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

[Rangarig]

With the Spiel 2014 Expo [http://www.merz-verlag-en.com/index.html] starting this week (Oct. 16th-19th, 2014) I am revisiting my role-playing book collection before I hit the "bargain" bins at the Expo. Of course this is also the time for fond and less fond memories of the various game systems and settings and to reminisce about Ye Adventures of Olde.

My table-top role-playing experience started about 20 years ago with the German version of "Middle-Earth Role-Playing" or MERP for short. Being huge fans of "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings", the idea of being able to play and live adventures in Tolkien's world was fantastic! Unfortunately our 15 year-old brains faltered at the complexity of the MERP/Rolemaster-System. Add to that our inexperience playing or even mastering a role-playing game, and you can understand that our adventures with MERP were very short-lived.

Thankfully I had caught the role-player bug and after enjoying the likes of "Eye of the Beholder" and "Dungeon Hack" on the PC, I returned to table-top gaming with Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 a few years later.

Yet MERP still holds a special place in my heart (and on my shelves), and the collection of books has grown since the early 1990s, waiting for the day when I will find time and patience to wade through the stat lists and critical hit and failure tables again.

What was your first role-playing game? How was your first experience with table-top role-playing? Players, please roll your own history checks!

 

[Summerstorm]

Started with DSA (Das Schwarze Auge) (The Black Eye) when i was 16... started Shadowrun soon after.

I am still playing both plus D&D (Eh, had to get a weekly group, nothing else at the time available) and tried dozens of other games, love the experimentation with different system and campaigns and GM/DM's.

I love table-top/pen-and-paper roleplaying.

 

[Irick]

The first tabletop RPG system I studied was D&D 3.X. I never played it as a tabletop game. I was more into wargaming as a kid, played necrons in middle school into high school. I studied up on D&D 3.5 some when I got into Neverwinter Nights, and then finally my first time playing a RPG tabletop was in 2008 with the release of Fantasy Flight Game's Warhammer 40k Roleplay, specifically Dark Heresy.

The GM had no clue about the system, only an inkling about the lore, and it is still by far the best campaign we've ever had. We still talk about it to this day for the ridiculously canon breaking, mechanically impossible exploits that occurred as well as the hilariously bad interactions between the player and NPCs. It involved such lovely things as:

• 
  [li]Suddenly daemon princes in the middle of a hive world.[/li]
  [li]Suddenly 16 homeless people attacking you with nothing but a knife and a vial of Obscura... each[/li]
  [li]Suddenly mars pattern macro-canon bombardments taking out the weapons cache you bought after selling said Obscura while the party is conveniently unarmed but for a single laspistol we manged to sneak in past security at a mandatory attendance high society party filled with *rolls a d6* nergalites.[/li]
  [li]Suddenly noise marines[/li]
  [li]Large scale accidental deployments of choke gas taking out an inquisitor, regiment of imperial gardsmen and three Daemons.[/li]
  [li]Exterminatus this bullshit, move on to feral world Omicron Persei FU[/li]
  [li]End first session[/li]
  [li]Suddenly super-not-necrons with 50 wounds, damage resistance to everything but simple weapons, and an ranged that automatically turned people into more of them on successful hit.[/li]
  [li]A wall made of wood, no wait stone... no, wait, melta-resistant steel, standing at ten feet tall, no wait thirty... you can get over that too? uh... i meant 100 feet tall. It was always there. It was always splitting the party. There where always super-not-necrons on the other side.
  What the hell do you mean it's an unwinnable situation? There was always a gate five feet to the left of where you've been pouring the better part of the armory. I swear you guys, I've never seen a party that had so much trouble with a wooden barricade[/li]
  [li]The imperial guardsman's devotional scar is a spirograph centered around his crotch and going up to his face.[/li]
  [li]The imperial guardsman must reapply his devotional scar nearly every session because biomancy heals like that now[/li]
  [li]The imperial guardsman cutting his way out of a motherfucking t-rex.[/li]
  [li]The psykers spend about a week doing nothing but drawing intricate and suspiciously eldar looking patterns on a leman russ.[/li]
  [li]The imperial guardsman wields excalibur, has been made immortal by the holy grail, and remains unshakably faithful to the God Emperor whilst the rest of the party is obviously converted by the eldar infiltrator party member due to the blatant incompetence of our inquisitor.[/li]
  [li]The imperial guardsman suspects nothing. Nor do any NPCs/[/li]
  [li]The psykers pull a leman russ through the warp, into a cathedral, and on top of the final boss crushing him instantly.[/li]
  [li]Exterminatus the grey-goo planet of fucking nano-constructor not-necrons after burning off our own skin and making our bodies anew with the power biomancy[/li]
  [li]Go to warp[/li]
  [li]The arbiter's cock is now a daemon prince[/li]
  [li]The arbiter learns the wonders of chem gelding.[/li]
  [li]Chem gelding now means large industrial machinery applied directly to the daemon prince[/li]
  [li]Cue a week of searching the vents for a disembodied penis with the stats of a daemon prince[/li]
  [li]I officially join the cult of the laughing god[/li]
  [li]Planet 3, locked in a eternal war with chaos[/li]
  [li]The inquisitor starts to suspect the Arbiter of heresy. This of course leads to the entirely rational decision to hand the arbiter lods of vials of mysterious red and blue pills that temporarily increase physical and mental attributes[/li]
  [li]Arbiter ODs on magic pills. Becomes unto a god. Solves the war singlehandedly in three combat turns.[/li]
  [li]Inquisitor is heretical.[/li]
  [li]We kill the Inquisitor for heresy with a straight face.[/li]
  [li]By order of the administratum, the Eldar is now the temporary inquisitor[/li]
  [li]With the universe burning around us, we see but a single possible course of action. In the moments of clarity and all-oneness afforded by the drug induced omniscience, we espouse the knowledge to bring about the end of chaos. With all of the resources of the inquisition we proceed single-mindedly in this goal. Mankind can not be safe without the eradication of the chaos gods. As the hammer of the emperor, we must throw away the pretence of respect of mater of theology or diplomacy. We make unspeakable alliances to further our cause. We gather the resources of entire sectors. We use our growing might and presence as we make our way back to holy terra. The imperial guardsman ascends via ritual immortum, his faith unshakable, his body pure and forged in war, becoming the avatar of the Emperor as the rest of the party carries out what must be done. With massive engines of tau make, we outfit mars. With murmured respects to the sacrifices they would unwittingly make, we hurl the red planet into the eye of terror. We know what may happen. The mechanicus will adapt, no doubt, and face the challenge before them. Armed with the ancient knowledge of mankind and the last few true wonders of human ingenuity, they may save us. Maybe. But we know of a greater truth. Void Dragon will awaken. He will fight. Chaos will be slain. We must gather mankind into yet another divine spear and point it at that ancient battlefield. The new threat will rise once more, but this time, we will have our Emperor. We will have an Alliance.[/li]
  [li]IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WAR.[/li]

