D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop Challenge, Day 2

First person who you introduced to D&D.  Which edition?  Their first character?

Well, I kind of jumped the gun on this question a bit, in that I mentioned the answers the first post.  Anyway, the first people I introduced to D&D were two of my brothers.  Once I had determined that I really wanted to play this game, and given that I was the natural choice for DM because I'm the oldest and had read the rules cover to cover about 96 times, I needed some players.  Owing to my extreme introversion and a pretty strong case of social anxiety, I had no friends in school or otherwise outside the family, so siblings were the logical choice. 

So I said something like, "Hey, I found this game, and it looks pretty cool.  Want to try it out?" 

We rolled up a couple characters, one d6 at a time, because that was all we had.  It didn't seem too great a pain to do it that way; it was all new and shiny to us at the time.  We took whatever the dice gave us without prejudice.  I don't remember if their scores were particularly good or bad overall, but I think there were at least a couple below 9, and I know they both had 13+ in Strength.  After hearing my rundown of the classes they might be suited for, they opted for an elf and a dwarf.  Nobody agonized over character names too much back then, so they ended up as Elvie and Sam.

I mentioned yesterday that Elvie never saw action, because that brother lost interest in the game pretty quickly.  Dredging up some more memories, I'm pretty sure Sam wasn't used in play either.  That honor went to his replacement, a fighter named Joe.  (We REALLY weren't picky about names.) 

It wasn't long before the oldest of my sisters and a couple of cousins were on board as well.  I still clearly remember the first time anyone rolled a natural 18 for an ability score (Dexterity), when my sister rolled up her first character.  I can't recall the name of her thief to save my life, though.  Soon each player had a stable of three or four characters from which to choose for each adventure.  Fighters and dwarves were most popular, but we had a cleric or two, a few thieves, a couple elves, and a halfling.  They all had names like Fred and George and Charlie.  It was quite a while before anyone wanted to play a magic-user, though, and when one of my cousins finally had one, he was Merlin. 

Naturally, the edition was Moldvay Basic, which held until I got the Mentzer Expert set - of course, I didn't realize yet that those were two separate editions, probably because Expert had all the rules for levels 1-14 anyway, so I didn't refer much to the Basic book any more and I didn't notice the few small discrepancies.