Single most defining event of your rpg life.

[MoonHunter]

The title pretty much sums it up. What is the single most defining event of your roleplaying life. Most of know what it is, it is the one gaming memory that truly sticks with us... that defines how we game, why we game, or the pinacle of our "gameness".

For me, it is well defined. It was at the very begining of my gaming life. I was in the library of my junior high school. The moment was when Jeff L took his little white box away from me (an OD&D 3 book box), and said it was "his game" and I can't learn it. "So I said, fine... I will make my own."

I then proceeded to create something fairly equal to the level of games at the time (of course that is not saying much... but we move on).

From that moment on, I was a true Gamer.

Your post might not be so "life changing" but tell us.

[Ancient Gamer]

I have considered this question and have arrived at the following conclusion:
After playing ADnD with the Forgotten Realms setting for a number of years, I one day got an unusual large amount of new players. All of these players had really weak english skills and struggled along, having difficulties following the constant english references. Yet they loved the game and suited in nicely, so I really wanted to keep them and not lose them to the language difficulties.

Then I realized I had to make my own system in my own language, so I began constructing the system and settings I currently use; based on Warhammer, RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu.

Nowadays all my players have equal insight into my system and all players can understand both system and setting.

[Kinslayer]

As a wee pup, moving from Japan & finding Canada to be a strange & frightful place, I watched some other little kids arguing as they played out some television show they liked.  They were arguing over who got to be what character and what each said or did on that episode.  I remember thinking that instead of trying to simply act out what had already happened on the show, why not make up our own stories, or even our own characters...

The most pivotal moment that actually involved an rpg was years later when my grandmother had me read a religious pamphlet about the evils of D&D.  It purported to cite page numbers for all sorts of atrocities, such as how to sacrifice someone to Satan, how to desecrate a Christian altar, &c. I learned then that if I chose to keep enjoying gaming, then there would be a large segment of society that would ostracise me for it, and the larger lesson was that people find things that are different to be frightening, as I witnessed for myself with the culture shock of moving about frequently.  

The interesting bit about this story was that my grandmother did not give me the religious pamphlet to warn me about this awful D&D game, but rather she thought that I would find it funny.  She had sent me my first "red box" set some time prior as a birthday present...

[Druid_Wiking]

I was being harassed about  gaming by a jesus freak in power, when I was 14.
S/he burned my d&d manuals, so I wrote a cheap one page system, and then gm'd it. From then, I became the default gm, as I've always been the best one around, though I just started to enjoy it two years ago.

[Murometz]

I was 12. It was 1983. I was doing lots of nothing in summer camp, when two kids came up to me holding what I would later learn was the d&d basic set. One of them said the strangest thing to me. "We want to play this game, but we dont have a "referee". Want do that for us?" (these were the exact words he used). I assured them that I would much rather "play" whatever game this was than referee it. His reply was "C'mon! we cant play without the dungeon master." (this title sounded significantly more interesting to me than referee!) "Listen, you like mythology right?", he sunk the hook. I became intrigued immediately and nodded. "Well", he continued, "In this game you can make up your own gods!". I said nothing for ten seconds, then "Make up my own GODS??!!...Ok I'll try it." That was a moment I will never forget. been GM'ing ever since.

[CaptainPenguin]

Hmmm...
Well, I was pretty sick of playing D&D, and I was enamored with my friend Uriah's cartoonish hamster game using the D&D system, and I thought... I'll make my own D&D, it'll be sweet.

That's probably not the best way to say it, is it?

[Michael Jotne Slayer]

Not too long ago we were taking a small break in the middle of a session sitting on the porch, watching the stars, talking about events in the campaign. My players were chatting about all the troubles they were going trough at the time; War, Plague, NPCs dying, etc etc.

Then one of my players took a deep breath, looked up at the stars and said;

"Yes, these are hard times indeed." 

This is why I keep on Gamemastering.

[MoonHunter]

Ping: Is this thread alive?

[Silveressa]

(I know this thread is a few months old, but given it's only #10 on the first page I figured making a new thread of the same topic would be pointless and redundant.)

The moment that turned me onto gaming was back when I was 13 on the school bus. A couple boys a couple grades ahead of me were playing D&D in the seat next to me and I listened, enamored at the story (I was a huge reader of fantasy fiction and choose your own adventure books back then) and thrilled at the idea you could make the hero do anything you wanted or tell any story you felt like.

