Incline How did you first discover RPGs?

[Hyperion]

Received a free copy of Dragon Warrior in the mail because of my brother's subscription to Nintendo Power.

 

[laclongquan]

I think it's thanks to the PCWORLD vietnamese local version, gaming section. I played PC games before, but in strategy like Deadlock and AoE, or tactic like HoMM3. IT's about Fallout 1 then 2 in two consecutive issues, I think.

 

[bataille]

My father's drug and porn stash had a secret compartment with RPGs in it. I think the former was just a front to protect me from the latter...

 

[Mikeal]

I borrowed "Gothic 1" from my cousin when I was 12.

 

[fabrulana]

Think the first is saw was Temple of Apshai on my trusty C64. Didn't get much into it though ... Then got a pirate copy of Bard's Tale 3 from a friend and was totally hooked. The pirate copy didn't include the protection that was only required later on, but I played the hell out of the first part.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Getting a 386 in the early nineties, I think the first 'proper' rpg was Ultima Underworld - no that I could understand much of it as a kid (English is not my native language) - but I loved it.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Somewhere nearby new millenium games still cost small fortune, publishers released cheap edition in boring blue boxes. Among numerous action games, one strategy and one point'n'click adventure title there was one RPG - Gorasul: Legacy of the Dragon.
It wasn't extraordinary bad, just nothing special and I got to set puzzles difficulty on medium cause there were broken at translation.
There was also Deus Ex demo but I never considered it as "RPG", just FPP shooter with weird shooting. Since my person don't give up easily I tried other ways to finish demo. It was some blast discovery after playing all these primitive titles from older machines...

edit
you know what - scratch that.
My first contact was Fallout2 from potato gaming magazine that somehow survived to this very day because they gave full games for like ~$6?
Did not played long, dropped after getting out of Temple of Trials. Was amazed when I managed to convince guard to let me pass without a fight. Because all my character sux at melee and speech. My english was nonexistand and english lessons in school was abyssal so this and Fallout2 gave me a kick to learn this language.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

1981, 11 years old, my mom got into medical school and so she moved my brother and I into the student housing on campus. Soon after moving in we were playing outside and these two kids our age asked if we had played a game called dungeons and dragons. I said we had not, and they said this older kid who lived in student housing also (he was 18, senior in HS) was going to be playing it with them and invited my brother and I to come over that evening to play.

So we went over to their apartment and rolled up some characters. I was immediately transfixed and amazed that such a game existed and was possible. The older kid DM was very strict and the opposite of a 'monty haul' type DM. He made us roll our3d6 in order of S, I, Wi, D, C, CH and deal with the outcome of whatever the rolls were and pick a class based on what would work best based on the dice rolls. He let us re-roll our characters prime requisite stats based on the class we chose using 4d6 and tossing out the lowest die. If the roll was larger than the original roll we could exchange it, if it was not we kept the old value. I don't know where he came up with that idea, I think he just made it up. He was the best DM I have ever had and after that we would never leave him alone wanting him to DM and play D&D.

I think the first dungeon we played was 'White Plum Mountain' and that my paladin I rolled up was killed very early in a forest encounter with a giant gorilla which the DM described as picking me up in one hand and peeling my armor off like a banana peel and biting the top third of my head/shoulders off....

He let me re-roll a new character (A dwarven thief) and eventually worked me back into the game, but I had to sit there for an hour in a half waiting for a time he thought was appropriate in the story for me to re-join the party.

Over the years after badgering him to play D&D all the time he brought over Advanced Third Reich war game and taught us how to play that. I really liked that as well. Then after that he had us play Gamma World and then Runequest where I was killed by a bunch of howard the duck type monsters. I remember really liking Runequest armor and damage system.

Another kid whos mom was in med school had a dad who worked at Apple and the kid would constantly brag about knowing 'Steve Wazniak', I could not have cared less. But he did have a cool Apple IIc or Apple II+ and he introduced us to Wizadry and computer RPG's. He also had castle wolfenstein which was awesome, and chop lifter which I did not care about much. Also he introduced me to computer porn. He had some floppy disks with something called 'French Postcards' on it. It was just some color X rated gifs with some very simple movement. The quality of the gif artwork was fantastic though for the time (1981-1984).

