#RPGaDay2023 Day 2
Yesterday, because it was the first day, I put out a much more expansive post than the average will be for this event this year. I responded to all three parts of the question, the original phrasing, the anniversary update, and the single word prompt. Neither you nor I should expect shenanigans like that every day during this event. We should control our expectations.
Day 2: First Gamemaster
I was introduced to D&D as my first RPG in 1983 by a friend from school. We had been classmates the year before, but in ’83 we ended up having no classes together, so to keep in touch he added me to his gaming group. That invitation kept us together as close friends all the way through the hell of junior high and the particularly hellish hell of high school. In the first session he presented me with an extra copy of the Moldvay version of Basic (B/X) and let me know that I would be running the next session.
Good procedure!
He has a lot of older brothers and he inherited a lot of their gaming stuff as they grew out of it or updated it. As a result, our play during those formative years was a mélange of D&Ds and it taught us to think about rules and how they work early on.
More good practice!
Oddly, during summer vacation that year, where I was dragged off to the hinterlands to feed the mosquito population, I got a second introduction to D&D via the Holmes rules by a fellow prisoner of parents with ramshackle cabins by a lake. Until we started playing, I wasn’t sure it was all that similar to the D&D I was getting to know, but teens being teens, my DM in wilderness extremis was certain that nothing was like the game he was going to ‘induct me into.’
Suspicious practice!
Looking back over the 40 years of fun, friendship, (Satanic Panic Frustration), and fabulous freedom the gift this (dual?) introduction to gaming has provided me with, how could I ever be anything but grateful?
Casting Shadows 
We were leading parallel lives, you and I.
I started in 1982-3, and also had a dual introduction (though not quite as dramatic as yours.) In intermediate school I saw classmates playing something in a conference room during lunch, joined in… to pink box D&D Basic. Then my buddy and I started playing on weekends, with AD&D books he borrowed from his brother.
(That’s one thing folks forget about D&D in the old days: People typically didn’t play just one or the other, it was often a mish-mash of Advanced and Basic, with a huge heaping of house rules thrown in.)
It truly was a stewpot of whatever we had access to~