(This is a repost, because I am an idiot. I thought I'd included "bookstore" as an option, but obviously didn't. I am now reposting the poll with that option. My apologies to those of you who previously voted. You may now do so again.)
For the five main options, I chose places of business that I can recall selling RPGs during my youth. I have undoubtedly neglected to include some possibilities. If you bought your first tabletop roleplaying game somewhere I didn't specifically mention, please choose "Other" and explain your answer in the comments. I'd love to know about some of the more unusual places where RPGs have been sold over the years.
Mine was mail order from Flying Buffalo UK. The only hobby shop at the time required a trip into London to Games Workshop
ReplyDeleteI still remember my first pilgrimage from Devon to Games Workshop, when there was only one shop - in Dalling Road, London. I bought the current issue of White Dwarf (#20, I believe) and subscribed on the spot!
DeleteHad my Mom send TSR a check for my first white box and GH and some dice (and waited weeks-Torture!) used/borrowed my group's books for the first few months. They had been playing for a year and a half prior to me (starting in 76) They had sourced from a game/hobby shop at an older sibling's college town, and from mail ordered as well..unsure if was TSR or maybe JG or Zocchi, etc.
ReplyDeleteHow come 'online' and/or 'digital' are not options here ? Like physical books, but at an online store (Amazon, etc.), or even purely digital (DND Beyond, Roll20, etc.)
ReplyDeleteMostly because I am old and never even considered that possibility. :)
DeletePoint taken. Well for what it's worth: I bought my first TTRPG (a physical book) at an online store, comparable to something like 'Amazon' (but another webstore specifically local to my local country). (I voted 'Other').
DeleteYou bring up a very valid consideration. Online retailers have been around for three decades now, so I should have included that option, but, as I said, I'm old and the thought didn't even occur to me.
DeleteI received Player's Handbook (Easley cover) and the Monster Manual (Sutherland cover) for Christmas. I suspect my parents bought them at Waldenbooks.
ReplyDeleteBought 0ED and 1ED D&D books and minis at a pet store back in mid-70's. Bought a parakeet, too. hehe
ReplyDeleteNow that's a tale. I'm willing to bet no one will be able to beat that origin story.
DeleteA friend in middle school introduced me to the game and told me about Sid's Pet Shop selling the books. That was the only place in my small hometown where the books were sold. I instantly loved the game. After college I decided to try writing and submitted a short adventure to Steve Sechi with Bard Games who gave me a shot to work on Talislanta. From that I got contracts with TSR and wrote several modules for Marvel Super-Heroes and the Hollow World. Also wrote a chunk of 2ED D&D Tome of Magic and other things for various publishers. Life is weird!
Deletea little town nearby mine had a record store that did a booming business in D&D books... For some reason they had the Grenedier box sets when my town didn't. Got Laurie Anderson and Woodland Adventurers at the same time.
DeleteBut a per store? That is a good venn diagram.
Are you Anthony Herring, then?
DeleteYep, that's me.
DeleteI convinced my dad to take me to a Games Store in another Chicago suburb to get a BattleTech book.
ReplyDeleteGot the Holmes Basic box set from a comic book store in Philadelphia, late 70s
ReplyDeleteThe Moldvay Basic D&D set from a toy shop here in the UK in 1983. It's the only RPG item I ever saw in mainstream (non-game) shops until the 90s (when RPGs began to appear in some book shops and places like Forbidden Planet).
ReplyDeleteMy first game was the Blue Book edition, but I don't exactly know where my mom got it. I am presuming JCPenneys because that's where I got all my subsequent AD&D books, because my mom worked there and got a 15% employee discount (a whopping $1.80 on a 12 dollar book, which *was* whopping 'back in the day').
ReplyDeleteI am pretty sure that I got the AD&D 2e First Quest at KB Toys at the local mall probably around 1995.
ReplyDeleteMy dad was a mostly Avalon Hills games wargamer. He got wargaming catalogues that came in semiannually from a warehouse distributor. I bought ElfQuest from that catalogue.
ReplyDeleteWe had a Rexall Drug Store that carried AH and SPI in addition to a great slection of model kits.
DeleteMy first game was the red box basic set purchased at KB Toys. I had no idea what a TTRPG was and had never heard of D&D. I was really into fantasy at the time and convinced my mom to let me get it.
