How many years have you been playing RPGs (including GMing)?

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How many years have you been playing RPGs (including GMing)?

  • <5 years

    Votes: 3 1.8%

  • 5-10 years

    Votes: 5 3.0%

  • 11-15 years

    Votes: 3 1.8%

  • 16-20 years

    Votes: 3 1.8%

  • 21-25 years

    Votes: 4 2.4%

  • 26-30 years

    Votes: 4 2.4%

  • 31-35 years

    Votes: 23 14.0%

  • 36-40 years

    Votes: 41 25.0%

  • 41-45 years

    Votes: 54 32.9%

  • >45 years

    Votes: 24 14.6%
  • Total voters
    164
Started in 1974 with a photocopied set of OD&D via a friend at Cambridge University who had US friends. First GM'd that Christmas and mostly haven't stopped running game since. Played a number of games moving on from D&D through Traveller and Chivalry and Sorcery to BRP and a variety of Indie games.
 
Some really cool stories in this thread.

I started during the pandemic, before that I had approximately zero interest in the hobby. My better half had always wanted to play so I ended up ordering Phandelver, marshalling a few folk together and we're still playing regularly.

I was definitely unfair to those that played when I was a younger man, but age can bring wisdom and a change in mindset was needed. It's a lot easier to like stuff than hate stuff, so that's how I try to approach everything in life now.
 
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Tommy Brownell said:
And why most of us hardly feel like their target audience anymore.

Which is kinda odd, because I've still got many prime buying years ahead of me and I make a substantial income for the region I live in, so catering to me in some capacity would seem to be financially beneficial. CMON certainly gets a bunch of my money with their board game releases.
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It is not just D&D, but it seems like almost everything targets younger people. I feel like the only adds I see with older people are for medicine and retirement communities.

Right now, I have significantly more disposable income than I had when I was young. And I think that is fairly common. The last few years of your career are generally your highest earning years.

So give us something that appeals to us.

Show me older people who have aged well.

Show characters my age who are human. Elves, vampires, demons, dragons and other characters who are old but look like teens or early 20s don't count as representation of older people.

I want a kick ass epic level adventure who is still going strong at age 50+.

I want old ladies out there having adventures.

And no jokes about older people being senile.
 
17/18 but more like 20+ if you count computer RPGs (I assumed the question was about TT only).

If I recall I was between 6 and 10 when I first found a copy of Baldur's gate and 12 when first TT
 
1983, a friend ran D&D Red box for me. It was an awful, awful game, but discovering RPGs and their possibilities just blew my 11 years old mind.
After that I bought the french edition of Das Schwarze Auge/The Dark Eye with my pocket money.

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I did not come close to anything D&D-related for the next 20 years. I grew up on a steady diet of Runequest, Warhammer, Rêve de Dragon and GURPS. I did come across Cyborg Commando at one point: "hey, the author invented D&D, that must be great!". Didn't hold Gygax in great esteem after that to be honest. I learned english mostly through RPGs at that time. What a great hobby to have.
 
Patchwork Dragon said:
Show characters my age who are human. Elves, vampires, demons, dragons and other characters who are old but look like teens or early 20s don't count as representation of older people.
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This was partly my motivation around Silver Haired Sentinels. Superheroes in the Retirement Age. Normalising older PCs.


And it kinda works for Traveller (and maybe Twilight 2000) where the PCs tend to be a little more grizzled. Though apart from Alexander Lascelles Jamison you'd never know. Jamison ain't in his 20s....

636c3df6-4a87-414f-9eb9-db9ec0b9dbcb.jpg

I'm enjoying The Expanse where it's plain Miller is in his 40s (Thomas Jane is now 54). Easier to empathise with real people.
 
I got my first RPG, Empire of the Petal Throne, for Christmas in 1976. I was 13. Been playing/running (mostly running) ever since with no gaps. Unlike most folks, I have very little nostalgia for D&D. It wasn't my first RPG (it was maybe my 4th or 5th RPG, after EPT, Boot Hill, Traveler, Metamorphosis Alpha), and I only played AD&D 1E from 1978-1981, when I switched to Runequest. I wouldn't play actual D&D again for over 25 years, until 4E came out in 2008. I worked in a game store during college and grad school, from about 1984 to 1994, so was exposed to tons of games and ran a wide variety.

I just turned 60, and don't plan to stop until I'm too out of it to continue.
 
johnmarron said:
I got my first RPG, Empire of the Petal Throne, for Christmas in 1976. I was 13. Been playing/running (mostly running) ever since with no gaps. Unlike most folks, I have very little nostalgia for D&D. It wasn't my first RPG (it was maybe my 4th or 5th RPG, after EPT, Boot Hill, Traveler, Metamorphosis Alpha), and I only played AD&D 1E from 1978-1981, when I switched to Runequest. I wouldn't play actual D&D again for over 25 years, until 4E came out in 2008. I worked in a game store during college and grad school, from about 1984 to 1994, so was exposed to tons of games and ran a wide variety.

