Was wondering about this and how it might not be the same as ones first system played. (let’s not count general dice or battle maps etc. this time)
For me it might be either Mouse Guard 2e boxed set or DnD 5e Tomb of Annihilation book.
I started a while ago when I was young with some hand-copied extract from AD&D2 copied from the notes of my friends who copied-it on photocopies from his friend with tons of house rule/homebrew at each copy.
Then, played a lot Warhammer FRPG, and finally got some money to buy Nightprowler a french game about thieves in a large city.
…1981 moldvay red box was my first product, but the first i played i think was 1977 holmes, although i don’t know for certain because i never saw my cousin’s books; in fact, i’ve been unable to identify which module he ran us through to this day…
The first system I played was the D&D Next playtest but the first rpg product I bought was the Shadowrun 5e corerulebook. I never actually played it and it seems too complicated for my tastes now but I still have the book.
DnD 5e which then turned into Soulbound which then turned into a TTRPG convention when turned into backing games on Kickstarter and buying other systems.
The first system I played was the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which I tried with a cousin in 1978, but the first one I owned was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons which I purchased in 1980 or 1981.
WEG Star Wars 2nd edition Revised and Expanded.
My roommate and I split the cost, and when we moved I kept it. It’s still one of my prized possessions.
I think it must have been Xananthar’s for D&D 5e. I’d been playing for ages, but that was the first book I wanted a physical copy of. I have a copy of the Player’s Handbook as well now, and more recently, I bought the FFXIV TTRPG, as well as the Star Trek Adventures: Lower Decks splatbook. Everything else is digital or improvised
It was a game called The Dark Eye (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Eye_(role-playing_game)). It was weird but fun, and my first foray into ttrpg as a kid. After that I got into AD&D 2nd edition (with the weird backwards THAC0) and also Warhammer 40K (2nd edition). Yeah, I’m really showing my age here 😄
My father started us on the first edition of the Dark Eye (from his own uni days). I started to play that with my friends when I was about 16. Another friend borrowed us his books for the fourth edition. The first books I bought myself were the revised fourth edition.
Dnd 5e. It was my first system I played and then got the PhB. Then did a bunch of 3.5 and pathfinder 1e before moving back to dnd 5e. I have done most of my time in 5e but read a lot of different ttrpg that I haven’t gotten to play yet.
I got the D&D 3e books when I was a kid. I completely, deeply, uncritically loved them. Read them cover to cover. Spent a lot of time drawing nonsense dungeon maps and coming up with terrible ideas.
I remember I went to some game shop in some local mall and asked the guy for advice. He was like, “yeah i don’t know, but that guy’s into it” and pointed me to some customer who was a mega D&D nerd. He was surprisingly patient with my youthful excitement. I remember being like “So I can just… do anything in the game? I can be like, you kill the orc and his eyes are magic??” The guy was like … i can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like “You can, but probably don’t spend a lot of time on minutia. You probably don’t want your players spending 30 minutes checking every single trinket and orc body part for secret magic.”
I don’t really like D&D/its close relatives much anymore, but like many people it was my entry point.
I had a similar arc, only I was introduced to it with D&D/AD&D in the '70s.
Today I don’t play D&D or any of its derivatives, though.
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set
Don’t know what revision, though.
goes looking through cover art of different revisions
I believe it was the 1983 revision.
I started with Robotech, then I worked up to Rifts, and Shadowrun. I didn’t jump onto the fantasy-only train until Stranger Things got a bunch of my peeps into TTRPGs.
Call of Cthulhu sourcebook (Ed 5.6.1) and a set of dice. Bought from a little shelf of RPG books at my local comic book shop. Was also the first system I played.
That I owned personally, I think it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. If not that, then it was Palladium Fantasy RPG.
I was gifted a D&D Monster Manual Core III. Found the pictures and descriptions interesting. Stat blocks were gibberish in my ignorant eyes.
