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What year did you start playing roleplaying games?


Trifletraxor

What year did you start playing roleplaying games?  

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  1. 1. What year did you start playing roleplaying games?

    • 1974-1980
      41
    • 1981-1985
      37
    • 1986-1990
      7
    • 1991-1995
      8
    • 1996-2000
      3
    • 2001-2005
      1
    • 2006-2009
      0


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back in 1985 I was a little kid but finally old enough to get my cousin to let me play DnD.:) Shortly after that me and my group turned to ADnD and eventually we came to todays versions with small visits to other systems and genres.;-( Dearly miss the days of real roleplaying and looking to use BRP to bring it back to my group.:thumb:

The gaming industry is trading quality for quantity.

The popular systems focus on the latest books powers, miniture battles, or encouraging MMORPG play and your imagination is somewhere else.

I weep for those who were born into roleplaying as a rehearsed tactical experience. :(

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I probably started as a player in a GURPS fantasy game around 1992 or '93. Took up game mastering myself around 1995, first with GURPS, then Vampire. I only recently picked up Call of Cthulhu, Unisystem and HEX which are my favourites at the moment.

I was born in 1971 so I came to RPGs rather late.

Edited by Vorax Transtellaris
RPGbericht (Dutch)
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Yes, I interpret it more hopefully: we who have met BRP-systems have stuck with them, even for up to thirty years!

:D

What I was getting at was what the lower "exposure" rates in recent years meant fewer new gamers got into BRP.

A similar age-survey of players of other games, those more prevalent these days like D&D and Warhammer, might be interesting. I suspect the age-range would be the opposite of ours - vastly more short-term (predominantly younger) players.

I think you got the right idea,in general. The average age for gamers is younger than the average age here, although Warhammer probably isn't a very prevalent RPG. But I expect that there is a rough correlation between older games ans older gamers. I believe that is less a matter of choice that it is one of opportunity (or lack thereof). The reason why all the RQ and Stormbringer players are older is than younger players haven't been introduced to those older systems.

I think that if you look at the RPGs that have been around awhile, you'll see a similar trend. Most of the DragonQuest, West End d6, Flashing Blades, and Jame Bond RPG players are probably a bit older too.

I bet it's due to the dominance of other shallower games. People play them for a short time, get bored, grow out of it, and quit - thinking they've "done roleplaying - that's for kids...". (This is particularly evident with WH/40K). A great shame. We're back to exposure. Show 'em there's something better than bashing stuff: plots, personality, moral dilemmas, character development - real roleplaying.

Our survey says... experiencing a more satisfying system gives people a hobby for life.

Partially. I think there are other factors too. Most gamers seem to start gaming in their teens, and that is a time where a lot of new factors get added to their lives. Over the course of a half dozen years they have to deal with things like dating/sex, higher education, leaving home, driving, and entering the workforce.

I think another factor is also the larger range of products out today. Back when most of us got into gaming, there were a certain number of companies (perhaps more than today), but they each produced a limited number of products each year. Today, many companies produce lots of products. Many games are now set up to be able to produce a series of books, just look at the number of "clan" books some RPGs have. Since a typical gamer can only spend a certain amount of gaming each week/month/year, then more products translates into more things vying for a share of that limited amount of cash.

Back in the old days, I used to get all the supplements for the RPGs that I followed. Now even as a kid with an allowance, I didn't find it too difficult to keep up with the various lines that I was interested in. I have all the RQ2 stuff, all the Bond Stuff, all the FASA Trek stuff, and more. I was able to do this while buying quite a few "one off" games.

As time went on, this became more difficult. More products not only meant more competition for my dollar, but also meant a greater chance of missing something, because my local store also had to make decisions about what to carry and what to pass up.

So I think today,a lot of gamers get into one line or another and that makes it all the harder to get them into another RPG. They end up choosing between a new RPG, or the latest supplement in a game that they are already into.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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Yes, I interpret it more hopefully: we who have met BRP-systems have stuck with them, even for up to thirty years!

That doesn't necessarily follow quite the way you think; while I'm playing in a BRP game again at the moment, its been far from the dominant game system in my gaming habits over the years once you get out of the early 80's. I've not only been all over the map, if you had to find a single game system and say its dominated my use, it'd probably be the Hero System, not BRP derivatives. I just haven't discarded BRP as an option (but often its either been too much work to get it to support a campaign I wanted, wouldn't support the style well, or both).

