30 Day D&D Challenge [Day 1]: How I Got Started

When I was a little bit I role-played with my friends all the time. I didn't know that was what it as called at the time, we just referred to it as "playing pretend", but our playing pretend had really intricate plots that sometimes spanned whole weeks (which was a really long time for 3rd graders). Slowly, as we got older, the playing pretend petered off for most of them.

I refused to grow up, however, and kept dragging Gwen into these games with me. We'd call each other on the phone and play like we were at Hogwarts. I'm not going to tell you how old we were when that stopped. I'm not ashamed, but for her sake, I'll leave it as "we were embarrassingly old to be doing that over the phone with no real character sheets or rolling system".

I spent some time doing paragraph RPs on the Harry Potter forums, and a few chatstream ones in the Star Trek chatrooms. Life was good.

When I was 12, however, the whole roleplay scene changed. I got a Star Trek novel, and I can't remember the title of it now, but I remember the dedication page. It was a memorial to someone's character, Seymour, whom the author had killed. And I remember thinking, "Why didn't he just go back to the last save point?"

I asked my mother and she told me there was this amazing game called Dungeons and Dragons where you could actually die, like for real, and not go back to the last save point. And you'd actually have to roll a new character, holy crap.

Suffice to say, it had me at "there's a chance of you really dying".

I spent the next few years with notebooks upon notebooks of character concepts. Then, when I was 14 or 15, I'm not quite sure which, I met Emily Bear and actually got to play for the first time. Given that I was already knee-deep into writing and was already a relatively accomplished cartographer (and when I say this I mean I doodled maps in class and people thought I was planning to bomb Russia) I ended up DMing before too long.

And never stopped.