Tuesday, June 01, 2004
My introduction to D&D...
Although I've forgotten many of my adventures playing the various roleplaying games that now adorn my shelves (and hide in boxes in the storage room), I do recall a few characters, a few situations, most of the friends I made whilst playing and, most importantly, how I started out.
As near as I can tell, my roleplaying fixation began in the summer of 1986. As a ten-year-old boy whose best friends lived in the same neighbourhood and went to the same school, I had always been somewhat imaginative and had dragged most of them into one form of make-believe world or another. My brother and I used to make up elaborate stories while playing with action figures, and then, for instance, we'd have G.I. Joe go head-to-head with the Galactic Empire's stormtroopers. It really shouldn't have come to anybody's surprise that Dungeons & Dragons would eventually fall into my hands and that I'd find the imaginative worlds buried within its many books too intriguing to simply ignore.
My original group started with just four of us -- myself, my brother Sean and a couple of friends -- Tim McColm and Sean Smith. I was the oldest of the group, but it was the youngest, Smith, that had the game. One afternoon, he asked us if we'd be interested in trying a cool, new game he had. Since we all rather loved board games and card games, we were in. That afternoon, we sat inside my parents' garage, rolling up characters under Smith's watchful eyes. Once we were finished, Smith ran us through what he probably thought of as an adventure at the time. Today, we'd class it as no more than an encounter in a larger story. Essentially, he took out a piece of paper, made two or three rows of X's and told us that each X represented an animated skeleton. What he told us was that we had to go through those skeletons, and they didn't want to let us.
We chose targets, rolled against THAC0s and tossed various multi-coloured, polygonal dice to account for damage and to-hits. That was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons, and my imagination was quickly lost to elven wizards, dwarven warriors and cunning human thieves (the latter became my preferred class for several years whenever I played).
Unfortunately, Smith moved away that fall, and by that point, we had only played a couple of times. My interest in roleplaying games went on hiatus. It wasn't until the following summer that I strolled into Leisure World in the Pickering Town Centre (a store that hasn't existed there for many years now) and found the Red Box that I had been introduced to barely a year before. Scrounging away my allowance, my dungeon mastering days were about to begin.
To be continued...
As near as I can tell, my roleplaying fixation began in the summer of 1986. As a ten-year-old boy whose best friends lived in the same neighbourhood and went to the same school, I had always been somewhat imaginative and had dragged most of them into one form of make-believe world or another. My brother and I used to make up elaborate stories while playing with action figures, and then, for instance, we'd have G.I. Joe go head-to-head with the Galactic Empire's stormtroopers. It really shouldn't have come to anybody's surprise that Dungeons & Dragons would eventually fall into my hands and that I'd find the imaginative worlds buried within its many books too intriguing to simply ignore.
My original group started with just four of us -- myself, my brother Sean and a couple of friends -- Tim McColm and Sean Smith. I was the oldest of the group, but it was the youngest, Smith, that had the game. One afternoon, he asked us if we'd be interested in trying a cool, new game he had. Since we all rather loved board games and card games, we were in. That afternoon, we sat inside my parents' garage, rolling up characters under Smith's watchful eyes. Once we were finished, Smith ran us through what he probably thought of as an adventure at the time. Today, we'd class it as no more than an encounter in a larger story. Essentially, he took out a piece of paper, made two or three rows of X's and told us that each X represented an animated skeleton. What he told us was that we had to go through those skeletons, and they didn't want to let us.
We chose targets, rolled against THAC0s and tossed various multi-coloured, polygonal dice to account for damage and to-hits. That was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons, and my imagination was quickly lost to elven wizards, dwarven warriors and cunning human thieves (the latter became my preferred class for several years whenever I played).
Unfortunately, Smith moved away that fall, and by that point, we had only played a couple of times. My interest in roleplaying games went on hiatus. It wasn't until the following summer that I strolled into Leisure World in the Pickering Town Centre (a store that hasn't existed there for many years now) and found the Red Box that I had been introduced to barely a year before. Scrounging away my allowance, my dungeon mastering days were about to begin.
To be continued...
// posted by Chris @ 12:51 PM 
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