It feels like much longer ago than it was now when I think back on my first experiences with D&D. I guess the memories of starting out and playing for the first time will forever be wrapped up within the slog of other things from that time period and memories I made then. Either way I’m going to attempt to recall the very beginning and talk about the first games I ever played.
This is the one I don’t remember much of but somewhere around summer 2016ish. I was 16 years old and things were kinda weird at home. This resulted in very many weekends where I’d sleepover at my friend Jackson’s house and at some point in time that we were hanging out there he asked me if I wanted to play D&D with him.
At the time I was only somewhat aware of what the game was and how it was played, but we really had nothing to do so I said sure. I was surprised when he pulled a red board game box out of a cabinet that his family has in their living room. He pulled out a pamphlet of about 30ish pages which described a method of making a character using a encounter with goblins, you’d define the attributes that your character would have like the class and race you want to play based on how you’d want to interact and engage in said encounter. If my memory serves me I think the character I build was a Elf Wizard or something of the sort, the reality was that it’d taken us around 5 hours to get the idea of a single character created and we hadn’t even gotten to mechanical creation yet.
It was obvious we both didn’t have the knowledge at that time to continue into playing any actual game so we got all the things back and put them back in the box with the promise that we’d one day go back and play again and that Jackson would make a character on his own. I didn’t know it at the time but that was the 4th Edition starter box and at the time 2 years earlier 5th Edition had just come out. Its interesting thinking back that perhaps if we’d had a 5th edition phb or something else how we may have started playing a little earlier but that was not the case.
I still search for that character and I now own the Red Box which Jackson gave to me for my birthday one year. Its strange right? At the time we both were adverse to D&D because it was a level beyond the nerdiness we both perceived we had and now just 7 years later its one of the things that bonded us and our other friends together. I owe D&D and Jackson a lot for that I feel, yet at the time I never would have guessed we’d play again after such a perplexing and strange first experience with the game. We started in such an unassuming way, we didn’t know it but in time D&D and tabletop in general would help grow our love of storytelling and make us some good friends along the way.
The End of Recall One: The Very Beginning
After that I became more interested in learning how the game was played because I wanted to run the same character creation game for Jackson that he ran for me. So I went online and learned some more about 4th Edition but quickly found out that there was a new edition that had come out.
At this time School was starting soon and I’d gotten a Job over that Summer so Jackson and I would have less time together. At school he was an AP try hard and I was only taking an AP History and English combined class AMSTED which he wasn’t taking so we didn’t know how much interaction we’d have (Luckily we had the same lunch hour). We were also moving from our Junior High School (Year 9 and 10) to our Senior High School (11 and 12).
During the first semester we began hanging out with a mutual friend we had who I’d met 2 years before in Biology class and Jackson had met the year before at Lunch. This was Joseph, someone who I’d already played Magic the Gathering with and hung out with outside of school a fair amount of times.
I don’t recall how the conversation went but I do remember needing to convince Jackson to try D&D again after our first experience. We asked Joseph if he’d want to play with us.