Tabletop Tales: My First Gaming Experience

How does one get into gaming?

And I'm not asking how one enters a particular game. No, I'm asking how does one enter GAMING as a culture and interest.

Well, my entrance into this geeky world came nearly ten years ago at the young age of 14. I'll explain.

When I was 14, I was working at a Boy Scout summer camp for the very first time as a counselor-in-training. I really didn't know anyone at the camp in which I was working, so I had to do my best to make friends.

One evening, I was walking through the camp, bored out of my mind, when I came upon some of the older counselors huddled around one of many picnic tables strewn about the camp. Upon the table rested tomes upon tomes of books about something called "Dungeons and Dragons".

Now, I was aware of Dungeons and Dragons, but didn't know anything beyond the fact that it was a game where you played a character and rolled dice. Being the bored and curious young man that I was, I asked the elder counselors what they were doing and they replied that they were building characters for a D&D campaign they were going to play.

I nervously asked if I could join, they jokingly ran me through the ringer for my inexperience, and sat me down to show me how a character is built.

Now, normally building a D&D character is difficult (for a newcomer, anyway), and I was no exception. Fortunately, the premise of the game made character creation easier than normal. Here's why:

We were playing a group of kobolds that, at the beginning of the campaign, were just hatched from their eggs. We were LITERALLY birthed at the very beginning of the very first session. Our personalities, stats, equipment, etc were all determined by the actions we took shortly  after our emergence into the world.

After being born, our kobold team got into a combat with some...creatures, I believe. Me, being the inexperienced player that I was, decided to attack the creatures with reckless abandon. The leader of the party (a role he took for himself, since he had the strongest out-of-game personality), gave each of us names and dubbed me Rath (get it?).

Unfortunately, our first session was our last, but the impact the incident had on me made a lasting impression that gaming was enjoyable and that I wanted to do more of it. Nearly ten years later, I'm still gaming and probably still will be ten years from now.