ReplyDeleteLike others, we didn’t really have a place to buy games locally (population at the time: 876). I’d been introduced to D&D by a friend of my brothers in 1980; that Christmas, I received the Moldvay Basic box from my parents. Later, we introduced our cousins to the game. They loved it enough to put a spinner rack of TSR products in their parents’ five-and-dime the next town over (population at the time: 1101). So that’s where I bought, over time and until going to college, all my AD&D books and adventures starting with the Players Handbook. It was the closest, and, with the family discount, least expensive, place to find rpg books.
ReplyDeleteHere's the big question: How did they do with the sales of them? Did the parents end up playing too?
DeleteOur town's 5&10 was on the xstian side of things and avoided anythign with D&D on it. But they had the best paints for miniatures as they supported the RC plane and high end military model crowd.
DeleteThe parents did not end up playing, at least not that I heard about. Nor did I hear anything about the sales. I vaguely recall that they slightly expanded to have both a spinner rack and a bunch of items on the wall next to the spinner rack.
DeleteI bought the D&D 3.5 PHB, Monster Manual, and DMG at Half Price Books in the mid-2000s.
ReplyDeleteFirst product(s) purchased were the PDFs of GURPS Steampunk and Steam-tech straight from SJG.
ReplyDeleteFirst game purchase was Serentity from Amazon, so went with bookstore.
Idea for your next poll question: *Who* introduced you to RPGs? The multiple choice answers may be a bit much to think of, however. In my case, with D&D, it was my best friend of the same age (10) you had been introduced to it from his older brother (our first DM, 14ish?).
ReplyDeleteA little used bookstore called The Bookworm. They had Judges Guild, Dragon, AD&D books as they came out, and the boxes (Holmes and LBB). They also started getting White Dwarf... Pretty good for a little used book store in a far off corner of the world in Juneau, Alaska. After they closed a new shop opened, a FLGS called Games People Play.
ReplyDeleteMy first purchase was the 1e DMG, which I think I got from The Sentry Box.
ReplyDeleteMy first purchase was in 7th grade in 1987 from the Stars & Stripes bookstore on the Navy base in Iceland. I bought an AD&D module even though I'd never played, nor had the rules. Everything about it just fascinated me and I wanted to read it like a book and imagine everything happening.
ReplyDeleteThat's a close second to the pet store story.
DeleteYes, that's quite a remarkable story.
DeleteHaha...James, I'm sure you'll be tickled to know the module was DL3 - Dragons of Hope. But, that Parkinson cover just looked so cool! However, once I realized it was the third in a series, I wanted to exchange it for DL1 (another fantastic cover by Caldwell)! I asked my dad to help me exchange it, but he put it in his jacket and swapped it out secretly on the shelf without asking. Let's just say he didn't set a good example for me and leave it at that!
DeleteAfter a couple of years of playing and running using other people's copies of games, I received D&D as a gift around 1979 I think.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't buy my first game with my own money until 1982 when I went 'halfsies' with a friend to purchase Villains and Vigilantes 2nd Ed.
A few months later I bought my first game all on my own, the Star Trek RPG by FASA.
Other: bought from a class mate in secondary school.
ReplyDelete(Edit): Holmes Basic set.
DeleteB/X D&D, AD&D PHB, DMG, and MM were all bought at a game and hobby store call Star Realm in Omaha, NE. Bill and Sandy Grush who owed the store treated all of us kids like family. I was very fortunate when I was a kid to have a place like Star Realm to go to. It was fun, safe, and clean. I have lots of great memories of the place. If it wasn't for Star Realm, I wouldn't be a gamer today.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started in '81 there weren't any stores in my town selling that stuff yet and I bought an AD&D PHB from a guy who was shilling them out of his garage.
ReplyDeleteCompleat Strategist, Ft. Lauderdale Florida, 1978.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what my first actual RPG purchase was and whether it was in 1977 after mid-October or not until 1978 but most likely OD&D 6th printing OCE, but maybe, possibly, I actually got Greyhawk first. I'm pretty sure it wasn't 1st edition RuneQuest purchased later in 1978. The only other possibility would be Gamma World. I'm not sure when I got Traveller, but it was also a bit later. I'm not sure I got Metamorphosis Alpha. Bunnies and Burrows was also purchased somewhere in there.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was running most in 1978 though was attempting to use the copy of Chivalry & Sorcery my friend got for Christmas '77 (through photocopies). I now own that copy (making it the first exact RPG item in my collection I ever laid hands on).