 

[Danny Dowling]

D&D 3.5

was pretty good tbf. I also remember someone getting some Japanese style role play book and adapting D&D style play to work with it. I was a ninja climbing around being badass and utterly utterly useless. It was awesome.

 

[Irick]

D&D 3.5

was pretty good tbf. I also remember someone getting some Japanese style role play book and adapting D&D style play to work with it. I was a ninja climbing around being badass and utterly utterly useless. It was awesome.

Oriental Adventures?
It's now a core part of Forgotten Realms, which is now the core setting of 5e XD

 

[Atmos Duality]

I brushed with some of FASA's old stuff when I was really young, but the first real tabletop I played was actually Traveler; wherein the first encounter I had was ambushing...a dead man.
An encounter that was swiftly followed up by my first botch; one that had me (hilariously) shooting my already prone friend in the ass with a laser rifle.

His character spent the remainder of the session hopped up on future-tech equivalent narcotics since our field medibot was a cheap model.

Good times.

 

[Danny Dowling]

D&D 3.5

was pretty good tbf. I also remember someone getting some Japanese style role play book and adapting D&D style play to work with it. I was a ninja climbing around being badass and utterly utterly useless. It was awesome.

Oriental Adventures?
It's now a core part of Forgotten Realms, which is now the core setting of 5e XD

yeah no there were Ninja's and Samurai and all that jazz. 3.5 was basically all traditional fantasy with a medieval aesthetic. at least everything i played of it was.

It's unfortunate about the stigma role playing games has with the "normal world" [if you know what I mean], they can actually be a really good laugh. Imagine how many people would buy into a Game of Thrones branded RPG that played like D&D? eh, stigmas

 

[Benpasko]

D&D 2nd Edition. Rolled a 1 on my hit die as a mage, burned an entire kobold village down. Shot a magic missile. Good times.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

I think it was probably the Aliens RPG from leading edge. It was a pretty clunky and obtuse system, but I loved Aliens and it did have very detailed hit locations, so to my 13 odd year old self and a few friends it was great fun stabbing someone in the eye with a crowbar and having other horrific adventures that would have us tried for crimes against humanity in any sane universe.

Was invited to play DnD a couple of times, but I was "that guy" who turns up wasted and proceeds to fuck everything up in one way or another. One session might possibly have been before I played Aliens, but it was over 20 years ago and it all gets a bit blurry.

After that it was CP2020 and WHFRP all the way baby!

 

[Irick]

yeah no there were Ninja's and Samurai and all that jazz. 3.5 was basically all traditional fantasy with a medieval aesthetic. at least everything i played of it was.

