D&D Next - 5e Discussion

During middle school a friend of mine introduced me to Pathfinder 1e. After my family found out they claimed I was practicing Satanism and had various church members visit me to dissuade me from "letting Satan into my heart".

It wasn't until I moved out and headed to college that I got into 5e. One of my freshman classes I met a 5e "Forever DM" and we started gathering a group that played off/on all throughout college. After college most of us stayed in the Seattle area, and I became a Pathfinder 2e DM this year. Currently running a game with some of my old college group as well as colleges who were interested in TTRPGs.

I played the Baldur's Gate games when I was a kid. My parents wouldn't let me play "that devil game" on the tabletop but were perfectly fine letting me play all these different CRPGs. Then I started playing table top in high school and my parents freaked out. My mom thought I was being possessed.

Long story short. I'm still playing D&D and my mom still thinks I'm going to hell.

D&D. My brother got the AD&D PHB when it came out in '89. Shortly afterward, friends of mine ended up with red boxes (which I thought were a major skip back. I couldn't be an elven fighter, just an 'elf'. lol)

I played all of the Gold Box games in the 90s and nowadays I watch several different TTRPG shows, but my first experience was the AD&D PHB.

Does Neverwinter Nights count? It was sub-bar D&D online, with janky real time mechanics, built on 3.5e ruleset. If anyone else remembers the persistent server City of Arabel, it was like a smaller scale MMO set in the jewel of Cormyr. I have a lot of neat memories, but its fairly bittersweet because if you weren't in a particular playerbase clique, you were a de-facto NPC.

That was my inroad into D&D. I lovingly crafted busted builds that worked only because of quirks of the aforementioned jank.

D&D media came first for me with the Baldur's Gate games, followed by the Icewind Dales and onto the Neverwinter Nights. Didn't roll my first dice until 5e.

As an old dude, my first exposure to D&D was media – the gold-box D&D games, Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Streams of Silver. I bought the 2nd edition PHB because I wanted to know what the hell thaco was.

I first got into d&d in the mid 1980s through a group that played at the library. Played that very briefly until they kicked us out for being Satanists.

I started early in 5e when a friend from work introduced me. This was before the SRD was dropped. Critical role was still mid 1st season so there wasn't much media yet.

...when i moved to the `states in `80, i overheard all the kids at the bike racks after school talking about their 'armor class' along with various swords and figured huh, i guess fencing or kendo must be the popular sport for kids here in the `states, like soccer clubs back in ponce...later that fall, thanksgiving, a couple of older cousins introduced me to D+D at our grandparents' house and i suddenly made sense of what all the other kids were discussing back at school, after which i started playing in earnest in `81, but it was just that: a strange tabletop game with obscure rules, exotic dice, and ambiguous objectives...

...merchandising really kicked in the following year with action figures in `82, a cartoon in `83, and somewhere along the way i could start finding game material at waldenbooks rather than the back corner of our seedy local hobby shop populated by middle-aged scale-model enthusiasts...by `84, D+D was everywhere: local libraries maintained subscriptions to dragon magazine, dragonlance novels took the fantasy genre by storm, and you could find notebooks, stickers, and other branded paraphernalia at any local drugstore...

...so for me, the game came first and media second, but the mid-eighties media presence felt every bit as prominent or perhaps even moreso than today; it was absolutely dominant in way that only something like fortnite or lego feel right now...

I picked up a copy of the D&D boxed set, second printing, when I was six, while my mother was at a Star Trek fan convention.

Technically? Media. I had just started watching Community and had seen their Dungeons & Dragons episode. I had also seen a few smaller references to D&D throughout my childhood, like one episode of Dexter's Lab and this Summoner easter egg.

But for the most part, my first real exposure to D&D was when a friend in uni invited me to play in his 4e game.

When I was a child too many years ago, I was dimly aware that my dad played something cool involving dragons. I had no idea what it was. In retrospect, I think him and his friends just got stoned and looked at the cool pictures and figures.

My memory is a little hazy on the exact sequence that followed, but I got some DND video games. Eye of the Beholder and Baldur's Gate. I didn't know how any of the rules worked (pre-3e is wacky) but I was super into it.

I went to a very left-wing church (UU) and actually got a group to play together through that. It was about as bad as a pack of 13-year-olds is expected to be. To the two adults who volunteered to run this for us, Vera and Mindy, I'm so sorry.

I also remember some random dude in a local-ish game shop who took about 15 minutes to talk to me, an extremely excited 13-year-old, about how D&D worked and while you can do anything in it, not everything is a good idea. Thanks, random dude.

But the TLDR is: Vague word of mouth -> video games -> actual play.

It was media for me. I started reading novels set in the Forgotten Realms, and in one of the introductions of the books there was reference to playing a game. I then found my way into playing AD&D 2E with my friends.

Fifth Edition for me. An old friend from my Mmo days wanted to open a westmarch, and invited me to play. The server has long since shut down, but I was hooked afterwards.