That's actually a question I have to think about. You see, my introduction to RPGs was around age 10 when my best friend Jay came back from camp and told me all about this cool game. He handed me the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Boxed Set and told me that he was going to play a fighter and a magic user and that I was going to be the Dungeon Master. I shrugged and started populating B1 with monsters. I followed instructions until Jay pointed out that I didn't have to put monsters into EVERY room.
I barely understood the rules but we had fun and soon we had a group of 5-6 kids being driven to one house or another to play once a week. I made an NPC hobbit thief named Bilbo and traced the art from my Rankin-Bass Hobbit storybook album onto the little square on the character sheet for pictures. The group split up because we were kids and kids can be jerks to each other. We sort of played a mutant Basic/AD&D setup (largely because we didn't really understand the rules).
I think the first time I actually got to sit on the other side of the screen was a few years later at the closest thing to a con we had. The hobby shop that sold D&D stuff sponsored what I guess was a kind of mini-con. A college kid name Michael ran the "Fez" modules, which were, for my money, some of the best puzzle adventures of all time. As I recall, I won the vote for best player and got a gift certificate or something. I was boggled, especially considering that there were GROWNUPS at the table. Going by when the module came out, I would have been 13 at the time. That game introduced me to a group of kids who I gamed with off and on until I went off to college.
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