My Introduction to Tabletop RPG Gaming & My First Player Characters
It was the frigid winter of 1991. I was eleven years old and attending Christian County Middle School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Among the small niche of new friends I had made that year was a guy named Scotty. In those days your “home room” class was the group of students you had every class with every semester, so we spent quite a bit of time hanging out.
Though we came from completely different social circles at the time, we shared many of the same interests, and would often enthusiastically discuss fantasy video games. The two of us formed a friendship that would last for many years before our lives took different paths during high school.
While I had been a fan of fantasy for a long while, I had only been introduced to the genre of fantasy roleplaying games a year earlier when I received a free copy of the Dragon Warrior video game for my new Nintendo Entertainment System as a bonus with a year-long subscription to Nintendo Power magazine.
One day while discussing the video game Final Fantasy, Scotty mentioned a different kind of game that his friend (also named Scott) had introduced him to the previous summer. The game was called Dungeons & Dragons. I had heard of the game before (having read the TSR choose-your-own adventure books I checked out at my local library), but never had the opportunity to experience the game.
When asked if I had played before, I embarrassingly assured Scotty that I had, promptly making myself out to be a fool by presenting him with character data from – you guessed it: Dragon Warrior.
It’s worth mentioning that during this phase in my youth I was an extremely insecure kid. Having just coming to terms with a cross-country relocation from the west, substantial culture shock presented by “the South”, and a general sense of not fitting in—anywhere. I often “exaggerated” truths if I thought it would make me seem like I belonged.
Rather than ridicule me for my obvious fib, Scotty said he would bring some books for me to read the following day.
The next day, during morning home room, Scotty arrived toting a stack Xerox copies that were crudely stapled together to form a book. He passed the stack over and informed me that these were the real rules to the game and that this was my copy of the book. After school the previous day Scotty had ridden his bike to the local post office and spent at least a week’s worth of lunch-money to at a dime-per-page on the public copy machine to duplicate every single page of the Player’s Manual from the 1983 TSR Basic Rules (red box) Dungeons & Dragons set and several copies of the character record sheet found on its back cover.
Old-school piracy, right? As a game designer, the irony isn’t overlooked. It’s a misdeed that I would eventually more than make up for with tens-of-thousands of dollars worth of purchases in the coming decades.
I took my makeshift copy of the players manual home, and read it twice that same evening. I was immediately hooked.
The following day I brought my makeshift book to class and Scotty brought his polyhedral dice. During our morning break I rolled up my first ever character; 3d6 for each of the stats. Kato the Fighter was born. The name Kato was a direct transfer of my character’s name in Dragon Warrior, which in turn came about as a result of the video game’s limit of four characters for names.
During the afternoon classes, while completely ignoring lessons, I ran Kato through the solo adventure included in the manual. Technically, it was the first time I ever played Dungeons & Dragons. After mourning the death of the good cleric Aleena and swearing vengeance against the evil wizard Bargle, I was ready for more!
By afternoon break that day, Scotty informed me that I would need an entire party of characters to go on the adventure he had planned (which happened to also be the first dungeon he had ever designed). So, I created the rest of my party during that break: Astos the Magic-User, Mordred the Thief, and Shadow the black panther companion of Mordred, who—if I recall—shared the stats of a dire wolf from the Dungeon Master’s Rulebook from the same set.
By the end of the day, I had my very first D&D adventuring party: The brutish Conan-like Kato, the Merlin-like, white-bearded Astos, and the suave, black-haired, goatee-sporting Mordred (and the Shadow that never left his side). They where ready to go on their first adventure together!
The following weekend we arranged for an all-night stay-over at Scotty’s house, and I spent the weekend delving the 36-room (totally nonsensical) dungeon he had built. The only story premise being that a king had requested the adventurers to rid the ruins of an ancient castle of the monsters that were inhabiting it. The adventurers were successful in the quest, and were granted stewardship over the keep as a reward!
That was my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop roleplaying games. It was crude and basic, but it was in every way a good-old-fashioned dungeon crawl. Over that first weekend I developed an addiction to tabletop roleplaying games that persists to this day. One that would have a hugely significant impact for me on the years to come.