Oh, and I forgot to mention the likely store: Excalibur Hobbies & Games, Arlington MA.
DeleteI had made earlier miniatures gaming purchases at a hobby/toy store in Bedford MA (where I saw OD&D in 1976 or 1977 but purchased Tractics instead). They had a toy store in the main space, with a hobby store tucked in a separate room in the back.
Very first gaming purchase was actually Avalon Hill's Tactics II purchased at a yard sale in Concord MA. Later purchases were made at a sporting goods/toy/hobby store in Concord.
Jim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteA department store called Van Leunen's, defunct for decades now, used to carry D&D modules and the Basic and Expert sets (no AD&D books for some reason) and I got my first D&D product, the Basic boxed set, there. We were so poor we had to lay it away. Summer '83. I remember I got scolded by a cute high school age employee there (I was fourteen) that fall for opening the plastic on modules to read them. Very embarrassing. Waldenbooks was another major source of my D&D modules and books across the mid-80s too. Instant gratification was what it was about, since the only time I sent away for something from TSR's mail order catalog, a set of bugbear miniatures, it took nine weeks to get the miniatures in the mail, and I died every day checking my mailbox and finding nothing there.
Yep, Waldenbooks was a really good source. I was a part of their science fiction book club, called the Other Worlds Club. You got 10% off all sci-fi, fantasy and RPG purchases. Bought my copy of Morderkainen's Fantastic Adventure there.
DeleteI got my copy of the D&D white box as a birthday present, but it must have come mail order from Games Workshop (who hadn't opened a shop then). There were only two or three shops in London that sold D&D at the time - definitely Games Centre in a back street near Tottenham Court Road, and probably Minifigs Skytrex in Victoria and The New Model Army in Manor Park.
ReplyDeleteI got my first D&D box (Moldvay) by trading in points I earned selling greeting cards for "sales leadership club" to get it from their prize catalog.
ReplyDeleteA white box from The Fusilier Game Store in Riverside, CA, circa late 1975. My friend had the brown box with the cheaply-glued label on it and I was thrilled that I got the "new and improved" version (with more typos than his older brown box version, ironically enough).
ReplyDeleteBest not to mention the photocopy of the tables from OD&D that kept me going for a while, I bought the supplements in one game shop, then T&T and Traveller later in a different one. Also TFT, all before 1980.
ReplyDeleteI probably spent more than the $10 cover price of Chivalry & Sorcery copying pages... I did live on some D&D photo copies for awhile.
DeleteThen there's the hand copied (into an exposition book in college) spells for Cold Iron from the time period where we were allowed to look at someone's printout but not make copies (all because the printout was not official, not having been put together by the game author...).
A friend of mine introduced me to D&D by running a short impromptu adventure. I was instantly hooked. I rode my bicycle straight from his house to the local Meijer department store, bought the Moldvay Basic D&D Set, and read the rulebook cover to cover. Soon after that, I started buying role-playing games and adventures from a hobby store and a locally owned bookshop, both of which were a short bike ride from my house.
ReplyDeleteThere was a store in our small town called "Book and Record", which itself was too small to have a decent selection of books or records. I found out about most dnd products long after they came out and rarely saw any in person. Always wanted a bunch of grenadier miniatures....
ReplyDeleteI'd been playing D&D with some friends at school, so, for my birthday, my mother got me my own Players' Handbook and an almost-complete set of Gamescience dice to go with it (I was missing the d8). I'd have to guess, but I'm fair sure she bought them at a comics-and-hobbies shop at the mall. "Same Bat Channel" was, I believe, the name. Been gone a very long time now.
ReplyDeleteB. Dalton Bookseller. Back in the day, book stores often had a little rack or shelf of games, and B. Dalton's was the best. They had most TSR boxes, Dragon, some modules, and some non-TSR stuff, the first I'd ever seen of those. I got both Holmes D&D and Gamma World there.
ReplyDeleteThe B. Dalton's around here also carried a surprising selection of GDW stuff, although that was later on - mid-to-late 80s. I got my copy of Sky Galleons of Mars through there.
Delete1980, AD&D books, had to special order 'cause the backwoods town where I was staying with my grandparents wasn't going to keep such things in inventory.
ReplyDeleteThese are all great memories!