 

[Prime Junta]

1982, San Francisco Bay area, California. My dad saw a TV program about how Dungeons & Dragons promotes Satan-worship in kids and immediately thought it sounded like great fun, so he bought me the basic boxed set.

Around the same time, I got to play this game called rogue over a 300 baud modem line. That was my first cRPG, although of course it wouldn't count as a cRPG nowadays.

 

[Storyfag]

Got my very first PnP RPG when I was 12. It was a huge pile of pages copied from the Warhammer Fantasy Role Play main manual. Then I swiftly moved onto the PC equivalents - the Might and Magic series (though at the time I did prefer the Heroes of Might and Magic take on the setting).

 

[WhiteGuts]

I didn't, they discovered me

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

1982, San Francisco Bay area, California. My dad saw a TV program about how Dungeons & Dragons promotes Satan-worship in kids and immediately thought it sounded like great fun, so he bought me the basic boxed set.

Around the same time, I got to play this game called rogue over a 300 baud modem line. That was my first cRPG, although of course it wouldn't count as a cRPG nowadays.

sweet, in my 1981 story above I was in the bay area too, in San Francisco.

 

[Biscotti]

I grew up playing DOS games on my dad's Win95, but oddly enough I never properly discovered CRPGs until a full decade later

Spoiler

through Fallout 3

Not very proud of it, but at least it got me to check out FO1 and FO2, because they intrigued me.
Caught the bug, rest is history.

 

[Serus]

Computer RPG:
My first two CRPGs were in the early 90s: Ultima 5 on PC and Lord of the Rings, vol 1. on Amiga 500.
The former was great despite me not having any manual and only very basic knowledge of English. Because of that I wasn't able to finish it but I was able to gather a party and just explore the world, find loot, etc...
The latter was cool too, it had gorgeous graphics (even today it's worth looking at the intro - really very well drawn Hobbits) and great atmosphere but i considered it crappy as far as gameplay is concerned even back then.
However what really made me hooked to crpg genre was in 1996 on my first PC (a 486) Betrayal at Krondor. It was the first crpg i finished and back then i liked it a lot.

PnP:
In school i had many friends but no one who was really into PnP RPG. For that reason we played more "prestigious" games - mostly bridge. I'm not kidding, I was in a small circle of 5 people (4 at a time obviously) who were into playing bridge in middle school (i know - , LOL). I started playing PnP RPG late - at university when i first met real RPG nerds. I don't remember what game was technically first but the best was "Dzikie Pola" (Polish pnp 16~17th century historical system).

 

[octavius]

For me it started with growing interest in Fantasy. My brother and my father raved about a book called Lord of the Rings, and I got hooked on Tolkien and fantasy and couldn't get enough. I loved numbers back then too (now they tend to bore me), so I bought various RPG manuals/source material and scrutinized the tables as intently as a healthy teenager scrutinized the Playmate of the Month centerfold.

My first fantasy games were Lords of Midnight and The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum.
Later I played Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach, Fairlight, Heavy on the Magic and Out of the Shadows, of which the latter was the closest to a real CRPG I played on the Speccy.

Then I bought an Amiga, and the first games I bought were Bard's Tale and Fairy Tale, both of which had already blown me away by their incredible screenshots. The audiovisuals were divine in "reality" as well (I wish I still had the capacity to be as impressed), but only Bard's Tale had gameplay that matched. I think Dungeon Master and Might&Magic 2 were my next CRPGs, both of which still are among my favourite CRPGs.

For a long while CRPGs to me meant Fantasy, and I thought Fallout sounded boring.
But fortunately I have matured since then.

 

[pomenitul]

Like most of my generation, I suspect. Eleven-year-old me started with Diablo 1, which felt like an RPG at the time, then moved on to BG1 and the rest of the IE games as they were released. I can't remember how the leap occurred, though. Fallout was uninteresting to me, as I had little to no patience for science-fiction in general.

 

[Tom Baker's Arse]

I started playing the initial iteration of D&D in the mid to late 1970s, and around the same time, during my university days, I was blessed to have played Oubliette (http://crpgaddict.blogspot.ca/2013/10/game-12-oubliette-1977.html) on school mainframes. A few years later, rather than concentrate on getting my bloody master's thesis finished, I remember wasting many an hour on the initial Wizardry episode. Early cRPG gaming holds a special place in my heart.