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So I think today,a lot of gamers get into one line or another and that makes it all the harder to get them into another RPG. They end up choosing between a new RPG, or the latest supplement in a game that they are already into.

What I also hear quite often is that more than a few gamers prefer to learn

to handle one good game very well instead of continuing to search for a po-

tentially better one.

A good example from over here is the fantasy roleplaying game "Das Schwar-

ze Auge" (DSA). It is its own little universe, with meanwhile four editions, do-

zens of supplements, a setting where each stone seems to be named and

mapped and connected to a dozen historical events, and so on.

It takes years to learn DSA well, more because of the setting than the rules,

and once a player has learned the ropes and feels comfortably at home in

Aventurien (the game's world), he becomes very unlikely to invest much time

and money into another game, too - he likes DSA and is good at it, so why

waste time on something else, and start again from "square one" ?

"Mind like parachute, function only when open."

(Charlie Chan)

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rust,

I don't doubt that. Most of the players in my area play D&D, and tend to shy away from other games in part because they would have to learn the rules. When one of the local D&D groups switched from AD&D to 3E, 3.5, and now 4,0 it has been accompanied by a good deal of complaining about having to learn a new system.

I also suspect that part of is isn't about learning a new system than it is about not being able to do the things they could do in the old one. I've seen a lot of players get annoyed when tactics they learned for one game (like charging missile users in AD&D) resulted in a slaughter in another RPG (RQ, Bond, Morrow Project). Often, instead of admitting that they screwed up (by doing a frontal assault across a football field against a protected .50 cal. MG) they will try to claim that there is something wrong with the system, and then high-tail it back to their previous RPG.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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Rules have grown greatly over the years. In the 80s when I really did most of my gaming most games were 128 pages or less, the largest typical game was possibly 256 pages or a boxed set with 2 or 3 books but much of the added pages were supplemental, not rules. There was less investment in cash or time to learn the rules. You could buy a new game, read it on the bus ride home and start a game that weekend.

The current trend seems to be toward massive tomes of rules, covering every little detail. I look at HERO as a perfect example, Champions was a 128 page book, the 3rd edition genres (DI, FH, JI) were 256 page books.

HERO 5th ed was 500 some odd pages, and HERO 6th is 2 books of 300 or so pages (maybe larger? I believe I've seen total page count is 700+). Not a lot of new rules so much as a bloated very detailed explaination of every rule. HERO is not unique in this, just one of the more extreme examples I know of.

A game system has become a major investment in time and cash, so I can understand why the 80's gamer who would buy and play several games ayear, has changed to a more conservative pick a game and stick with it style of play.

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Rules have grown greatly over the years. In the 80s when I really did most of my gaming most games were 128 pages or less, the largest typical game was possibly 256 pages or a boxed set with 2 or 3 books but much of the added pages were supplemental, not rules. There was less investment in cash or time to learn the rules. You could buy a new game, read it on the bus ride home and start a game that weekend.

The current trend seems to be toward massive tomes of rules, covering every little detail. I look at HERO as a perfect example, Champions was a 128 page book, the 3rd edition genres (DI, FH, JI) were 256 page books.

HERO 5th ed was 500 some odd pages, and HERO 6th is 2 books of 300 or so pages (maybe larger? I believe I've seen total page count is 700+). Not a lot of new rules so much as a bloated very detailed explaination of every rule. HERO is not unique in this, just one of the more extreme examples I know of.

A game system has become a major investment in time and cash, so I can understand why the 80's gamer who would buy and play several games ayear, has changed to a more conservative pick a game and stick with it style of play.

There is some truth to that. I don't think that the increase in book size it is as much trying to cover all situations (the recent trend in RPGs is towards fewer rules) as it is all the "fluff" that has been added to the rules.

Back in the 80s, most RPGs were comprised of rules. The designers tried to squeeze in as much as they could into thier 128 pages or so. Today, a lot of the book is taken up by introductory text, and fiction. In many cases fairly important stuff is left out of the core book so it can be "spun off" into a supplement.

For example take a look at White Wolf's World of Darkness line. In the new World of Darkness core rulebook, you are something like 30 pages into the book before you get to character creation. In a RPG from the 80s, you probably would have gotten through character creation by page 30.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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Most of the early roleplaying games also left much of the setting's details to

the referee's and players' imagination, they provided only a basic framework.

