Monday, March 17, 2025
Was Your First Tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons?
We've got a very simple poll this week: was your first tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons? I suspect that the vast majority of people who read this blog entered the hobby through D&D, but I'm nevertheless curious about the number who didn't. If you answered "no," please use the comments to indicate the tabletop RPG that was your first instead and, if you can recall, the year when you first played it. I'm very curious about the other games that might have served as gateways to roleplaying and when they did so.
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Yup. It was the only one out.
ReplyDeleteI think I had three or four choices, not counting any overseas stuff that I'd never heard of and had no way to buy if I had.
DeleteQuest, in 2021.
ReplyDeleteFirst RPG was RuneQuest, November 1978.
ReplyDeleteJohn E. Boyle
I never played Dungeons and dragons. My tabletop games were wargaming ones, mainly with traditional toy soldiers but also Warhammer. Role Playing became an element of my wargaming, inspired by Frank Perry.
ReplyDeleteI voted "no," but it's a little more complex than that. The first character I ever created was for AD&D at my junior high school's D&D club, but that club was soon closed down before we ever got a chance to play. Thank you, Satanic scare.
ReplyDeleteThe first ttrpg I actually ever played was Star Frontiers in 1982, unless one counts Car Wars in 1981, though I felt that original Car Wars was more a combat simulation game than an rpg.
I was about 12 at the time, depending on time of year, having been born in mid-'69.
My first RPG was the French SF RPG Messagers Galactiques (1984) which was published as a magazine. You played agents of the Galactic Federation who were sent to alternate worlds. All the PCs had a power called "Transfer": they could send their mind into a NPC and occupy their body, if they were able to defeat them psychically. It was very useful for investigations...
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting. Sounds like it might have taken some inspiration from Piers Anthony's early scifi, back his stuff was all about mental projection and kirlian aura strengths and whatnot.
DeleteMy first tabletop RPG was MERP
ReplyDeleteI kinda adore that when I cast the 60th vote in the poll the non D&D starters were exactly 1 in 6.
ReplyDeleteMy first ttrpg was Rolemaster. I was a player, so I never came to know how much of it the GM used and how much he made up himself. I do remember tables were used, and that my dwarf fighter, having been badly hurt by an attack, managed to bite the opponent's foot. The GM ruled that the damage to be rolled was that of a "small animal" ("pienen eläimen vahinko") if I recall correctly. Rolemaster was one of those systems that was translated into Finnish in the early 1990s.
ReplyDeleteI was a big fan of the Fighting Fantasy adventure game books and they had an RPG system based on those rules called Advanced Fighting Fantasy, which was my gateway.
ReplyDelete1988 was the year and the game was MechWarrior, followed shortly by Shadowrun when it came out
ReplyDeleteFirst RPG was the good old MERP, in 1989. The translated spanish version. Next one was RuneQuest. D&D came years later (AD&D second edition, the one by Zeb Cook), and I used it to play Dark Sun and Birthright.
ReplyDeleteIn Spain the first translated RPG was D&D, but only a couple of adventures were published. The main translated RPGs were MERP, Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, WEG Star Wars and, later, AD&D and Vampire. D&D, Vampire and Call of Cthulhu are still the most popular RPGs in Spain.
The Dark Eye, ~2013
ReplyDeleteNo. My first was either Fighting Fantasy or Shadowrun, depending on how you count it.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the UK. I've long had a feeling that other rpgs (Call fo Cthulhu and RuneQuest in particular) were more dominant than D&D here in the 80s, but I don't know how accurate that feeling is, and how much of it is influenced by White Dwarf's coverage, which of curse was going to focus more on the games it was (re)publishing.
Oh, and as for years, FF would have been 1987-1989ish, Shadowrun later in 1994-1995.
Delete"No" for me, because of RuneQuest. Followed in (I think) less than a week by Traveller. Year: 1980.
ReplyDeleteD&D had to wait nearly forty years.
1984, I played star frontiers. We were in 4th grade and didn't really know how to play but it was fun. I started dnd in maybe 1987.
ReplyDeleteDragon Warriors, 1985. It looked like a fighting fantasy game book in the book catalogue at school. I believe quite a few British gamers came into the hobby this way.
ReplyDeleteTraveller for me. Fantasy (and therefore D&D) never appealed to me as much as science fiction. I've still not played much D&D, even now, 44 years later.
ReplyDeleteTraveller for me, in 1981. I've always preferred SF over fantasy, and have never played much D&D.
ReplyDeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteYes, D&D was my first and also the only tabletop role-playing game I knew of for probably the first year I played it, until a TSR catalog made me aware of other TSR RPGs, and then gradually other company's games entered my consciousnesses through being in the hobby and knowing other players. D&D was 99-percent of what I ever played during the heyday of my gaming.
HeroQuest house-ruled out the wazoo c. 1992. Picked up the republished B/X eventually and folded that in.
ReplyDeleteChampions (pre-4e) in 1994
ReplyDeleteBasic D&D - the Games Workshop single book reprint. I got lured into Arduin Grimoire almost immediately and then the university club's mish-mash of C&S, D&D and Home-Grown.
ReplyDeleteT&T for me, specifically the UK fifth edition in 1979 or thereabouts
ReplyDeleteT&T for me, specifically the uk printing of the fifth edition
ReplyDeleteYep, the "B" in BECMI was my first. I then went on with the E, C, and M before transitioning to AD&D 2nd ed. But I had already branched out to other games by then, too. Mostly GDW stuff like T2K and MegaTraveller.
ReplyDeleteB/X rules and AD&D 1st ed in 1981.
ReplyDeleteHolmes Basic as a player quickly followed by AD&D as a DM and a year or so later on to RuneQuest 2.
ReplyDeleteMoldvay's Basic Edition. Still the best.
ReplyDeleteOkay. I chose no. As previously mentioned, I count The Fantasy Trip as my first meaningful RPG experience, April 1, 1981. But I bought the AD&D books in summer 1980. Tried to run a module (T1) for a friend and got nowhere and didn't understand anything. I've played AD&D a few times since (few = countable on one hand) ... there's no real way to credit D&D for anything I've done, except pioneering the hobby of course.
ReplyDeleteParanoia, 2008
ReplyDeleteMoldvay Basic in '83.
ReplyDelete