 

[mihai]

My older sister played a lot of AD&D, that might have been an influence. The first game I bought was Wizardry 7 around 1994. I remember the German "Power Play" magazine to praise it game of the year. Unfortunately the DR-DOS of my father's PC didn't leave sufficient main memory to start the .exe ... so I thoroughly studied the nice manual for weeks till I got MS-DOS, and was well-prepared for the game - or so I thought.

Hi codex, btw... been lurking here for some years I think.

 

[Farewell into the night]

Cousing lend me a copy of Diablo 1 circa 1997, not so far from there I bought a game magazine with a Baldur's Gate demo on a CD. It think that was it, I was little kid then.

 

[Black Angel]

Bros, thanks for all of your ratings. Additionally, I also would like to thank some of the old fucks recounting their initial encounter with RPGs. If not for you guys, I wouldn't even want to try anything from before year 2000 makes my backlog bloated with incline of the past, though

 

[Ismaul]

CYOA books man. Some even had dice rolls and shit. The gateway drug, in the paper-dominant era.

 

[JarlFrank]

I grew up playing DOS games with my dad but we never played any RPGs because he didn't know the genre, had no manuals (he copied floppies from pals), and therefore thought the games were too complicated. So in the early 90s I played mostly adventure games and later strategy games.

It was only in the early 00s when I bought a collection of Blizzard games because I wanted StarCraft, and the huge box came with StarCraft, BroodWar, Warcraft 2, and Diablo. Since I now had that game, I installed it because why not try it out?

I loved it. I later got Diablo 2 and loved that even more, and then my discovery of real RPGs began. There were still some old Might and Magic III and Eye of the Beholder floppies down in the basement waiting to be installed...

And then I met Reapa who came to Germany from Romania, and he always brought cheaply bought cracked games from there, most of them RPGs. Together we discovered gems like Baldur's Gate 2, Morrowind, Arcanum, along with mediocre RPGs such as Gorasul (which we were stoked about at first because the cracker's catalogue said it had 4 CDs!! That's more CDs than Arcanum and Morrowind combined!!! That means it must be chock full of content!), Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege.

That was the greatest period of my gaming life because neither me nor Reapa read any gaming magazines, so those games he brought from Romanian crackers were always a surprise. He'd bring some new RPGs and we wouldn't know what the game is like until we installed and started it. I miss that age of discovery. Nowadays we get so many previews shoved into our faces that we're intimately familiar with a game before buying it, but back then I literally went in blind in 99% of cases. The most I would know about a game before playing it was whatever the blub on the back of the box said.

 

[Modron]

I remember I used to watch my brother play Eye of the Beholder, Betrayal at Krondor, and Bard's tale games. I cannot really place what my first proper rpg was either Daggerfall or Betrayal at Krondor most likely. I was more a point and click adventure game player on the PC until dat Fallout demo accompanying a pc gamer issue turned me into a hopeless addict.

 

[Citizen]

Played mostly HoMM3/Disciples2/Age of Wonders, Diablo 2 and 3D-platformers(sic!) on my first windows pc, but in mid 2000s I started to use a linux laptop for studying. I discovered dosbox as the only way to play cool games back then(never heard about wine in my first months with it), asked an older buddy what are some good dos games, he suggested me to play fallout. So i did. Later played Jagged Alliance, Daggerfall, Dark sun, some M&M, then finally I discovered how to launch win games and began to methodologically play Infinity Engine games, second fallout, arcanum, NWN, ToEE etc.

EDIT: Technically the first RPG I played was not a fallout, but morrowind. I tried to play it during my obsession with turn-based strategies and platformers, but the screenshots I saw on cheap jewelcase of the game were taken in third person view, so i decided it was a 3d-platformer (With all the giant mushrooms it looked like Rayman: Great escape or some other shit I played) and was completely disappointed with the game. Uninstalled in 10 minutes, didn't even made it out of Seyda Neen.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

My father bought "me" FO for "my eleventh birthday" (smooth move), and that was that.