GETTING STARTED
I started playing D&D with a neighbor when I was eleven. He was around seventeen. He smoked a lot of weed (his house always stunk) and he really had a lot of fun fucking around with us kids—he had me convinced for an entire summer that he was a legit wizard and I could be too. His name was Peter Eagle, but we just called him Peter.
One day I begged him to show us how to play Dungeons and Dragons. I had seen old D&D books at my grandfather's house and my father off-handedly mentioned that he used to play. Looking back, I don't think he ever really got into it. He was baffled and confused the first time I tried to get him to play using the 2nd Edition rules and he never seemed at home with it... one of the reasons I stopped trying to include him in my games. The other was because he could never remember the names of important NPCs, which I thought was quite simple.
Anyhow, Peter had the Dark Sun set. He promised us he would let us roll up some characters, but it was really bullshit; he made up a bunch of nonsense numbers and then plopped us down in some inn. The other kid, Vinnie, and I instantly got into a fight over which one of us was going to get the room's one bed and which one was a piece of shit. He was a fighter. I was, of course, a wizard. I cast spook, thinking it would get rid of him. We hadn't read the books at this point, we were just going off of Peter's word.
Peter said that the spell killed him. He died of fright. I had to go, now, and find a way to bring him back. A bat killed me later in a forest. He didn't really want to play, he just wanted to amuse us for a while.
How old are you in fourth grade? I was that old, I think, because I remember immediately making up simple roleplaying games and playing them during recess. I didn't have access to the D&D books at first, so there were a lot of 3d6 games that were just mimicries of the SNES rpgs I had played. It wasn't until I got my hands on my first copies of the AD&D 2e books, a few months later, that the game really began in earnest.
I have literally never stopped playing since that day. Peter thought he was making a fool out of me, but he was introducing me to a lifelong hobby of fantasy gaming. I was already hooked on the Lord of the Rings and other fantastical literature. It only took one spark to galvanize me into Dungeons and Dragons forever.
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