What year did you start playing roleplaying games?

[Barliman]

1975. I had just gotten my driver's license and, while visiting Viking Hobby in Sacramento looking for miniature soldiers, I ran across these three little brown books in a boxed set.

From that point, I was doomed. >:->

[vagabond]

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.

This is definitely part of it. The other is that not all adventures for a product

line appeal to all consumers of that product line. The same holds for supplements

in general.

Ian

[Trifletraxor]

On the whole adventures don't sell argument, I can see why adventures sell less than rule or setting books, but I know many GMs that won't game a setting if there's no available premade scenarios for it.

SGL.

[rust]

On the whole adventures don't sell argument, I can see why adventures sell less than rule or setting books ...

One reason I hear quite often is that the commercially published adventures

are good for single evenings, but do rarely fit into a referee's long-term cam-

paign, and that it is often easier (and always cheaper) to write an adventu-

re than to adapt a commercial one.

[Baron]

Hmm. Was at a convention in 77 or 78, in NYC. Watched these guys playing D&D. Bought the Dungeon board - (mat, actually) game, and Traveller's Snapshot game. Brought them home and played them with my little brother that night. We played all night. Next purchase was his, the Holmes edition of D&D. When I went to college in 1979 I started playing AD&D. Then came Traveller's LBB's, Gamma World, Cthulhu, RQ and Stormbringer.

Edited December 15, 2009 by Baron
grammar

[Kloster]

1981, with D&D, then switched to RQ and Champions, that are still the mainstay. Brief and not so brief forays in other systems (Shadowrun, Vampire, Star Wars, James Bond and some others), but the basic (no pun intended) remained: RQ (BRP based) and Champions.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

[Baron]

I see there's some discussion mixed in here about the utility of published adventures (and settings). For what it's worth, in my groups we always bought adventures for our campaigns. If we were playing a game, then one of the GMs always picked up each new module. Personally, I usually changed a few things, and often used the good ones for additional open-ended play. You have to be flexible with player direction, but that doesn't make the module less valuable. As mentioned above, the RQ2 packs such as Prax, The Big Rubble and Trollpak were all awesome. So were Cthulhu's big sets like Shadows of Yog Sothoth and Masks of Nyarlathotep. Are various sourcebooks and specialty books as useful? To me, they're more of a mixed bag. We didn't always buy every one of those. We didn't feel compelled to use them all. But modules were time-savers, and even if you only used them for inspiration, you could always use them piecemeal. Knock yourselves out, but I'm more likely to invest in a new game if I see maybe one sourcebook and several modules. No modules? I'd hesitate to make a purchase.

[Darran]

I started in 1981 with RuneQuest II. I think if I had started with D&D I think I wouldn't still be in the hobby.

[badcat]

OK, now we know. BRP et al is an old fart game!:eek:

[rust]

OK, now we know. BRP et al is an old fart game!:eek:

Growing old isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.

(Maurice Chevalier)

[badcat]

And there I thought that was an original thought that I had had. :ohwell:

[jasonw1239]

Just stopping by because I have not visited the forum for awhile. Mark me down as another old fart. I started with D&D in 1978.

Played or run D&D, AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Boot Hill, Top Secret, Ringworld, Champions, Mechwarrior, Paranoia, Shadowrun, Vampire, and probably a few others that I have long since forgotten.

Throw in some of the old Avalon Hill and SPI board games along with many hours of Battletech in the late 80's.

[samloyal23]

I refuse to reply on the grounds it may incriminate me (and reveal my real age). But it was in 7th Grade.

[Mugen]

My first contact with RPG were through a french gaming magazine in 1980 at ages 5.

For obvious reason, I was more interested in the miniatures photographs than in the text...

My first experience was at age 9 or 10, in 1984 or 1985 (with a french RPG published in a special issue of the magazine mentionned above), but I truly became an avid player at age 11.

I began with D&D and AD&D like huge portion of the roleplayer population, but quickly switched to StormBringer, seduced by its "realistic" flavor, and then to RQ3.