I asked them if I could play too and they just stopped and looked at me for about a minute in silence before the DM nodded and then  they both tried to explain these strange rules to me in a rush which I completely got lost on. (THACO anyone?)

After that I was confused but hooked, and it just went from there. (although I never did get a chance to play with those two boys, I did manage to get my hands on a few rpg books and play with a few other kids during study hall and after school.)

[Drackler]

To bring back the dead, all you need is a few thousand in diamonds. Or one reply.

Anyway, to get to the point of the thread. The point that really "fixed" gaming for me was when I realized that I could actually DM. I had been making maps and filling out lists of monsters for some time, even run a few games, but I was uncertain of myself and how well I could do. I read all of the "DM Tips" that I oculd find on any site I could get a hold of. But then I really started DMing and my old fears about not being able to keep up with the flow of the game just fell away. I've been running games ever since, and I still don't think that I'll get to a point where I'll stall the game.

[MysticMoon]

It was at the tail end of a long campaign. The party had successfully repelled the invaders and were trying to put civilization back together but couldn't unite everyone. I made a side adventure where they were put in a similar, but slightly different situation in an alternate world. And they figured it out. They came home and applied the lessons they'd learned.

There was this moment where I realized that gaming could be an excellent tool for learning to look at old problems in a new light. It probably felt more epic than it actually was and I still play just for the fun of it. But I remember feeling like I'd accomplished something cool as a GM.

[Scrasamax]

When this little brunette girl sat down with my gaming group and said I wanna play too.

We've been married 8 years.

[ScorpionJinx]

The most defining event of my RPG life was when it ended. The group broke up, friendships ended, and people moved away. One of them died.

I ended up with the menagerie of gaming books and no one to play with.

Even the online RPGs died. I didn't play my character the way they wanted me to play them. (I am not talking about you, Scras.) I had DMs who had my character's every action pre-plotted and would get mad when I did not follow their 'script'.

Or I would get carried away and the game thread would die.

So, here I sit. Alone. Surrounded by gaming books.

[ScorpionJinx]

I realized how depressing my previous post is, but not all defining moments are good. Sometimes they signal the end of an Era. If I were to choose a happier defining moment, It would be when the group first formed. When we were just starting out with D&D. Later White Wolf joined the mix with its menagerie of beings.

Our GM was very talented in creating and running several different storylines based off of different systems. There was the D&D game. The strictly VtM game. The Battle Tech game. Werewolf the Apocalypse and Mage the Ascension game. Cthulhu found a place in the games too. And a few rare games saw the addition of Magic the Gathering cards. It was always growing. Always moving.

[Roack]

Sometime after first stumbling upon the citadel through means unknown, (if I remember correctly, it was one the first day I arrived,) I hopped into chat and found two members warmly welcoming me and soliciting ideas. Their names were CaptainPenguin and MoonHunter. Somehow, despite being 15, a newbie to the site, and very shy and unsure of myself, I was coaxed  into talking about (or perhaps I blurted out) a nascent Ylfharn setting in which elves evolved not from apes, like men, but fish.

What followed was an argument of epic proportions. Moon immediately cited the oft-used statistic that we share 99% of our genes with a chimpanzee, and therefore an organism more closely related to a fish would, undoubtedly, more closely resemble a fish. The Captain, in turn, defended the idea by bringing up that we were, in fact, talking about a work of fantasy in which fantastic ideas no doubt had their place. I sat, and read, remaining mostly silent for the rest of the discussion, and slowly falling in love with the site.

Afterwards, the two became totemic representations of the extremes of writing in my mind. On the one hand, there was the hyper-realistic MoonHunter, who wrote everything with a reason and a purpose and an explanation, each detail painstakingly and perfectly placed. On the other hand, there was CaptainPenguin, the unmistakably creative, who wouldn't let reality ever drag down his work or mar its beauty, letting it slip in only where necessary to support the important things. I have always strove to walk in the dead center between the two, always finding increasingly bizarre explanations for the strange, fantastic, and psychedelic.

It's because of those two that I'm here today, and I can write about all sorts of crazy weird things mollusc-like, dragons that hover on internal bladders, swim with their scales, and are occasionally pulse-jet driven or eat lighting with their metallic tongues, but at the same time give them scientific names, and be able to intimately describe the mechanisms by which they do all those things, and how those mechanisms evolved.

And I never properly thanked you for it, either.

[MoonHunter]

You are welcome. 

CP and I always seemed to be on the polar extremes of any argument.  The sky is blue - no it is not - kind of explained us.