Lich van Winkle has a post in his blog where asks people how they started role-playing. I figured I’d answer that here!

Before I start, it’s worth noting that I’m Brazilian, so my story is going to be a bit different than that of most people reading this blog. I also grew up in the state of Mato Grosso, which in the 80’s and 90’s meant “far out in the boonies” as far as RPGs were concerned. Most of my acquisitions happened during trips to visit family in Curitiba, a bigger city in another state.

  1. The year you began, and with which role-playing game

  2. Did you figure it out alone, or were you introduced by a lone but experienced GM, or by joining a preexisting group?

My first contact with the concept of role-playing games actually happened through Choose Your Own Adventure books. Y’know, those books that had a couple hundred numbered sections and directed you to different numbers based on your decisions. There were a bunch of those in my school library, which was a small miracle since that library only had like four bookshelves. This was 1991 or so, which means I was 9.

Later on I’d convince my parents to buy me similar books - my first Fighting Fantasy titles, in their Brazilian editions. These were more complex, with an actual character sheet and die rolling. I remember this book from some other series, where you played Robin Hood, and which had a combat system complex enough to rival AD&D.

My first actual RPG experience was around 1994, with a version of Basic D&D that was translated by a company named Grow, and packaged as a board game. I think it might have been a boxed set as well in the US - it was the one with Zanzer Tem’s dungeon on it, and had rules for PCs of up to level 5.

Shortly after that I got into GMing, and my games of choice were Tagmar (a Brazilian-made fantasy game) and later a very badly translated Shadowrun 2nd Edition. I also got familiar with GURPS and Storyteller at around this time, though I didn’t play them regularly. In 1996 I went on a one-month student exchange trip to the UK, and came back with a backpack full of Shadowrun supplements in English.

  1. What was your first group like? Was it private among friends, in a game store, or in a club? Were they older, younger than you? Did their style of play shape the way you played later?

The group was my brother and a couple of other friends. Almost everyone was around the same age as me (except for my brother, who was a bit younger). We usually played at my home, and I’d say my style of play shaped theirs more than the other way around, since I was always the GM.

I think I was the only one out of that bunch who kept being a part of the hobby once we split, though. Dunno if that speaks well or badly of my GMing skills.

  1. Your favorite role-playing game. (Was it the game you started with?)

It’s GURPS, and it’s not the one I started with. Lately I’ve also taken a

huge liking to Lancer.

  1. Anything else you want to share reflecting the impact of how you started on how you play(ed).

Despite being from a different country and having ready access to a very small pool of games when compared to someone from the US, my experience bears some striking similarities with Lich van Winkle’s in that D&D was a very small part of my formative experience. I remember finding its many arbitrary limitations very confining, so I spent most of my time in other games that didn’t have them. Though some of those limitations have been removed, a lot of them still remain in the game’s latest edition.