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
Fighting Fantasy gamebooks in 85. Making our own games in 86, then the first Fighting Fantasy RPG in 86. Played a bit of BECMI D&D in 87, before starting with MERP in late 87, after which it was MERP and RM (with the odd other game for session here and there) through the 90s. I started seriously branching out into different systems after D&D 3e arrived on the scene.
 
Long enough that I had to click the 2nd lowest option. Happy that I didn't have to choose the lowest option (but its so close!)
 
Let's see, I started wargames in 4th grade, but didn't start RPGs until I started playing D&D with my brother in 6th grade. So that would be, what? Right after they invented dirt?
 
Raleel said:
Any game, but must have published rules at some point. If you all hand did up your own rules and wrote them down, that’ll count too.
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Played the Holmes edition in the summer of 1978. Me and friend took turns running a character through the porttown dungeon. My character was a Magic User. I casted a Magic Missile and the skeleton didn't go down. I when oh shit! And died two rounds later. But I was hooked as I immediately got the possibilities over what I was doing wargaming (hex and chits).
 
Fun to compare the results here to those marketing surveys WotC does where the options for how long you’ve been playing D&D are, like, 1) less than 3 months, 2) 3-6 months, 3) 6 months to a year, 4) 1-5 years, or 5) more than 5 years.
 
T. Foster said:
Fun to compare the results here to those marketing surveys WotC does where the options for how long you’ve been playing D&D are, like, 1) less than 3 months, 2) 3-6 months, 3) 6 months to a year, 4) 1-5 years, or 5) more than 5 years.
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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.
 
Pretty much 45 years. I went to my cousin's, they were playing, their Mom showed me a Church News article that was about what you would expect. I played anyhow. They handed me Phoebus from Rogue's Gallery, they were playing Vault of the Drow. They sent me home with a Holmes basic set and a set of dice.
 
First time was summer 1978 IIRC, the older brother of my best friend at the time was back from college (who had been playing there) and my friend had showed me the Monster Manual in social studies earlier that year (which was one of the coolest things I ever saw). It was definitively OD&D with Grayhawk, and Eldritch Wizardry . My first adventure was the Thieves Fortress of Badabaskor. Pretty sure died quickly, made another character and died a little later :smile:. I remember more the elves in the forest on the way ambushing us because we (me and my friend) were telling too many bad jokes and we had to talk our way out of it. I was hooked.

By start of school in 1978 it was all the rage amongst my geek contemporaries, an odd mix then of Monster Manual, Player's Handbook and OD&D. I don't recall the Basic Set in the stores where I lived in summer 1978 (the only set I could find in my FLHS was OD&D). It certainly was their by Christmas '78.

So think that puts me in 45+ range "yikes"
 
T. Foster said:
Fun to compare the results here to those marketing surveys WotC does where the options for how long you’ve been playing D&D are, like, 1) less than 3 months, 2) 3-6 months, 3) 6 months to a year, 4) 1-5 years, or 5) more than 5 years.
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I imagine that WOTC's folks are looking at very different things than I am
 
What caused the Great Blight of 1999–2008? Recreational real estate speculation?
 
34, maybe 35 years. I started the same year AD&D 2e came out, around a year before Dark Sun (first RPG product I ever owned). Played Basic D&D for around a year with my first group, before getting my own books and doing the transition to 2e. Then never looked back, and rarely played as a player again. :thumbsup:
 
VisionStorm said:
34, maybe 35 years. I started the same year AD&D 2e came out, around a year before Dark Sun (first RPG product I ever owned). Played Basic D&D for around a year with my first group, before getting my own books and doing the transition to 2e. Then never looked back, and rarely played as a player again. :thumbsup:
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Newbie!
 
Picaroon Jack said:
A trend has been established. :tongue:
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Yes. Yes it has.

old-school-pvc.jpg
 
Acmegamer said:
March 1978 to 2000. 2000-2010 didn't play ttrpgs. So 46 years this March or 36 if online rpgs and board games don't count for the 2000-2010 period.
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Yeah, if we're getting technical, I've had several gaps of years where I wasn't roleplaying, especially in my 20s. I'd say it was probably closer to 25ish years of actual experience in those 36 that I mentioned.
 
There were years where I gamed less but I don't think there were any where I didn't game at all. Still, one of the reasons I opened my store was that I was having trouble getting groups together without a place to play. Then I spent pretty much 10 out of 11 years gaming three to five days a week. 2020 was quiet and there might have even been a month in there where I didn't game.
 
In 1983 I was still in Primary School, and I discovered Choose You Own Adventure books at the age of 11 years old.
This eventually lead me to collect Fighting Fantasy solo gamebooks by my final year in Primary School in 1984.
I kept collecting those solo game books all through my first year of High School, but then I came across the Fighting Fantasy group play book, which was a very basic trpg. By mid 1985 I had gathered friends for a few lunchtime sessions of group Fighting Fantasy.

