30 Day Challenge: How I Got Started in RPGs

So this is apparently a thing. Let's see about breathing some life into this blog, shall we?

I first heard about RPGs in the mid 90's in an infamous Adventures in Odyssey episode that dealt very badly with them. Adventures in Odyssey is usually, I think, a very good kids radio show, so it doubly disappoints me how badly they handled RPGs. Fortunately, I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

I was introduced to RPGs, D&D 3.5 specifically, in college. One of my floor-mates was running a game and my roommate joined in. I think I heard my DM talking about people criticizing RPGs as evil and so my guard went up and I didn't join in; I didn't have enough information to know what I thought and didn't have the time to quickly research and figure stuff out for myself.

I eventually did do enough research to figure out what a farce B.A.D. is; I seem to remember an article by Michael Stackpole helping out a lot with that, and I joined one game, but decided I was too busy right then to game regularly. I did enjoy myself. I played a Dwarf.

The next semester, I think, another friend invited me to play as he ran the 3.5 introductory set and I played the pre-generated Dwarven Cleric. I remember things getting tense with my roommate as I hadn't figured out gaming etiquette and had my character pick a fight with his character.

My friend went on to begin a full-on 3.5 campaign in which two of his sisters, my roommate and myself played. I played a Marshwiggle (from Narnia) Cleric that I'm pretty sure was severely underpowered; my roommate and I homebrewed the Marshwiggle race and neither of us really knew what we were doing. 3.5 is complex, but we can already see the beginnings of my inveterate homebrewing.

At some point I began poking around online during this campaign and stumbled upon the OSR blogosphere. The rest, as they say, is history.