With many of the more recent games, the rules are comparatively slim, but

the setting descriptions contain lots and lots of details, almost down to the

colour of the underwear of the second cousin of the high priest's servant.

In the early years, I considered games like Empire of the Petal Throne as ex-

traordinarily "setting heavy", but compared to material like the most recent

version of D&D's Forgotten Realms the early versions of the world of Tekumel

seem almost "skeletal" in the amount of detail.

The "fluff inflation" not only helps to sell supplement after supplement on sub-

jects like the newest fashion at the Emperor's court, it also leads to a stran-

ge kind of competition especially between younger players: You have to have

the latest supplement about the bloodthirsty flying deep-sea krakens of New

Guinea and to know the length of their tentacles for each sub-species - or

you are not "in", no "real gamer".

"Mind like parachute, function only when open."

(Charlie Chan)

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I don't remember the exact year, but I think it was sometime around 1981-1984. I was pretty young when my cousins introduced us to D&D (it was one of the boxed sets - either red or blue). Eventually we moved up to AD&D, which was game the majority of our early gaming. Later on, one friend switched over to using Rolemaster for his game then later on his younger brother started running a RuneQuest 3 campaign (in a homebrew world, not in Glorantha).

I remember briefly dabbling with Star Frontiers at one point, and maybe Villains & Vigilantes. Touched on Shadowrun a couple times in early college, and maybe Champions around the same time. But after getting into RuneQuest, that became my own personal choice for running campaigns. Now I've got BRP and I hope to start a game with that soon.

Pyronnic

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I think a big part of the move towards fluff is that fluff is easy to produce. Rules take careful consideration, play testing, and balancing. Editing of rules is much harder as well, you have to make sure there are no contradictions and that the rules are presented clearly and logically.

Fluff you just have to write and then edit for grammar and basic lucidity.

Statting up npc's and foes is a lot of work in many systems (BRP definitely being one of those systems) - it takes time and is also harder to edit.

Game companies make money by selling books. The more pages the more money. The more books the more money. Fluff is easy to write and publish. Rules is hard and time consuming.

Back in the 70's and 80's games were developed by game developers and they developed rules - that is what makes a game after all. Just about every publisher today says that adventures don't sell as much as source books, but they are a lot of work to produce; yet in the early days of D&D the Adventure Module was the primary support for the game because TSR didn't know adventures weren't good business - no one had figured that out yet. It was a hobby first and a business as an afterthought. Chaosium may be one of the last companies surviving on that model ('cause good business sense is certainly not their strong point). Now most game companies are businesses that produce games, not gamers that produce businesses.

Now no one gets into the Pen and Paper RPG business just for the money - on some level just about everyone in the industry is a gamer. But as in any market those with a shrewd business sense tend to eventually dominate the market.

Though the production quality was lower, most games back then were labors of love, and it showed. That is why many Monographs are as good if not better than many commercial products - they are something the author produces because the material is very dear to them and certainly not something they produce just for the money. Many modern RPG's are written by writers who are told to write x words about subject y and have it handed in by date z - and sometimes that fact is obvious.

In the end fluff is good business.

Help kill a Trollkin here.

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I don't buy the "adventures don't sell" argument.

Every successful RPG line publishes adventures. Many GMs prefer to buy adventures rather than write their own, and I think one reason why D&D did so well was because of the published adventures.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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I don't buy the "adventures don't sell" argument.

It's not so much that adventures don't sell. it's that adventures only sell to the GM in a group, but rule material sells to everyone n the group, player and GM both.

As a GM, I don't want my players to buy and read prepared adventures before I run, but i wold love it if they bought and read the rules and didn't just rely on my explaining things to them.

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It's not so much that adventures don't sell. it's that adventures only sell to the GM in a group, but rule material sells to everyone n the group, player and GM both.

As a GM, I don't want my players to buy and read prepared adventures before I run, but i wold love it if they bought and read the rules and didn't just rely on my explaining things to them.

I'd love it if my players did that, too. It doesn't seem to work that way, though. Usually the GM is the one who bought the rulebook. Then the GM teaches everyone else how to play the game.

If the game goes well, some players might buy the core book, and possibly some supplement that pertains to their character (a fighter book, martial artist"s book, clan book, species book, etc.). But usually the GM spends more on a RPG that the rest of the players combined.

