group at my college, and have been playing ever since.

[Perthro Yellowox]

Just after college, 1990 (i think), my younger brother and his friends got me to play with them and I loved it! We did mostly homebrew campaigns using the latest version, AD&D 2e. After playing for some months I got into DMing. That was as much fun as I had had. I developed my own world and even still have a large scale map of it somewhere. I used monsters and lore from almost every book I could get my hands on. Those were fun times.

[ricktur63]

It was at high school in the late 70' to early 80's (graduated in 81') We played first edition and my DM let me play a knight I think it was and later it was a psion. I got away from DnD after that for many years until I started playing again with 3.5 ed. Skipped right over 2nd ed and 3.0. While I think I've enjoyed it in all of its iterations, I did like 4th ed once I got use to it. Although I still have not given in and tried 5th ed.

[Ceredyn]

Wayback in 1979, my friend and I were bored at home and drove to the mall and stopped in at the local KB toy and hobby and picked up the original Redbox DND game. Didn’t know how to play it. Didn’t know what to do. But we were fascinated by the looks of the system. Now many years later I have migrated pretty much over to GURPS.

[UncaJJ]

I started getting interested in D&D and Roleplaying when I was about 12. My neighbor and I worked up characters but never got to play them. I'm now 48 and have never actually played a tebletop session. I've played various Console and PC games, and have been in a few good games here, but even though my sister had a monthly RPG night at her old house, still have never sat in a group and played.

[InfamousDasher]

so I've pretty much always had a knack for making characters. My friend group growing up would always make stuff up, and that hobby continues on to this day. After several years and several people trying to bully me into playing DnD, I finally gave in after watching Harmonquest with my partner.

We haven't done a whole lot in terms of a legit campaign, but we will be shortly.

If anything, I'm having fun building characters again~

[Marshmallow]

During my time on another forum I got asked to join a game of D&D 3.5E, I had no idea what was doing, the rules weren't explained to me very well and I was extremely confused on why one guys turn would take 15 minutes and the rest of us barely five. I then stopped playing for about two years and ended up getting involved in an online campaign of "Storm Kings Thunder" and got really into it. I'll always remember my first character - an assh*le of a halfling who pickled eyes and had the face of a niblog.

Then I discovered Shadowrun and the plethora of other TTRPG's out there and I've kind of never been able to get back into D&D since.

[Fergus Muir]

'Twas my eleventh summer. My parents were supposed to take me on a trip that I wasn't able to go on due to a broken leg. Instead of taking me, they took my younger sister and had my uncles bring their kids to our place to have them keep me company for two weeks. My uncle had friends over one night and woke me up with the noise they were making. I crept down the stairs to see what was going on in the living room; they looked like they were having a lot of fun and talking in different voices, also the occasional roll of weird looking dice. I was so curious that I walked into the room and saw they had tons of snacks stacked in a corner that was out of sight from where I was earlier. When I asked my uncle what they were doing, he told me that it was "grown up pretend". I watched for a while and when I thought I had a grasp of everything, asked to join. They took a break for everyone to help me come up with a character. That was the birth of Twig, my Halfling Barbarian. Was hooked since then and still am now.