The ongoing results of the polls I've posted here over the last month have been very instructive in giving me a better understanding of Grognardia's readership. I've still got several more polls (at least) in the works before I attempt to draw any conclusions. Among those polls is today's, which I consider an important one:
when were you first introduced to roleplaying games? My assumption has long been that most of my regular readers are middle-aged, the vast majority of whom entered the hobby during the period between 1979 and 1983, when
Dungeons & Dragons was at the peak of its faddishness. However, that's just an assumption and may well be wrong.
So, for today's poll, I've presented lots of three-year periods – from 1974 to 2000 – in which readers can identify the period when they first started roleplaying. My apologies to anyone who entered the hobby from 2000 on. I've compressed the last quarter-century into a single option, both for my convenience and out of a sense that it'll still be a minority choice. If I'm wrong about that, I can always do a follow-up poll to distinguish between the various three-year blocs of the last 25 years.
Part of this is dependent on what one means by "rpg". I am going to assume that this question means: "when did you first play pen-and-paper RPGs" and answer accordingly. The reality, though, is that I first played a computer RPG on an Apple ][ (The Bard's Tale) as a child years before getting together with friends and playing MERP in middle or high school.
ReplyDeleteYes, I mean pen and paper RPGs.
DeleteTechnically in 1984ish with the Fighting Fantasy rpg (so that's the answer I gave), but I didn't start properly playing until around ten years later with Shadowrun.
ReplyDeleteYou have two overlaps in the later options: 1989-1991 & 1991-1993, and 1994-1996 & 1996-1999. You might want to restart the poll with those cleared up (and perhaps some more options for the 2000s, as there seem to be quite a few respondents in that section already).
ReplyDeleteI'm going to leave things as they are now, since there's already nearly 100 votes. I trust people will be able to choose an appropriate span of time, despite the overlap.
DeleteSure, if you like - it's your blog, after all! It does mean that those four options will effectively be two-and-a-half year periods, unlike the earlier three-year ones.
DeleteI would suspect there are others like me who don’t remember the exact year. I guessed based on starting with Holmes, moving on to AD&D, with my copy of Deities & Demigods still containing the Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythos, plus seeing the White Box and Eldritch Wizardry in book stores (which in my youthful folly passed up as museum pieces - hey, I was already playing Advanced D&D, what did I need that stuff for?}. On the other hand, I didn’t buy my first Dragon magazine until 81, I believe.
DeleteIn my 6th grade year my English teacher would read us The Hobbit once a week. My uncle had left us his copies of LotR (which I didn't read until later) That spring there was an animated "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" on PBS and my Mom bought me the Chronicles for my 12th birthday. So, I was familiar with fantasy. In the summer of 1979 my best friend and I went to summer camp together and one rainy day we were in another cabin and one of the councilors had the AD&D books. We had no idea what they were but we were fascinated by the Monster Manual. Two summers later Moldvay appeared in our local book store and I bought it for him for his birthday. I've been playing ever since.
ReplyDeleteI vividly remember that day in the summer of 1981, just before I started 5th grade. As was the Saturday morning custom back then, after watching cartoons I strolled around suburbia in search of something to do. I ran into Denny, my soccer teammate, and asked if he had any ideas. He was already booked for a family trip that day and so suggested that I track down Albert to show me a new game called D&D!
ReplyDeleteAlbert’s intimidating big sister answered my knock at the door but went and got him for me. He agreed to show me this new game, grabbed his books, and then led the way to the school bus stop where we plopped down on the sidewalk. He explained a pre-generated character to me, “You’re strong, but not to smart, and have a magic sword. It’s all written down here.”
Then, I was off into the Tomb of Horrors! It actually worked thanks to that module’s many illustrations, not to mention the funky dice. I still remember marveling at the Egyptian art in the entry hall, following that winding path, and then falling into a pit. I eventually reached that many-armed gargoyle thing after which Albert concluded the lesson.
I was intrigued, but not obsessed. Over the next few weeks, I joined a local play-in-the-basement group of 10 or so, but was soon bored with their slow pace and egregious disregard for the rules. A few weeks after that I fell in with a small group of three led by a precocious DM who understood the rules. We played feverishly all through middle school but less frequently as high school progressed.
We seem to be very nearly the same age. I lived in a place where there really was a guy who lived in the woods nearby. He was a Deadhead with a scruffy nasty dog, but he had been decommissioned by the Carter Administration, had really no skills to speak of, couldn't quite get a job in a cab (a lot of returning Vietnam vets who had no civilian skills ended up driving cabs and delivering newspapers in the WashDC area: they creep while you sleep) but he had a box of foil-wrapped D&D gear. Another guy - who didn't live in the woods - had also been decommed and he had some gear too. His was worn because he actually used it (PTSD killed him years later; no one was petting soldiers and thanking them for serving their country back then) and the mere fact that older brothers had this gear was enough for younger kids to think it was cool. Also it could be played down in the woods away from parental supervision. And then, Conan the Barbarian.
DeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteI became aware of D&D in about 1982, from comic book ads and a simplistic but awesome tv commercial, and was interested right off, but it wasn't until summer 1983 that I began playing after I finally got the Basic boxed set, with the low-level rules and the module The Keep on the Borderlands (which I thought meant, like, "save the borderlands") and I still have the "Dragon Dice" that came with it.
Maybe a little sad to think back on today but my parents had just split up, my dad took all the money from the bank in a dick move, and my SAHM was suddenly left so broke that summer that we had to put a ten-buck basic set into layaway and pay on it in stages for about four weeks before I could get it. Not fun, but you know, it made me really treasure that danged game when I finally got it, and the door to D&D and role playing was open and the hobby dominated my life for much of the rest of the 1989s. (Heck I'm on here today forty-plus years later writing about it!)
I put late 90s, because that’s when I technically first played, but the second time was well into the Obama administration.
ReplyDeleteI chose '2000+', but only started playing TTRPG's (D&D 5e) in 2021, at the age of 48. Also, it seems to me that this poll is somewhat 'incomplete', as it does not give any insight into how old you were when you first started playing TTRPG's. For example, I get the impression that most people here first started playing D&D in their teens (or earlier), which might correspond to them starting playing in the 70's or early 80's. But I may be mistaken, since I first started playing at a far older age.
ReplyDeleteI will probably do a poll later about the age at which people first started playing. There's only so much information I can collect in a single poll, alas.
DeleteI guess if we are defining things as when we first played then I'm 1990. When I first knew that role playing games existed, then I'm 1982 curtesy of the rather bad Tom Hanks made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters. Followed pretty closely by the Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon in 1983. The odd news story throughout the rest of the 1980s would remind me D&D existed, as did seeing the various BECMI boxed sets in book stores.
ReplyDeleteWhat finally pushed me over the edge was reading the first Guardians of the Flame novel by Joel Rosenberg in either 1989 or 1990. The early chapters depict a bunch of college students playing a D&D like fantasy RPG, including some discussion of game mechanics and showing a new player how to roll up a character. That really fired the imagination and I was off drawings maps, trying to figure out rules, and creating characters.
My parents saw the writing on the wall and bought me the AD&D 2e Player's Handbook. I believe it was a bribe to get me to cut my hair, I was rocking a fairly tragic mullet at the time. More rule books, dice, and my first attempt at running a campaign followed shortly. I didn't get to be a player until 1995 when I was in college.
Introduced? That would be in 10th Grade. But I first 'heard of' D&D (and by that, RPGs in general) that previous fall. We received our much coveted 'Christmas Catalogues'. One of them had a Battle of Hoth diorama that I dearly wanted. On the same page, however, was a strange 'game' I had never heard of before. No boards, no playing pieces, just books. And nearby, some small lead models. I couldn't process how that could be a 'game', but soon found out how it worked. So I'll call that the first I was introduced.
ReplyDeleteI remember the first time I heard about D&D, when I was a kid in the late 1970s, from a couple of older kids who told me they were in "a campaign against Asmodeus." At first I thought that maybe they were fundamentalist Christians protesting the Devil. (By "campaign," I imagined they were marching and holding "Down With Asmodeus" signs.)
ReplyDeleteI soon gathered that this was a game of some kind, and begged my mom to get me the boxed set--which came with chits due to the dice shortage. The same two older kids were very helpful in explaining things I didn't understand--like the difference between hit dice, hit points, and damage dice.
My first intro was spring of ‘82, towards the end of 5th grade. I didn’t start getting truly into it until my best friend got the Basic D&D set in October ‘82 for his birthday and I got the Basic and Expert sets that same year for Xmas.
ReplyDeleteOctober 1977, at my best friend's birthday party where he got Holmes. I had seen D&D earlier, but chose Tractics instead. Initially I wasn't interested in playing, but pulled an all nighter Friday night reading the rules and announced I was ready to GM in the morning.
ReplyDeleteA bit slippery for me, as I started hearing about them in 1979 ... but it was 1980 when I bought my first products and the Gamescience catalog replaced the Sears Wish Book in my heart. But I count my RPG birthday as the first time I played that I "got it," and that was April 1, 1981 ... hence my pick of the 1980-82 options.
ReplyDeleteProbably 80 or 81, when I was ten or eleven. I still remember seeing the Holmes set at a store, maybe K Mart. "Now here's something that looks cool!" I remember it reminded me of the Hobbit, my favorite book.
