So I’ve been asked the “how’d you get into gaming” question a few times on various podcasts and streams. When asked that, you usually have to be kinda brief. There’s always a short version and a long version of that story. Today I’m giving y’all the long version describing how life lead me to that first game.

I’m a 90’s kid from a small town in Texas. We only had a few channels on TV and there usually wasn’t much good on. To give some added context of how small the town was back then, it took nearly an hour of driving to reach a McDonalds. But sometime during elementary school, the town started growing a whole lot. When I entered school, I was terrible at reading and writing. Nearly got held back from the first grade because of dysgraphia. My father started reading me more bedtime stories in an attempt to get me more interested in books. Sometimes I’d ask him to make up stories about King Arthur, but he usually read me books from The Chronicle of Narnia series or from The Hobbit. And that’s where the seed of nerddom was first planted.

I still struggled to read until the second grade. I suppose I essentially powered through those struggles and it was largely due to finding books that held my interest. So it’s all thanks to The Hardy Boys and Goosebumps. Later, as a teenager, my parents would wonder why I was torrenting old film-noir and horror movies but it all began right there. However, I also found a few Give Yourselves Goosebumps books (aka, Choose Your Own Adventure). I think that was the real first start with roleplaying.

I didn’t actually own that many books, but I sure made a lot of trips to the library. By the fifth grade, I think my parents were tired of the sometimes twice weekly trips to the library for short books that I finished all too fast. I could finish one or two Goodbumps books in a day so they just wanted something to hold my attention for longer. On a trip to the book store, my parents asked a saleslady about good fantasy novels that were long. I soon had the first books in The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, The Death Gate Cycle by Weis and Hickman, and The Jackal of Nar by John Marco. While I prefer shorter length sword-and-sorcery fiction now, back then I adored these fantasy-epics. I’d even get in trouble at school for reading them in class instead of paying attention.

Other than reading, I did try my hand at other forms of creativity. I remember drawing pictures of a street level superhero that I made up called Nightstriker. I wrote a no dialogue, slapsticky comic called “!!!?” but my 5th-grade friends were not impressed. Around that same time, I wrote a multi-chapter Resident Evil fan-fic based on an article from Nintendo Power. I’d never played the game at that point so it was wildly different from the reality of those games. So there was always some part of me that wanted to create things and share it with the world.

In 2003, I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It was my first foray into D&D games. That game uses D&D as it’s rules basis, but has the veneer of Star Wars. It was mid-way through my second playthrough when I actually started understanding that some of the available feats where vastly better than others. In 2004, I played the sequel, The Sith Lords. Me and my best friend were obsessed with these games and replayed them over and over. In 2005, my friend actually read the little blurb that appears at the beginning of the games, which states that the system is just 3.0/3.5e D&D. We’d both replayed both those games numerous times and were hopeful for a 3rd game that didn’t seem like it was ever going to manifest.

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My friend told me that we could basically create our own stories or even play published adventures for D&D but that they were all some kind of medieval fantasy instead of Star Wars. He bought the 3.0e box set (it was on sale since 3.5e was out) and invited me and a couple other people over. I wanted to be the wizard, but that was already taken when I arrived. I chose between the fighter and the rogue. Fourteen-year-old me was somewhat non-plussed at having to play a halfing woman, but that huge list of skills really appealed to me at the time. I grabbed the mini for Lydia the Halfling Rogue and the game began.

For those that haven’t experienced the adventure held within the 3.0e box set (which is different than the one in the 3.5e box set). It is basically a pure dungeon crawl. The fighter really excelled and was the only one to actually survive the adventure. One room contains a magic mirror where an elven woman is trapped within. After asking a few questions, I tried to reach in to pull her out. That didn’t work and now I was also stuck in the magic mirror, seemingly for all eternity! So maybe not quite “character death”, but I got my character sheet taken away in my very first session of D&D. I can’t recall if I even got a saving throw.

I think I watched my friends get to the next room, but left before they got to the final boss. I thought this was like a board game or a video game where we’d try to beat the dungeon next time and maybe I’d survive that. Then we’d all continue along with our characters into further adventure! Not so much though. I never played Lydia the Halfling Rogue or that adventure again. A few days later, my buddy told me that the black dragon in the last room was actually a goblin using an illusion spell.

But that day of the first game, I kept thinking about D&D. I remember thinking about how crazy it was to talk to NPCs. In video games, I had pre-written dialogue options but here I just had to make it all up! In the game session, I’d even asked my friend if there was something like that but he said no!

But that is how I found my first game of D&D and I was hooked. About twenty years have passed since then. For about the first decade, I played a game practically every single week. After that, it’s been at least once (maybe twice) a month. Lotta gaming has happened. I might have a few stories to tell if y’all are interested.

Were D&D video games the path in for anyone else? What’s your origin story?

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