So the original Fighting Fantasy group play book was my gateway game.

This was before AFF Dungeoneer, the early Fighting Fantasy was designed for simplistic group dungeon crawls and occasional forest crawls.
By the end of my first year at High School, I was 13 yrs old and I was reading early White Dwarf magazines for inspiration. I needed more substantial rules to run our sessions in. I knew what I wanted for Christmas - one of the early TSR red boxes of D&D, yet my older cousin convinced me to ask my parents to get me the RQ2 box instead.

That was Christmas 1985, and by Jan/Feb 1986 I was running RQ2 sessions.

From 1986 to 1990:
* As a GM: RQ2/3, MERP
* As a PC: RQ2/3, MERP, RM2 (occasional D&D B/X, BECMI, AD&D)

The rest is history :grin:
 
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xanther said:
First time was summer 1978 IIRC, the older brother of my best friend at the time was back from college (who had been playing there) and my friend had showed me the Monster Manual in social studies earlier that year (which was one of the coolest things I ever saw). It was definitively OD&D with Grayhawk, and Eldritch Wizardry . My first adventure was the Thieves Fortress of Badabaskor. Pretty sure died quickly, made another character and died a little later :smile:. I remember more the elves in the forest on the way ambushing us because we (me and my friend) were telling too many bad jokes and we had to talk our way out of it. I was hooked.

By start of school in 1978 it was all the rage amongst my geek contemporaries, an odd mix then of Monster Manual, Player's Handbook and OD&D. I don't recall the Basic Set in the stores where I lived in summer 1978 (the only set I could find in my FLHS was OD&D). It certainly was their by Christmas '78.

So think that puts me in 45+ range "yikes"
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I got so much use out of Badabaskor as a GM. Hehe, fond memories. Like you we were definitely playing a Frankenstein's monster of D&D in 1978. Part small books D&D, part Holmes box, AD&D 1st edition Monster Manual and AD&D 1st edition Players Handbook.
 
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Squarely within the "21-25" range*...though I make up for it in volume. There were quite a few months (or years, we weren't counting) in my life when the only times the session stopped was during sleep, and sometimes we managed to make it coincide with the IC sleep times:shade:!

*Which makes me amongst the most experienced roleplayers where I live. The hobby didn't have any chance before 1989, and the first groups appeared past the middle of the 90ies for various reasons.

T. Foster said:
Fun to compare the results here to those marketing surveys WotC does where the options for how long you’ve been playing D&D are, like, 1) less than 3 months, 2) 3-6 months, 3) 6 months to a year, 4) 1-5 years, or 5) more than 5 years.
Click to expand...

Tommy Brownell said:
And why most of us hardly feel like their target audience anymore.
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It only makes sense - with experience comes discernment, and with discernment D&D5e tends to lose out:gunslinger:!
 
Early 80s (1984 or around there) with the Italian edition of Mentzer's D&D (I should still have that full BECMI set somewhere).
More or less 40 years and a couple hundred games later, I'm still around (and still buying things, for my wife's unending joy).
 
CorvusRuber said:
Early 80s (1984 or around there) with the Italian edition of Mentzer's D&D (I should still have that full BECMI set somewhere).
More or less 40 years and a couple hundred games later, I'm still around (and still buying things, for my wife's unending joy).
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Most of us know this joy and have scars from it...:grin:
 
Raleel said:
Any game, but must have published rules at some point. If you all hand did up your own rules and wrote them down, that’ll count too.
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So, I said 41-45 years, but we didn't write down our little dungeon rpg game's rules that we played in 81-82 when I was ten or eleven. However, I did play a little at 12-13 with my cousin (Space Opera, it would've been), and that's still in this range. Regular games would be from 40 years ago.

Actually... my first game had to have been before then, thinking about the context. So 79-80, but again, not using published rules, but a friend's recollection of his older brother's D&D set (which one I have no idea). A lot more GM fiat than D&D, a d6 as the only dice, and an extremely high mortality rate.
 
Sharrow said:
So, I said 41-45 years, but we didn't write down our little dungeon rpg game's rules that we played in 81-82 when I was ten or eleven.
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The first games I played were Fighting Fantasy.

Then taking those rules and making them individual characters (before the FF 'weretiger' gamebook was available to us). And because I couldn't easily put together a referential 'turn to page XX' gamebook, I took an A3 piece of paper and mapped it over a Monopoly board. Moved around the board with the normal dice - but you could go back and forth. GO was where you went back to 'heal'. Used little soldier miniatures. Completely rewrote Community Chest and Chance cards to fit a fantasy world. And instead of buying property it was about fighting and defeating wandering monsters.

Not bad for a 11 year old.

Technically a hexcrawl, right?

Heck, this makes me want to remake it again. Proper-like.
 
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