[Tabletop] History Check - Your first table-top role-playing game

[Redingold]

My first tabletop campaign was in Pathfinder, with a homebrew campaign. We started by retrieveing a magical amulet that caused temporary insanity when someone tried to use Detect Magic on it (boy, that was fun finding out) and then we learned that dragons were going to try to use it to wreck everybody's shit. We went to get a book from the tomb of a powerful, long-dead wizard who knew all about dragons, and along the way a party member turned out to be some sort of prophet, a divine messenger or some such thing.

When we got to the wizard's tomb, we found that he wasn't dead but had become a lich. We tried to call on our friend's god for some assistance, but apparently the lich was having none of that, and nothing happened. I made the call to back out, figuring we couldn't take on a lich (we were level 3. Seriously, DM, what the hell?), and we left empty-handed. Then a dragon attacked. Our rogue and cleric went down immediately, scorched by dragonfire. Our fighter tried to take it head-on, but got swatted aside and knocked unconscious. I made the wise, tactical decision to leg it as fast as I could while the dragon was distracted. That just left our ranger, who up until this point had been pretty much worthless. Couldn't sneak, couldn't fight, couldn't shoot for shit, nearly got killed by a wolverine. Our ranger rolls under the dragon, attacks its underside, then climbs up onto its back. The dragon takes off, and tried to shake off the ranger with rolls and dives, but amazingly, he hangs on. He climbs up to the dragon's neck, takes his sword in both hands and plunges his sword in.

Unfortunately, the dragon's scales were too thick to penetrate, and with both hands on his sword, he couldn't hold onto the dragon, and he fell off. The dragon landed, and prepared to face him a second time. Then it scored a critical hit against him with its first attack, and literally split him in two down the middle.

Later, our fighter wakes up, and staggers back to the city we'd come from, to find me sitting outside a cafe, enjoying a drink. Things got a little awkward at this point, apparently he thought my very reasonable decision to run away screaming was cowardly, or something, but lucky for me, dragons attacked the city. He runs off to help the guards fight, and I made my way to the highest point in the city to watch. A dragon landed next to me, and I became a carbon shadow against the wall.

And that's how my first and, to date, last campaign went.

 

[Fappy]

I think it was D&D 3.0 back in middle school or something. We experimented with tabletop a few times between then and college, but never seriously played until I was around 20 playing D&D 3.5. I've played a few systems since then, but my group's been settled on Pathfinder for the last few years now. It's great!

 

[Albino Boo]

I feel old, I played DnD first edition when it was the only edition.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

TMNT and Other Strangeness.
Playing with my buddies Eli and Phil in the lunch room of my Elementary school.

Ninjas and Superspies, After the Bomb, Heroes Unlimited, Robotech, Beyond the Supernatural, and of course Rifts...Paladium was my Go To publisher for a long long time.

It wasn't until I was in High School that I started playing other games, mainly the World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu titles from White Wolf and Chaosium respectively.

 

[fenrizz]

My first and, sadly, only tabletop RPG is New World of Darkness, specifically Vampire: The Masquerade.

Had a fair bit of fun with it, but as I grew older it became harder and harder to find someone to play with regularly.
1 GM and to players just ain't enough.

I really want to play DnD though.

 

[Mushroom 118i]

Pathfinder Beginner Box in about... 2010? 2011?

 

[infohippie]

I started way back on AD&D in the eighties, before there were these newfangled "editions".
But I have played many systems over the years from Ars Magica, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, to Shadowrun and Cyberpunk.

 

[Irick]

Pathfinder Beginner Box in about... 2010? 2011?

I love the crap out of Pathfinder's Beginner Box. It just screams quality and usefulness.
The Edge of the Empire starter box is the only thing i've seen that really seems to come close to it in terms of quality, but it's still way behind it.

 

[happyninja42]

Original Star Frontiers roleplaying game back in the 80s. That was my first experience with it, playing and running a game.

 

[Warhawg01]

Deleted. Double post.

 

[Warhawg01]

Twilight 2000.