I just turned 60, and don't plan to stop until I'm too out of it to continue.
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With you on D&D, I have fond memories of the games played, not the rules system.

I always thought EPT was very close to OD&D in the rules used. I recall passing on it in the day given the setting didn't grab me and had very limited funds in those days, can still recall the other things passed on that day in the hobby store where they had a a little out of the way area of RPG stuff; unlike the RC, model train and models stuff. :smile:
 
Mid 80's when my older brother got the red box. Been a life long love with all it's ups and downs since then. Before that it was Choose Your Own Adventure and Interplanetary Spy books.
 
Saturday November 19, 1977, Holmes Basic. My best friend got Holmes the day before on his birthday and I just watched and started reading. Saturday morning I declared I was ready to start running.

So 46 years.

BTW, with something like this, the starting year would make a better poll. It would also be interesting to have individual poll entries for the first several years.
 
Patchwork Dragon said:
It is not just D&D, but it seems like almost everything targets younger people. I feel like the only adds I see with older people are for medicine and retirement communities.

Right now, I have significantly more disposable income than I had when I was young. And I think that is fairly common. The last few years of your career are generally your highest earning years.

So give us something that appeals to us.

Show me older people who have aged well.

Show characters my age who are human. Elves, vampires, demons, dragons and other characters who are old but look like teens or early 20s don't count as representation of older people.

I want a kick ass epic level adventure who is still going strong at age 50+.

I want old ladies out there having adventures.

And no jokes about older people being senile.
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For a movie example, there's Chingachgook (played by Russell Means) from The Last of the Mohicans. An absolute badass, and Russell Means was 53 at the time.

The-Last-of-the-Mohicans-the-last-of-the-mohicans-35397298-800-600.jpg


OB-VB126_means1_EV_20121022163952.jpg
 
ffilz said:
the starting year would make a better poll.
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this one filters out the weak who can't do math ;)

truth, i was too lazy to break it out that far. It's already a lot of poll items.
 
AsenRG said:
Most of us know this joy and have scars from it...:grin:
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lol Right? I just did the break down of what I spent on gaming this year... damn it if I didn't increase from last year. Time to really crack down and cut it back down to half of what I spent in 2023.
 
38 years for me, I think. Started with Red Box Basic D&D. I was young for it at the time, but had an older sibling who got me into it. Most people my age got into gaming a bit later on.

There have been some lull periods to be sure, but never a time where I considered myself done or fully out of the hobby.
 
In ‘81 or so it was raining so we had recess inside. Joe Clement brought in his brother’s Monster Manual and some character sheets so we could play D&D on the floor of the classroom.

We fought a Peryton, but Joe wouldn’t let us look at the picture. “What do you mean it looks like an eagle with a deer head? Just let me look at it!”

I was hooked, the rest is history. Thanks Joe, wherever you are!
 
I started in 76/77 when I was 12/13. I found I was not "as fond" of D&D as my friends, but still played. I was the gamer they called when they wanted to play something else (Traveller, John Carter, Empire Petal Throne, Boot Hill). Then I became the TFT GM (where we did wandering about rather than ruin delving). I became the GM for those "other games" in High School (Bushido, Top Secret-ish, and others). I became The Champions/Hero GM soon after. About that same time I became entangled with Tri-Tac. It was a smaller hobby back then.
 
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Agemegos said:
What caused the Great Blight of 1999–2008? Recreational real estate speculation?
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Higher education I would guess.

I started playing the Red Box around 8 years old, started to GM around 12/13 until my early 20s.

Then I got busy with university, women, writing, dabbling in reporting, broadcasting and music.

Looked over 3e off the shelf but wasn't digging that level of crunch anymore, VtM intrigued me but the system was underwhelming and play (as in what you actually did) was unclear, there was no sign of CoC supplements or other games on the shelves as in our town rpgs were only carried by the local comic shop and their selection seemed to be strictly D&D. My discovery of CoC and Pendragon was more luck than anything else.

I did check out the rpg club at uni but it seemed like it was only D&D and I was more interested in CoC, CP2020, Pendragon, Paranoia, Top Secret S.I., etc. Unknown Armies and Delta Green would have kept my attention but I didn't find them at that time. Once the net was going full blast my interests were elsewhere.

So I only came back to rpgs around 2015 and while that's still lots of years of experience technically, it's no where near others here.
 
I went in to Toys-R-Us and left with three boxed sets.

1. Basic D&D (Mentzer red box version)
2. Expert D&D
3. Forgotten Realms Campaign Set (original version)

Those three sets were a great starting point into D&D for someone who didn't know anyone that played. After I read them I started GMing.
 
A friend and I were heavy into Avalon Hill wargames. In 1979, I bought Magic Realm, and we tried to play it, with little success.
He then told me of a game he had heard of at college called "D&D".
The next day I sought after and bought the Holmes Blue Book.
Going strong ever since.

TGryph
 
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