My first experience with Dungeons & Dragons was not with pencil, paper, and a handful of dice. I had an Intellivision in the 1980s and one of the games in my collection was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This game was a TSR-licensed game but did not recreate the tabletop game experience in a faithful way. It also wasn’t a game that my young mind comprehended. I could not figure out how to make sense of the world map, let alone visit a dungeon, so while I had awareness of D&D at a very young age I did not understand what it was. My first true entry to the RPG genre came a few years later when Nintendo Power magazine offered me a free copy of Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest). I had seen coverage for Dragon Warrior in Nintendo Power and I admit it had its charm but the menu-driven gameplay was of little interest to me. I only got a few new games a year so taking a chance on this weird game that thematically looked fun but mechanically did not was not something I desired. But a...
Thoughts on roleplaying games of the tabletop and video varieties