ReplyDeleteVoted 1977 since that was first actual session, but I suppose technically I was well aware of RPGs as a concept in 1976 when I first started buying gaming magazines - Dragon, The Space Gamer, and the couple of issues of Alarums & Excursions I ever actually saw in person.
ReplyDeleteIf it wasn't for those mags I probably wouldn't have started in '77, and perhaps never at all. Some of the adult (or at least older - some were not so mature, even to a 10-11 year old's eyes) wargamers I'd been playing with were extremely negative about roleplaying, and even fantasy and scifi gaming in general. It's an alien mindset now and has been for a good 20 years or more, but there was a time when gaming magazines were a major factor for drawing new players into the hobby.
Really
In my case it was my dad starting me with RuneQuest, Chivalry & Sorcery, AD&D 1e, and Classic Traveller from his horde in the basement.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to select the 1977-1979 timeframe for more "street cred", but realistically it would be 1980 or so. 😁 We had the red box with the erol otus cover.
ReplyDeleteFor my brother and I, the Dungeon boardgame was our gateway to the D&D red box starter set. A few years later we migrated our PCs to AD&D as the books became available in local book and hobby stores. As is often the case back then when D&D was just part of the zeitgeist, I have vague memories of being invited to a huge intro session at an older kid's house somehow, but after that session or two we often just gamed by ourselves or with one or two friends. One of us DM'd and the other ran the 5-6 characters! Somehow we maintained our suspension of disbelief!
I remember this introduction to D&D happened early enough that I had enough knowledge to actively disdain the Tom Hanks movie when it was released.
The game was NOT popular enough that I felt safe advertising my participation during those crucial middle school years, and by high school my brother and the neighborhood kids had lost interest. Luckily I found kindred spirits in high school.
I still have copies of those original character sheets printed on our dot matrix printer - I think we made up our own sheets in wordperfect.
WordPerfect, Lotus, Arts & Letters and a Panasonic KXP-90 (I think). OhHellYeah.
DeleteIn '78, age 8, I had a babysitter who taught me D&D from Holmes & Monster Manual. He didn't really get it except as a boardgame, had the whole map out on the table, but I immediately got the books myself and learned it properly.
ReplyDeleteThe four (!) characters I made for that game, the cleric & thief died, but my fighter Starkad Giant-Kin and magic-user Grecal, survived, and I kept playing them for decades, I still use them as NPCs.
The first time I encountered or played a pen-and-paper RPG for real was in 1990, when a friend of mine invited me to play in his Dungeons & Dragons campaign. That campaign was an utter fiasco, but I loved (and still love) the hobby itself!
ReplyDeleteI had been aware of D&D long before that, however. I had grown up watching the D&D cartoon, my next-door neighbours had a copy of Dungeon!, which I made every excuse to go over and play with them...
An earlier commenter mentioned video games. I had played a number of video game RPGs prior to my first tabletop session -- the Ultimas, Dragon Warrior, and Moraff's Revenge, plus the classic "DND," so I really do not recall a time when fantasy RPGs (and D&D specifically) weren't part of my life.
I first heard of D&D in late 1976 when Games Workshop started advertising it in Military Modelling magazine, got the first issue of White Dwarf in the summer of 1977 and then got a white box D&D set for my 14th birthday in September 1977, so I'm saying 1977-79.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to see you do a pole where you ask what age you were whenever you first started playing. I think the majority of us were all munchkins I.e the first kids to have played the game. all the zero generation players were adults when it came out
ReplyDeleteIt might have been 1979, but I'm reasonably sure it was 1980 or '81 for me and RPGs. What I cannot recall is if it was D&D or Top Secret that first grabbed me! I met one through the friend across the street, the other from another guy two houses over. The first was DMing D&D-- very homebrew-- and the other just had the TS game but never played it. I do know TS was the first RPG I bought, not long after seeing the art at his house.
ReplyDelete1982, when the swedish rpg Drakar och Demoner case out. I was ten.
ReplyDeleteI only tool up DnD in 3e era, probably in 2001.
My high school was over the road from Games Workshop when it opened in Hammersmith in '78 and I spent a lot of time there browsing. But somehow we all knew about RPGs even before GW arrived. The older brother of one of our class introduced the concept and it spread like wildfire through our year. I remember making up my own rules because before GW arrived there was nowhere to see any of this stuff.
ReplyDelete1983 with BECMI Basic. AD&D the year after.
ReplyDelete1983 with a photocopy of a handwritten French translation of the AD&D Player's Handbook (re-translated ad-hoc for my friends together with the German Red Box for the DM), and the following year with Traveller.
ReplyDelete