When did you start playing RL?

[Le Noir Faineant]

Hello,

Quite vulgar question this time, or so it seems...

I am not asking about your age or the year/month/day, but what would be interesting to see would be how many of us confratres started their RPG- and D&D-hobby directly with Ravenloft, and how many tried other settings/systems earlier.

There's that urban legend about RL being a game mostly played by very experienced DMs, so I am quite curious if this is true for our little community here.

Yours,

Rafael



PS: Just to leave my vote here - I started getting into RL seriously not much more than a year ago, with that fabulous *El Corte Inglés* episode... I had a history of at least 10 years of gaming then, though. And had been a GE fanboy for quite a long while too, so for me, that stereotype seems to fit...

[Scipion_Emilien]

I played AD&D during my highschool years but didn't really like that, our DM was scare of house rule and this was leading to situation like my fighter cannot climb while the thief can. I wasn't able to understand the logic of the % to steal either. (What stealing a comoner or a guild master is as easy??)

I rediscover D&D later by NWN. I buy a player handbook to play with my universities friend. As they where die hard old players of 2e and I wanna know nothing about it, i become the office DM for helping learn the 3e rule i was already knowing by NWN.

I create a new island in the forgotten realms (only setting i knew) to avoid the incoherence at large of the realms. After 6 month of campaign, i found a RLCS in special and buy it (new material cheap is always welcome when you study). I browse it and after each page i turn, i was saying in my head : this exactly the kind of world i would like to see in D&D!

No magic everywhere, good and evil weren t neccessarly detectable with small spell and magic wasn t alway the end of all. The vilains where not clone lich but had personnality. Now it is one year since my campaing is in ravenloft and i really like it, my only regret is to not be able to discover the world the same manner as my player.

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

I started gaming when I was 11 and found Ravenloft when I was 17.

[Seamus]

I started gaming 12 years ago. While I'd had a look at some of the material, I never tried Ravenloft in 2E, but I picked up the 3E campaign setting as soon as it came out. It sat on my shelf for a long time, even as I picked up more RL material, until last year when I ran my first RL game. I'll be starting my second RL campaign the week after Hallowe'en.

[Jack of Tears]

I began my Gaming career approximately thirteen years ago, when the original black box was still new. I'd played the game only two months before discovering ravenloft by chance during a visit to out of town friends. I fell in love with it immediately and began gming approximately a month later.

My first adventure was Web of Illusions ... since dubbed the worst adventure made for Ravenloft. That was my only experience running a published module and the reason I've never touched one again.

I ran Ravenloft fairly exclusively for ten years, then three years ago I found that I was putting too much pressure on myself to perform and so moved on to less demanding settings. I will occasionally go back, but haven't run reliably since.

Recently I've been feeling the itch to return to a full time campaign and may indeed do soon.

[Maximillian]

Well, I started gaming nine years ago, when I was fifteen and my first setting was actually Mystara. But since I already had this unhealthy fascination for gothic horror, I discovered Ravenloft two years after that, with my little brother (aged 14 then!) merrily leading the way. But I really got involved in it only 4 years ago. I guess that more mature players may better appreciate the setting and everything it offers. But I may be mistaken here.

[Jasper]

My first bite of the forbiden fruit of Ravenloft was about six years ago when I bought a used copy of The Created from a friend at school. After reading it front to back several times I got on the internet to see if I could find anything else about it and the net led me to the Kargatanes door step. One christmass gift of Domains of Dread later and I was hooked.

Scince that day I have played weekend in hell off and on when ever I could get a group together (and due to real life this has come quite hard)

[artent]

started when I was 10-12 perhaps...Got heavy in RL senior year of high school(When I started reading VRG's)..so around 6-8 years of experiance..most of that as a DM.

[Guardian of Twilight]

I have played D&D in one form or another since I was in the sixth grade. (I am 24 now.) I stopped playing shortly after sixth grade and started back in to it my senior year of high school when a few friends mentioned an interest in it. That is when I started looking around at some of the other worlds besides FR. I picked up Ravenloft in the Silver Anniversary box set and found an original copy in great condition at a used book store. Shortly thereafter, I planned a 2nd Edition Ravenloft campaign and fell in love with the setting immediately. Been playing it ever since.

[Jester of the FoS]

I started gaming when I was thirteen and discovered Ravenloft when I was fourteen when I was handed Touch of Death to run for an impromptu game session at a local library. I bought the Red Box 6-7 months later and started playing an official Ravenloft game after that. This must have been back in '94 then.

I'd been introduced to D&D slowly through expose to Dragonlance and Dragon magazines as early as '92.

[JinnTolser]

I started playing D&D when I got to college in 2001. Forgotten Realms campaign, but fairly low-magic compared to the standard. When I came home for the summer, I wanted to teach all my friends the game, but the Forgotten Realms book I ordered on ebay never came.

One of my friends had bought the RLCS because he'd heard of Ravenloft and planned to DM it himself once he knew the rules well enough. So I borrowed the book, liked what I saw, and began DMing my first campaign in Valachan. A month or so later I did a search for Ravenloft via google, and stumbled into the Kargatane site.

[Jester of the FoS]

The Kargatane site... oh man, I've been going there since prior to it's move to kargatane.com. Years and years. I didn't hit the Goat until a couple years before the end though, but posted a few reviews and (unsucessfully) submitted some stuff for a couple of the Book of S___. Man that early stuff I wrote was crap...

[Le Noir Faineant]

Very interesting insights one can get here.

Just to detail my own gaming history a bit more. My first contacts to D&D were made in 1990 (I was about 8 years old then), and began with extensive Greyhawk and Dragonlance play. Afterwards, I tried other worlds and systems (Middle Earth/MERP, for example), but always returned to Greyhawk, which ended my party confronting Vecna and got me introduced into RL via the Burning Peaks cluster.

My group disbanded about 1999, and I then joined other games as a player, but returned to D&D as a DM in 2002. Since then, I've dropped almost all of my former settings and now play mainly in the Mists and in the North (Dave Arneson's Blackmoor).

[Catman Jim]

I won a radio contest when I was 18, the prize was a gift certificate to a gaming store. I used it to get the D&D basic boxed set . That was 1978. I've been a huge fan ever since, excepting the 5 year diversion I took into Magic:The Gathering in the 90's. I bought the original I6:Ravenloft when it came out at this time of year back in 1983, and have been trapped in the mists ever since. (and yes, that does now make me 45)

[Joël of the FoS]

Similar to CatmanJ (but I didn't win anything then and never touched M:tG).

I was introduced to D&D in 1981 at high school from a friend coming back from a summer in Alberta where he learned of the game.

I designed my first PC and was already madly hooked. I played I-6 the year it came out, or perhaps the year after. My PC got polymorphed into a bird by Strahd. It's still a joke between me and the DM friend because once in a while I still chirp chirp as I did for the rest of the game.

When the infamous Black Box came out, I ran to get it. So I was playing for about a little more then 10 years when I got it. I started by playing weekend in hell adventures during the 90's and 2000's - this campaign started in 1987 (and is still running, through changes from 1st ed to 2nd ed, then 2nd to 3.5) and we had a lot of fun switching words from FR to RL to planescape and then to Greyhawk (with a dash of CoC in it too).

But then the PCs were too high to my taste to bring them into RL, so we started a 2nd campaign with low level RL natives.

Joël