I suspect that is one reason why CCGs generate more revenue that RPGs. With a CCG everyone has to buy cards, and buy new cards if they want to diversify thier decks. With a RPG, you only need one copy of the rule book, some dice, pencil, paper and a little imagination and you can diversify to your hearts content.

Back in my Pendragon days, I recall telling my players that if the spent half a much on Pendragon as they did on Magic cards Chaosium might publish more supplements. It got a couple of people to break down a buy a rule book-after a decade of playing.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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I think the real issue with adventure modules is many have limited utility, once you run through it, it goes back on the shelf. This is an area I think PDFs are particularly useful. Lower cost to buy, easier storage (HDD) and low cost to make.

Looking back some of the more useful modules included stuff that could continue to be used, new toys, new rules, details of the local area beyond that actually required for the adventure to help the GM in the future.

I'm specifically thinking about the stuff from Twilight 2000 and The Morrow Project, although they are not unique.

Each of their modules added something new to the game and really set up play well beyond the actual mission included. With lots of detail about the area, contacts, plot ideas etc. In effect they were not a one shot as much as a starter for a campaign.

While I think there is truth in the statement adventures don't make money, I think that is a short sighted statement. The sales of the modules may not be highly rewarding, but I think they create sales of the other game components. I think that is one of the reasons D&D has maintained its place, it always has a bunch of stuff on the shelf so people can buy everything they need to start playing right now.

For games like GURPS, HERO and BRP I think published adventures are less useful because they already attract players more interested in creating stuff. I think there is still a place for pre gen adventures, but probably as part of a larger setting book not the D&D style packaged adventure.

Edited by Toadmaster
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Good point Todamaster.

One of the things that I liked about RQ2 was that it had more campaign packs that adventure modules. Something like Borderlands or Prax not only gave a GM a setting and several adventures, but enough material and hooks to make more. I wish companies still did stuff like that.

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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I'm an '81 child of Moldvay & Cook/Marsh D&D, but I grew up pretty fast into 1st Ed. AD&D and then TFT and Traveller. Despite having a copy of 2nd Ed. Runequest, the box of Superworld and the delightful 16-page BRP I managed not to play a game using this fabulous system (other than one brief con game of RQ in '85) until this very year. Weird.

75/420

---

Geek blogging at http://strangestones.com

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I started in late 1980, when my parents gave me the Holmes Basic D&D Set for my 10th birthday.

Unlike most others here, I've only recently become interested (or, more precisely 're-interested') in BRP games. I did play some BRP games during the 1980s (RQ, CoC, and Hawkmoon), and I read Elric! around 1993-4, but most of my gaming has been with some version of D&D or Rolemaster.

Now I regret having ignored BRP for the past 15 years! :o

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I don't buy the "adventures don't sell" argument.

Every successful RPG line publishes adventures. Many GMs prefer to buy adventures rather than write their own, and I think one reason why D&D did so well was because of the published adventures.

Talk to any of them of any size. They'll tell you they barely pay for themselves.

The reason they sell them (and you'll tend to notice as the size of the company increases, the amount of them they sell goes down) is they feed into the main game line and other products. But the adventures themselves never really pay for themselves; they're one shot products GMs only buy, and not all of them.

Contrast them with almost any other class of supplemental material.

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Looking back some of the more useful modules included stuff that could continue to be used, new toys, new rules, details of the local area beyond that actually required for the adventure to help the GM in the future.

Same with the RQ2 supplements!

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Funny thing, I rarely ever Ran a straight adventure, I simply used them for a jumping off points, and flavor for my games. My players often would go off on another tack, and I would have to change things anyway. The only straight adventures I ever ran were dugeon crawls, where you had to "a" "b" "c" to get to "x" "y" "z", and that was just in dnd.

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I've also run very few straight. When we first started, we all had various AD&D modules, but really we were just hacks running dungeon hacks back then. The only ones I've ever run straight were the Enemy Within campaign (first three sections) and the Melisande's Hand section from Sun County. But despite not running many adventures, I've certainly bought a lot and enjoyed reading them. Some of them have inspired my own adventures, but mostly I just like to see what other people have done with the setting material. Rosen once said (in talking about Veni Vidi Vici), that adventures were for running and so therefore were best published in PDF form. But I disagree - in my case, at least, adventures are for reading in bed and inspiring dreams of my own campaign.

"Tell me what you found, not what you lost" Mesopotamian proverb

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