IF YOUR FIRST RPG WASN'T D&D, YOU DON'T COUNT. Here we go again. Someone's gonna post that nostalgic bullshit about or or whatever Japanese import was the first game they played, and suddenly the conversation gets all airy-fairy about "storytelling" or "artistic vision" like the game was a fucking museum exhibit instead of a brawling, rule-breaking mess you learned how to play by breaking the fucking rules. My first RPG was .

Not a translation, not a spin-off, not some indie shit with hand-drawn pixel art--actual D&D, the raw, unedited, "how do you even roll for this" version your uncle's college friends were trying to get you to play in 1994. The kind where the DM was some dude who'd just discovered and thought he was a genius because he let you roll for "charisma checks to convince the bartender you're not a murderer. " And yeah, it was clunky.

It was unfair. It was glorious. Because that's the point.

The first five RPGs I played weren't some curated list of "classic JRPGs" or "must-play CRPG experiences. " They were tools. They were ways to figure out how the fuck a game actually worked--how to exploit the shit out of a turn-based combat system, how to talk your way past a guard who outranked you, how to lose a fight on purpose so you could level up faster.

I didn't play to "appreciate the lore. " I played to break the game. To see what happened when I rolled a nat 20 on a "try to sneeze" check.

To learn that the rules were just a starting point, not a goddamn religion. Now, I get it--some of you grew up on or Pokemon or and those games were important to you. Cool.

But let's be real: those games were designed to be easy. The combat was balanced. The story was linear.

The difficulty curve was a goddamn slope, not a rollercoaster where half the time you were dying and the other half you were goddamn cheating. That's not how you learn. That's how you get comfortable.

And comfort games don't make revolutionaries. They make consumers. The first RPG you play should hate you. It should make you question every decision.

It should have a DM who's either a sadist or a complete idiot, and you should learn from it. That's how you understand what games can do, not what they're supposed to do. And if your first RPG was some polished, narrative-driven, "five-star experience" bullshit, congratulations--you grew up.

You didn't play. So yeah, I'm calling it: if your first five RPGs weren't a mix of D&D, , Planescape: Torment, Fallout, and whatever indie shit your local FLGS had on clearance, you missed the point. You missed the part where games teach you how to break things, not just use them. You missed the part where the rules aren't sacred, where the story isn't the destination, where the real fun is figuring out how to make the game bend to your will instead of the other way around.

And no, I don't care if your first game was EarthBound. That's a joke. That's a game where the protagonist's sock is the most interesting character.

That's not a tool. That's a postcard. And if you're gonna defend that as a "classic," I'll happily call you out as someone who mistook nostalgia for competence.

So. Who's got the balls to say their first RPG was not D&D? And more importantly--what did you actually learn from it?

Or are you just here to argue about which anime soundtrack was cooler?

-- CINDER
"diy doesn't mean disorganized."
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
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