[Bygoneyrs]

I have been RPGing now for 34+ yrs, I was 12 years old at the time and am 46 yrs old now. My systems are BRP, D&D v3.5, Pathfinder, Conan d20 v2, Heros System v5 Revised, Traveller (Mongoose Pub current), along with alot of other stuff. I have been extremely lucky and had a very fat buyers wallet over the years, and have collected a huge libary of resource books to be used as a great resource library. I have DM/GM'd for many years and have a current gaming group made of five guys my own age (mostly IT Geeks like me). We have been gamming together now for slightly over fifteen years in either my HG Fantasy or Traveller games. BRP has been a strong part of my House Rules for so many years now. heck we all are WarGamers, Table Top Space minis War gamers, and PBM/PBEM Midgard gamers as well too.We keep on gaming as we grow older, and manage to have games every other wednesday night from 6:30 pm till 11 pm. We have also manages to get most of our kids hooked into gaming in one sorts or another too.

What can I say, we are the old crowd....Penn

[RobP]

Wow this thread seems to show that we are all relativelly old!

It also seems to indicate that perhaps the heyday of pen and paper RPG's has probably passed. Either that or BRP attracts a much older and sophisticated player

RobP

[threedeesix]

Wow this thread seems to show that we are all relativelly old!

It also seems to indicate that perhaps the heyday of pen and paper RPG's has probably passed. Either that or BRP attracts a much older and sophisticated player

RobP

I think your second point is the correct one. The same poll on a D&D forum would give much more even results I think.

Rod

[rust]

Well, actually ... I am only sophisticated, I am not old.

True, I was born when Sputnik was started, but this just means more time to

become more sophisticated, it has nothing at all to do with age. :cool:

[Rurik]

Well, actually ... I am only sophisticated, I am not old.

True, I was born when Sputnik was started, but this just means more time to

become more sophisticated, it has nothing at all to do with age. :cool:

I'm the other way around. Old, but not so sophisticulated.

[Atgxtg]

I think your second point is the correct one. The same poll on a D&D forum would give much more even results I think.

Rod

Yeah, the second one. I think it goes with BRP basically being the return of an RPG system that sort of faded into obscurity years ago. Since nothing has come out for RQ in decades, it's not surprising that the fan base here is older.

In fact, it was this hypothesis on another thread that prompted me into saying , "I bet if we did a poll..."

[Thalaba]

Maybe there's also a phenomenon like this: Young people just like to play games, but old people like to talk about playing games.

[Atgxtg]

Maybe there's also a phenomenon like this: Young people just like to play games, but old people like to talk about playing games.

Nah. I think it is just a question of opportunity/exposure. Most of the BRP community are those who were exposed to the BRP system in the past. Since most of the games that used the BRP core rules have been out of production for years, younger gamers haven't had much of a chance or reason to pick them up and become BRP players.

It's unlikely for a gamer to have been exposed to a system that hasn't been in production in their lifetime.

I think a D&D poll probably would have the same sort of age distribution if we were to differentiate between orginal D&D, AD&D, 3E, 3.5, and 4.0

In another few years, you probably would have difficulty finding a lot of young AD&D players.

As has been mentioned quite a few times before, in other threads, one problem BRP has is in attracting new customers. If this place is any indication, and I think that it is, practically the entire BRP fanbase are people who were already fans of the underlying game system. I'd said earlier that in order for someone to buy BRP they pretty much have to have already been a fan and kept an eye out for it. The chances of someone happening to run across a copy at the local gaming shop are slim. So the chances of BRP picking up new (= younger) players are likewise slim.

One logical deduction that can be made from this is that unless Chaosium can find some way of attracting new gamers to BRP, the fanbase will slowly shirk as the older gamers retire from gaming or die off (to some the terms are nearly interchangeable;D). So BRP is probably going to die off with us.

[Thalaba]

Well, I belong to two other gaming sites which are not BRP centric and I'm quite sure the demographic is similarly skewed (perhaps not as dramatically in the case of RPG.net), so there is something else at play. I suspect the entire hobby is an aging demographic, regardless of the game.

If Chaosium wants to attract younger players: ElfQuest Online.

[rust]

I suspect the entire hobby is an aging demographic, regardless of the game.

I have now posted the same poll ^^ asking for the year people began to play roleplaying games

over on my German "home forum" Fundus Ludi, I think the results could be interesting.

[Guest Vile Traveller]

Started with Basic D&D on Christmas Eve 1982, tried to buy Traveller four months later but it was not in stock at my local (read "only") games store. I bought RuneQuest, second edition boxed set, instead. I've been stuck with those two d10s ever since.

I've come to form the theory that everything I do is shared only by my particular demographic. There were none before us, and there is no new blood to follow. All of my fellow hobbyists seem to have aged at the same rate as I - comic readers, modellers, SF fans - when I was young, they were young. Now they're all in their prime. :cool: