The Lords of Hack is an association of pen and pencil gamers from the South Central Pennsylvania region of the United States. This is our weblog.
The Lords of Hack is an association of pen and pencil gamers from the South Central Pennsylvania region of the United States. This is our weblog.
I was nine. I had heard about D&D from a fellow named Brian Nestor, and when the blue box (pictured) came to Race-O-Rama in the Queensgate shopping mall I went out to get it and "played" with my neighbor Eric. It was over a year before I was able to buy dice for the game.
ReplyDeleteI started with the same version, only I bought it at Allied Hobbies over at Park City.
ReplyDeleteI had seen ads for D&D before that, and had heard about some guys who played "Empire of the Petal Throne".
I had been heavily into Avalon Hill wargames for 2-3 years before starting with D&D and always switched back and forth between the two sorts of games.
My original group was my younger brother Al, Old Chuck and occasional other guys from the neighborhood. But, things really got rolling after we added Matt Battison, a guy I knew from school who had stumbled on D&D on his own; and then Tom Pavel, a guy I met at Scouts who played with another group, but switched to our group. We had a large number of guys rotate in and out of the group, which met in my basement, Sunday afternoons (god help me, I'm living the same life I did as a teenager).
It was 7th grade for me in Hawaii. A fella named Keoki Wongwai, a friend I hadn't seen since 2nd grade, asked me if I wanted to play D&D. Since I wasn't even allowed to watcht the crappy D&D cartoon on Saturday mornings, I naturally said yes. I think I only played a couple of times before I dropped out. Partly because it wasn't all that thrilling (six or eight guys playing D&D for 40 minutes at lunch, means not much going on), but mostly because it meant I had to skip lunch to do it. I was still interested, just not with that bunch. It wasn't until we got to New Jersey that I played anything even similar to what we think of as D&D. The guys in that library at lunch were pretty much making rules up as they went along, with every encounter either being horribly violent or horribly sexual, or some version of both.
ReplyDeleteI ended up playing quite a bit of D&D in New Jersey, but me and some friends played a TON of Car Wars (which I had convinced my parents was good for me...lots of practice using my handwriting, and lots of math).