ReplyDeletetime: summer of 1980
ReplyDeleteplace: Honey Bear Toys in the Pueblo Mall
what: basic D&D boxed set edited by Holmes (with B2 and chits), the Monster Manual, and a green 4-sider, an orange 12-sider, and a red 20-sider (numbered 0-9 twice). I didn't have enough money to also buy an 8-sider or a 10-sider.
A small, family owned coin, RPG games and tabletop miniatures shop in Roswell, NM. It was the ONLY place in town that sold this stuff and had an aware that was willing to take a risk by bringing in new, odd, obscure stuff. My buddy and I would ride our bikes across town every Saturday and spend the best part of a day talking games, scenarios, history etc.
ReplyDeleteAn RPG and tabletop minis store IN ROSWELL, NM? Ok, that's a story in itself...
DeleteOn a hunch I just tried something. Yes, you can repeatedly vote in the same poll without any login/ID trickery.
ReplyDeleteThat's odd. Because of your post, I just tried this myself, and got this error message instead of a submitted vote: "You (or someone on your Wi-Fi/network) have already participated in this poll."
DeletePerhaps TPTB already fixed it :)
DeleteWhile my First rpg (Holmes Basic set, with chits instead of dice) was a Christmas present in 1978, the first rpg's i BOUGHT were the three AD&D core books in 1980. I got them from a hobby shop in town that specialized in wargames and wargame miniatures. They had an 'attic' upstairs that housed their D&D products.
ReplyDeleteA home goods store call “Discoveries”, that had a toy section. I had just turned 10, so my mother was willing to let me buy it. That Erol Otus box art was impossible to resist.
ReplyDeleteIt was a gift that was purchased at a small local bookstore.
ReplyDeleteTechnically, my first RPG book was the 1st Edition Monster Manual, given to me for Christmas. My parents apparently thought it was just a book about monsters and fun things I might be interested in. Later I bought my first D&D books, the old Basic set and Expert rules (with the Isle of Dread), at a Waldenbooks in a local mall. But since I'd wager the MM also came from that same store, I'm going with Book Store for my vote.
ReplyDeleteRed Box Basic Set at Waldenbooks. $12.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure my mom bought a Holmes basic set for me in '80 or 81 after I saw it at KMart and said it reminded me of the Hobbit. It was the coolest thing in the whole store to me.
ReplyDeleteIf you ever revisit the poll, it might be valuable to separate out 'hobby shop' from game shop - from interviews on 50 Years in the Dungeon with Stan!, it's interesting the number of people who found games at hobby shops that had model kits and railroading terrain (because wargamers were using them in their setups).
ReplyDeleteAs a boy I discovered RPGs in the late 80s while my father, a career US Navy man was stationed in Yokosuka, Japan. There was a very large selection of RPGs and dice at the Navy base book store. They would also order anything you asked for. Shipping from the US took nearly a month!
ReplyDeleteThe bookstores on the bases overseas were a haven for me, as well.
DeleteThe Holmes Basic Set from CB Coin & Stamp in Duluth MN
ReplyDeleteAm I the only person in the comments that bought the Mentzer basic set at a big chain grocery store? Only to return some time later to pick up the cook expert set? Yes, they had piles of both versions BX and BE. So you know exactly when I got mine!
ReplyDeleteIn 1985 I first purchased a boxed set for D&D Basic (red box Elmore cover) from the Yokota Air Force Base Stars and Stripes bookstore in Japan because I had a copy of B/X Expert (but no Basic). The bookstore had a lot of dead stock from the early early 1980s and was only just now getting material from 1983.
ReplyDeleteI think it’s safe to consider the local comic book shop as a Game/Hobby store. Good days buying the west end Star Wars game back in 1990 or so.
ReplyDeleteThere is a definite difference between the first RPG I owned and used and the first RPG I purchased myself. The first I owned was the AD&D Player's Handbook 2e, and that was given to me as a gift. The first rpg product I purchased myself would have been the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide 2e and that was at a Game/Hobby Shop.
ReplyDeleteIf you want distinct rpgs then MERP (1e boxed set) was likely my first non-D&D game, that was a gift. Vampire the Masquerade (1e version) was likely next, that was also a gift. The first distinct from anything previously mentioned rpg that I purchased myself was probably WEG's Star Wars D6 (the 2e core book), and that would have been from a bookstore.
Memory is a funny thing - I can remember exactly WHERE the store I first bought the Moldvay Basic book was, but cannot for the life of me remember what KIND of store it was (book, toy, hobby).
ReplyDelete