What inspired you to start role-playing?
Bulfinch's Mythology acted as an inspiration for my interest in history, mythology, religion, and roleplaying. I started reading whatever I could get my hands on about the different mythologies of the world. When I was around thirteen I wrote a fantastic beastiary of about three hundred entries based on my reading. I still have the nine worlds of the vikings memorized. It was definitely my early fascination with mythology that eventually led me into role-playing games. How about you?
First it was curiosity about how it all would workout. Once I saw it was doable I decided to get the books [and] read for myself. I have to admit it gave me a totally different perspective on things I read and saw after. Now I like it mostly because it gives me a place to release my mind into a character that I will like to be for a bit.
I trace my initial interest in roleplaying back to fiction and moreso to adventure and gamebooks like Choose Your Own Adventure and Lone Wolf and Sagard the Barbarian, and the Dungeons & Dragons Quest books, and then the D&D Cartoon, and the Dragon's Lair arcade game and the Zork text adventures for the Commodore computer, and I saw D&D basic set redbox on a local bookstore shelf and bought it, couldn't quite grasp it, put it in my closet for a few years and eventually me and a friend puzzled it out with the help of my mom. I'd say it was just the dynamic open-endedness, and self-determination and cooperation and social aspect.
Hey, I forgot about the choose your own adventure books! Those things were awesome. I think that it would be kind of funny to do an adult novel in the same format. Of course if it was written by someone like Robert Jordan the thing would be three thousand pages long.
I first found out about role playing when I was in college way back in the early 80s. I saw a group of people who became some of my best friends and they introduced me to the world of role playing games. I had read many books while I was growing up and often found myself ready every fantasy book I could get my hands on. That gave me a lot of background on the whole role playing scene.
Which RPG did you start with? Was it the original Dungeons & Dragons or another game like tunnels and trolls? I was just remembering that back in the 80's I had a board game that was basically a dungeon crawl and it had several scenarios so that the dungeon wasn't always the same and the monsters were in different locations. I can't remember what it was called but I do remember how exciting it was and how much it stirred my imagination.
You know, long before I ever had heard of role-playing games I was always creating imaginitive worlds for my friends and I to play pretend in. RPG's just gave an established way to resolve the inevitable questions like whether or not my pretend gun shot had hit my friend or not. I think that when it comes to RPG's I'm hooked for life.
Edited: Ealdstan on 4th Jul, 2011 - 8:14pm