It's unfortunate about the stigma role playing games has with the "normal world" [if you know what I mean], they can actually be a really good laugh. Imagine how many people would buy into a Game of Thrones branded RPG that played like D&D? eh, stigmas

Ah, not a D&D setting book then.

Well, there is a Game of Thrones tabletop RPG. It's rather interesting. Here [http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/64701/A-Song-of-Ice-and-Fire-Roleplaying-Quickstart-PDF?filters=0_0_44836_0_0] is the free quickstart PDF for it. It's got enough rules to run a game with pregenerated stuff if I remember correctly, then the full game has all the rules for character/house creation.

 

[Fractral]

My first experience was a game of D&D 4th edition that our group never finished. There were far too many of us for the story and it devolved into everyone making perception checks constantly and never actually doing anything. Then a little while ago the Paranoia XP manuals went on sale online so I picked those up and decided to GM a game. Boy, was that an experience.
I managed to get all of the players at each others throats towards the end of the mission. There was a scene where a bunch of death leopards try to hijack a train while the lights go out, and the Death Leopard in the group took the opportunity to join them. One of the players had killed another earlier in secrecy, but two others had noticed, and opened fire on him- but they neglected to tell the victim, who begin firing back at his avengers. A few rounds in, two of them were dead (one vaporized by a homemade grenade and the other's mutant power backfired and melted him, plus the surrounding platform) and the rest managed to get on the train, at which point an epic four way firefight ensued. It ended with the Death Leopard jumping off the train seconds before it exploded and rolling to his feet as the fireball lit him from behind. All of the other players died, two from the explosion and one from being thrown under the train's wheels.
All the players agreed it was far more fun than Dungeons and Dragons.

 

[Volothos]

I have two entries:

My first tabletop (and the one I stick with) was Pathfinder. We tried running the Jade Regent where I tried to convert a character I roleplay as elsewhere into an inquisitor. It was a good effort, but the game died because the DM wasn't very confidant in her skills even though I thought she did good.

Then came 3.5, the one that really got me into tabletop. We played Red Hand of Doom and started at level one which the dm compensated for with ALL THE LEVEL UPS. I rolled a wizard at first, but his roll was so unfocused and bad I basically rerolled when he died. Went for a sort of red-mage thing, yeeaah.

Then came my sorcerer. She was given the nickname of "Walking forest-fire" with good reason because as we all levelled up, the party kind of came to be afraid of her magic.

Here are the two shining moments: First, I scored a kill on a dragon. I utterly wrecked his shit. With many an enfeebling ray, the dragon was taken out of the fight because one of the party members grappled onto it for a good portion of the battle as we cleared out his hobgoblin buddies. Three lightning bolts and a couple of magic missiles later I nailed me a dead pack of scales that sadly fell into a raging river like something out of ace attourney.

Second: I singlehandedly made a hobgoblin raiding party flee for their lives. One fireball. Thirty-Six damage I believe. Everyone screamed, both hobgoblin and party member alike, as the raiders were disfigured, dismembered, and running for their lives. I also may have ruined a building or two in the process.

Sadly, we died because we encountered a black dragon, some hobgoblins, and the dragons goblin buddy. One of our party members was dominated, but in character my character thought it was just the dominated guy and our tank taking out some stress on each other. When the tank died wehad a staff of revival and basically used up all of the charges because dominated guy had a shit ton of good rolls, the black dragon is a black dragon, and by the end of it only the dominated guy managed to finally break out and flee with his life.

Hot fucking damn I'm in love with tabletop if awesome shit like this can go down.

 

[hazabaza1]

About a year ago I got into a Pathfinder group. DM was basically "choo chooooo" and I didn't realise until after a while so I left. Found my current DM on a /tg/ thread and we started playing Dungeon World. Started off rocky but it's gotten a lot better since then. Including, but not limited to me killing myself by smashing myself in the crotch with a magic hammer. They found the healing potions on my body. Whoops.

Recently changed to Fantasy Craft and I'm really liking it, we've slain a few pygmies but I can see it turning into something big.

 

[Lieju]

Hm, those would have been games we made ourselves.

We had a bunch of cousins, and I was the oldest so I always directed the play.
And the games and stories we told became more and more complex and I made rules for the game.
It eventually turned into something like a mixture of larping and tabletop/cardgames.

The big adventure we had was basically with a plot lifted from Lord of the Rings.
We formed a team that had to find some magical thing to defeat the evil plant-monsters, and then once we got it turned out it was an object that had corrupting influence and we had to destroy it.
I cast myself as basically Gandalf and cheated the rules several times (by having powers I didn't tell people from beforehand and that could be magically only used when the plot called for them) in order to keep the plot on track or solve the problem if the other kids (who ranged from 3-10 years) couldn't so they wouldn't get bored and give up.