Edit: Oh, yeah... the James Bond RPG. The "Q Manual" was the coolest thing ever.

 

[Guffe]

My first tabletop RPG... Monopoly?
If not that then I guess Cluedo or something else simple.
Later I've tried some random D&D my friend came up with while we were drunk and Warhammer40K a little.
Lately I've been playing Gloom, not sure it that counts though? but Arkham Horror is fun as hell
Not too much tabletop RPGing from here

 

[Rangarig]

My first tabletop RPG... Monopoly?

Not sure I would classify "Monopoly" as a role-playing game ... but then again, it would all depend on how much you channelled your inner Gordon Gekko!

 

[Ambitiousmould]

Pathfinder. Only a short while ago, in summer of this year. I started with my brother and two friends, one of those friends played it before but he has a reputation for being wrong a lot, and now was no different. Luckily my brother went through the rulebook cover to cover, even so I'm fairly sure we're doing a lot of things wrong.

 

[Rangarig]

Pathfinder. Only a short while ago, in summer of this year. I started with my brother and two friends, one of those friends played it before but he has a reputation for being wrong a lot, and now was no different. Luckily my brother went through the rulebook cover to cover, even so I'm fairly sure we're doing a lot of things wrong.

As long as you are all having fun, it is not so much 'wrong' as 'house rules'. Just because the rulebooks for an RPG say you have to do it one way, doesn't mean you can not decide and agree on another way with your friends.

 

[Savagezion]

My first was DnD 2nd edition. Had no clue what the hell was going on until halfway through the campaign. It confused me a lot because GM was meticulous about stuff like feeding horses, maintaining spell ingredients, and stuff like that. Then of course, I had made a wizard so I had a lot of tedium. However, then I got introduced to Vampire the Masquerade. That was probably my first time actually getting into tabletop RPGs. This was in like 94-95

Then, I rediscovered DnD with 3rd edition around 99-00 and had a blast. I am currently about to start a homebrew game of DnD 3.5 as the DM for a bunch of newcomers wanting to check it out because of the stories I have told about past games. I am getting pretty excited about it as I am building the world from scratch and am currently designing the intro quest lines.

 

[Scootinfroodie]

Started with DnD 3rd Edition when a friend of mine bought this beginners boxed set from Chapters. Would have been like... 2001 or 2002. I dont think we ever played by the proper rules. I stopped playing for a few years and then got dragged into some 3.5 games in Highschool. Can't really stand it at this point and I'm not sure if that's a result of saturation or finding games that are more my style. I still have those maps and books though

 

[WindKnight]

Probably good ol D&D at a college roleplay group. Had fun despite one party member being a bit of an ass, and regularly screwing the rest of the party over for lulz and personal gain (just about every game I played with this dude afterwards had him being irritating, selfish and cowardly, including one game where he got half the part killed for his personal gain, and another where he gung-ho'd into using flechette grenade rounds in a crowded nightclub... even though there no dangerous enemies present (though if memory serves, in all the games I played with him, he actively avoided any other combat where there we're dangerous enemies involved).

 

[Ambitiousmould]

Pathfinder. Only a short while ago, in summer of this year. I started with my brother and two friends, one of those friends played it before but he has a reputation for being wrong a lot, and now was no different. Luckily my brother went through the rulebook cover to cover, even so I'm fairly sure we're doing a lot of things wrong.

As long as you are all having fun, it is not so much 'wrong' as 'house rules'. Just because the rulebooks for an RPG say you have to do it one way, doesn't mean you can not decide and agree on another way with your friends.

Well we kind of decided to go that way, but sometimes as a newbie you feel awkward about doing things in case of any customs or etiquette involved, so it's really quite nice to hear that from someone who I gather is reasonably experienced. It was sort of like when we first started with WH40k. At first we thought that if anything is done wrongly and not to GW's rules, it'd somehow throw the game off. Now we have an attitude more along the lines of "I don't care what the rule book defines as a 5+ cover save, a wire fence gives you nothing, because otherwise it'd be nonsense."