We’ve all had a different journey and experience getting into the gaming hobby.
For me, I was totally enamored of fantasy literature and superhero comics as a kid. In my sixth- or seventh-grade year, a new kid moved to my school (this was a vanishingly rare event: the migratory patterns of my hometown are a one-way affair). He introduced a few of us to Magic: the Gathering and got a small circle of players. The nearest shop to pickup cards from was over an hour away, so we just played with decks he built or whatever we could scrap together. The folks at the church I grew up attending were apoplectic when they saw the art on Unholy Strength and likely would have timbered the county bare for witch-burning, but hard labor is incompatible with idle gossip.
Dungeons & Dragons was pretty well-known in town. It was a conduit of demonic influence waiting to ensnare the youth and twist them into murder-suicide-pact cultists who talk back to their parents and work to conjure their infernal masters. The only worse thing might have been The Simpsons.
Vampire: the Masquerade was fine. Somehow. There was never a Tom Hanks movie or a Very Special Episode of a prime time police procedural about it. By the time VtM came on my teenaged scene everyone was too cool for anything so nerdy as a game that was all books about make believe. So I figured I probably was, too.
I managed to sneak into a couple of clandestine sessions of Call of Cthulhu and Mage at 4-H camp during high school. Those seemed pretty cool, and I’d love a chance to revisit either (or both!, why not both?) of those titles.
Many, many years later we picked up the D&D 5e Lost Mine of Phandelver starter set and a friend volunteered to DM it. She never read the book and figured she could just wing it. It was fun, a total mess, and fizzled after a handful of sessions.
Then, later, a good friend I met playing Halo was visiting and tried to spin us a one-shot for an evening’s diversion. That experience got us interested enough to make a go of it on our own.
I dusted off the old starter set, studied the adventure enough to know where the story was going, and talked Sara into giving it another shot. She was the only other player, and we played sporadically in our living room over the course of a few months.
Somehow, I came across an open-to-the-public D&D table nearby, on Meetup, and talked Sara into giving it a shot. I had to promise we’d just pick up and leave the moment anyone got weird or inappropriate. The whole night was weird and nearly-zero D&D got played. It wasn’t the players’ fault but more than a dozen people showed up to try to play, the room was double-booked against a birthday party, and the GM (who turned out to be a really good friend, supremely handsome dude, and an incredibly insightful game designer) did the best anyone could to pivot to community-building. I ended up getting talked into a PvP character duel that we decided was a draw - she forgot to check the range on her Fireball spell and incinerated us both.
We did manage to joint that public table and had a great time. Enough people starter showing up to play that I ended up spinning up and GM’ing a second table to accommodate the demand. I can’t stand to see people turned away, have always had a hard time doing nothing.
When that campaign wrapped up, I joined another one at the same spot - as a player - and rode that out for almost a year.
Since then, I’ve realized that my preferred role to play is “GM”. I probably don’t do it the way anyone expects. I don’t (and won’t) know all the rules, spells, and class features. I usually don’t use props, or minis, or even maps. I don’t do extensive story-building work away from the table. I largely don’t do much to integrate player-character backstories into ongoing narratives. A lot of that is a time-management strategy. Preparing for a session can easily run to double-digit hours, which feels very expensive for someone who trades the hours of their days for a paycheck and often wants to be doing several other things.
That’s how I got into this. How about you? What has been your journey into gaming? What games are you playing, or want to? Do you feel as plugged-in - as “realized” - as you’d like?