My character was called Illanhämy which means 'Twilight' and was super-cool when I was 12. She was a wizard and I think part some mythical creature which explained all the Deus ex Machina powers. Gandalf basically.

Pretty interestingly, the other main two players, Jack and Inga (which I assume were equally cool names for Finnish kids) were pretty much a warrior and a rogue...

I've been wanting to get into 'proper' roleplaying for years but I can't find people to play with. All those cousins have real lives now and we live in different cities...

I also made board-games and Warhammerish games.
Our biggest one was a Star Trek space-battle game between Federation and Romulans and Klingons, with ships we drew ourselves. You also had cards with stuff like worm-hole powers and stuff.

Good times.

 

[Buckets]

My first RPG was Judge Dredd by early Games Workshop, hated it due to the stupid over complicated dice rolling (rolling for pretty much everything, never felt like a badass trained from birth judge when you could essentially trip over a bin in a shootout). Was introduced to D & D 2nd Edition by some friends and played most versions (up to 4th) on a regular basis, have a lot of good memories usually involving beer. Dabbled in Earthdawn, Shadowrun, Palladium (Nightspawn mostly), Early West End Star Wars and D20 Modern so I have had a pretty varied roleplaying career. Would like to try Pathfinder but don't really get a lot of time nowadays so I prefer playing board games like King of Tokyo, Lords of Waterdeep and pretty much all of the new breed.

 

[Rangarig]

I've been wanting to get into 'proper' roleplaying for years but I can't find people to play with. All those cousins have real lives now and we live in different cities...

I am currently playing a D&D 4e and a Fate Core campaign with friends from the UK and Finland using Roll20 [http://roll20.net/] and Google Hangouts. I have also used Fantasy Grounds [http://www.fantasygrounds.com/] (Steam [http://store.steampowered.com/app/252690/]) for table-top games over Internet. There are always ways and means, even if sitting around a table tends to be the most fun.

 

[Lieju]

I've been wanting to get into 'proper' roleplaying for years but I can't find people to play with. All those cousins have real lives now and we live in different cities...

I am currently playing a D&D 4e and a Fate Core campaign with friends from the UK and Finland using Roll20 [http://roll20.net/] and Google Hangouts. I have also used Fantasy Grounds [http://www.fantasygrounds.com/] (Steam [http://store.steampowered.com/app/252690/]) for table-top games over Internet. There are always ways and means, even if sitting around a table tends to be the most fun.

Ah, thanks.

I have heard of this kind of stuff before, maybe I'll check it out at some point, I'm just kinda anxious with people and especially ones I don't know but I'll see.

 

[Spudgun Man]

That'd either be Monopoly or Mousetrap, things got heated in both occasions, and now DnD is never safe.

 

[small]

My first experience was a game of D&D 4th edition that our group never finished. There were far too many of us for the story and it devolved into everyone making perception checks constantly and never actually doing anything. Then a little while ago the Paranoia XP manuals went on sale online so I picked those up and decided to GM a game. Boy, was that an experience.
I managed to get all of the players at each others throats towards the end of the mission. There was a scene where a bunch of death leopards try to hijack a train while the lights go out, and the Death Leopard in the group took the opportunity to join them. One of the players had killed another earlier in secrecy, but two others had noticed, and opened fire on him- but they neglected to tell the victim, who begin firing back at his avengers. A few rounds in, two of them were dead (one vaporized by a homemade grenade and the other's mutant power backfired and melted him, plus the surrounding platform) and the rest managed to get on the train, at which point an epic four way firefight ensued. It ended with the Death Leopard jumping off the train seconds before it exploded and rolling to his feet as the fireball lit him from behind. All of the other players died, two from the explosion and one from being thrown under the train's wheels.
All the players agreed it was far more fun than Dungeons and Dragons.

paranoia is definitely fun.. one of my favourite R&D toys to inflict.. er have the trouble shooters patriotically and enthusiastically test is a small robot that follows them around and refuses to obey commands unless its serial number is quoted.. which is written inside the robot.. try to keep it alive till the end and when questions why they havent tested it.. have the computer show them what it does "robot xyz345 .. explode". always good to end an adventure that way when you have one survivor.

as for my first game.. well the first session as such was over a few days during a get together with friends.. twilight 2000, traveller 2300ad, AD&D and TMNT the rpg. we ended up playing tmnt alot and when the first movie and cartoons followed around 1990 here it killed it for us. it instantly went from interesting to something for little kids.

after that shadowrun and cyberpunk 2020.

i miss tabletop gaming, and yeah no one in my area anymore and ive never tried it online

 

[somonels]

I tried to combine mtg and labyrinth, which I've never played nor owned but did see some commercials, to a d6 combat deck maze RPG. Then I found the d20srd.