Like previous polls, this one is necessarily limited. I lumped anyone under the age of 6 into a single category on the assumption that very few people first play tabletop RPGs at that age. Likewise, anyone age 21 or older gets put into a single category. In both cases, that's a function of my own experience of entering the hobby. If enough people vote for either of those categories, I may do a subsequent poll that expands upon them, but my gut tells me that most people who read this blog probably started roleplaying between the ages of 6 and 20, with the vast majority being somewhere in the 10 to 14 range. We'll see if I'm correct in this assumption.
Monday, March 10, 2025
How Old Were You When First Started Playing Tabletop RPGs?
This is another poll whose results whose results will greatly interest me. I had just turned 10 when I discovered Dungeons & Dragons during the Christmas break of 1979, but all my neighborhood friends, who formed the group with which I regularly played, were younger than I was, by a year or two. I eventually came to know roleplayers who were older, like a friend's brother and his buddies, but we never gamed with them very often.
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I was either nine or ten -- which are conveniently in the same band, so I don't need to try to recall which side of my birthday it fell on. For contrast, my wife was seventeen (she joined a game I was running when we were in college), and my son started at three. He understood only so much of it, but he played a character and had fun, so hey presto! :-)
ReplyDeleteI was 14 when I first played a RPG (good old MERP), but my players (my brother, my sisters and a cousin) were 9, 8, 5 and 5.
ReplyDeleteI was around 12 or 13 years old. My buddy and I used to play Star Trek, acting out different scenes. Over time, we came up with an idea—what if we played out these scenes but focused more on telling stories?
ReplyDeleteA month or two after that thought, fascinated by The X-Files, we started coming up with our own "horror" stories and "playing" them out. Back then, it wasn’t really a game—just ordinary child fun. Not long after, we stumbled upon a Polish magazine about RPGs at a newsstand and realized that what we had come up with had already been developed by others. My friend bought MERP, and I got The Call of Cthulhu.
If I were to make a guess, I would say that the starting age was maybe 20-25 during the 1974-1979 timeframe, way lower from 1980-1990 (closer to your own age when you started playing).
ReplyDeleteThe average starting age then gradually increased from the 90s onward, as the interest dropped off among youngsters, and then sank back down to around 20-ish from the start of the 5E era until today.
I had a brief experience trying to understand the Fighting Fantasy rpg at around 10, but I don't consider myself as properly playing until I was about 15 with Shadowrun.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I played my first RPG in the latter half of 1979, and we were also of similar age. My friend asked if I had heard of Dungeons and Dragons. Thinking he was referring to Dungeon Dice, which saw plenty of television advertising at the time, I said "yes" and he invited me over to play in a game of "AD&D" of the sort many people played, ignoring most of the rules, run by his older brother. I played a magic-user.
ReplyDeleteI was 10. A friend had that box set with the big Red Dragon on the top. He DMed, I played. We had a little group going at school in the library but that ended after some grumpy folks had misinformation about DnD. For Christmas he got Hero Quest and I got the Dragon quest set. The rest is history. He's still a good friend. Another guy that started playing with us is also still a good friend.
ReplyDeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteSummer of 1983, I was fourteen (and a half). I took to RPG-ing like a blue dragon to a desert mountaintop, and the pursuit dominated my life for the next three years, and was a feature well beyond that. Today I play once again with the grands and have fallen in love with the good times all over again as I DM while a seven year old plays as a fighter transformed by a spell into a killer rabbit. God bless Gary Gygax and crew!
I voted for '21+', which specifically is '47', when I first started playing (D&D 5e). Although I knew of the existence of the D&D game decades earlier than that (but not the game specifics) - and 'almost' got to play one time before (I think that would have been AD&D) but that never came to be. I assume (but you know what happens when we assUme) that the majority of the people here started playing around their teens and I am the exception here, but perhaps the comments turn out to prove me wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt would definitely be interesting to have a 2-dimensional poll for those who started gaming as adults (and for those starting in the 70s, did you do wargaming before RPGs).
DeleteTen for me, but my birthday was two weeks later so almost eleven in 1977.
ReplyDeleteIt was with Moldvay but before Mentzer so that would put me somewhere between 7 and 9.
ReplyDelete14 for me, the initial players I played with were maybe mostly a year younger, not quite sure of ages. My younger sister did play for a while (even had her own DMG). She at least started by 1978 (age 11).
ReplyDeleteI did later get an older player, who recruited me to come to an MIT game convention where I started gaming with older players (though my AD&D campaign was MOSTLY players my age or a year or two younger). The big exception there was I started gaming with Glen Blacow (one of the Wild Hunt editors, and author of the Fourfold Way article in Different Worlds). I had actually been introduced to him earlier by the owner of my FLGS, but started actually gaming with him at MIT.
I got my copy of the white box OD&D for my 14th birthday, so that's an exact age. I was mostly playing with my school friends who would have been 13 or 14, as I was one of the oldest in my school year, and my brother who was a couple of years younger.
ReplyDeletethe year x age scatterplot would be interesting to see
ReplyDeleteIt would be! I just don't know how easy it would be to plot it.
DeleteI'm sure if you just collected the raw data *somebody* in your readership can help out. (If you do that kind of survey, which edition was your first as a third question might provide some insights as well) AGE/GENDER/YEAR/EDITION
DeleteI'm admittedly more than clueless here, but: is it even possible to make the age and year correlation, when you do not have the data linked to each other in the same poll ? I mean you could have people starting at age 11, yet still only starting playing in 2014 (instead of the assumption that 11 years olds first started playing in 1977); the way the two polls are separated from each other seems to make it impossible to make the correlation ?
DeleteI started with J Eric Holmes rules (I was 10, 1980), but Moldvay Basic came out shortly thereafter and it was off to The KEEP for me!
ReplyDeleteI was 10 or 11 and it was '80 or '81. I found a Holmes set with Keep on the borderlands, iirc. I remember really liking the sample dungeon in the Holmes rules. And I liked the name Bruno the Battler. My 19 year old son's main character he's played since he was five is named Bruno. :)
ReplyDelete...i voted 9-11 although technically it was like a week before my ninth birthday...
ReplyDeleteActually got to finally play? Voted for 18 - 20, as I was in early university but can't remember exactly when. (Pretty sure it was before 21, anyway.) Lusted after the idea of playing however.... much younger!
ReplyDeleteI started as a Cub Scout, at camp. So I am guessing 6-8, but that was 45-50 years ago, so...
ReplyDelete