In 1977 I was a freshman in college. I saw an ad in The Squadron Shop catalog for this new game, Dungeons & Dragons. It suggested that I might combine my love of gaming with my love of Conan and Gandalf and other fantasy characters I had read about. Up until this point, gaming for me has been centered around my interest in history (and historic characters like Napoleon I). My first board wargame and my first miniatures gaming were both about the Napoleonic Wars. I had The Squadron Shop catalog because I enjoy assembling and painting models. That fall I suggested to my girlfriend that D&D might be a good present for me at Christmas.
She came through for me and by the new year, I was deeply confused regarding how to play this new "wargame". It took me and my friends, who were also into gaming, a while to figure it all out, but eventually it all came together and we had discovered a new love - fantasy adventure gaming. By then I had turned 19 years old.
I did not grow up playing D&D. I came to the game as an adult working my way through college. D&D was not my introduction to gaming, that had come almost ten years prior when I purchased Avalon Hill's Waterloo wargame. Computers were mainframe machines and my first college programming was done using punch cards. Popular culture had (obviously) not yet been influenced by D&D, and folks in America were just discovering the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, mostly through a bootleg paperback edition.
I think now about how we come into the hobby, what we bring with us when we first sit down at the table and roll some dice, and I think that it matters to how we approach the game and what we expect from it. Our prior knowledge shapes how we interpret the game and the genre of fantasy gaming. You see, D&D was never a child's game to me. It was, from the beginning a game I played as an adult with other adults, many who were older than me and most (like D&D designers Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson themselves) had already spent years playing wargames.
As everyone today knows, D&D took off in a big way and it wasn't long before players younger than me joined the growing ranks of folks who were excited to play the new adventure games like D&D. For many D&D would be their introduction to the genre of fantasy. The population of D&D enthusiasts in those early days was diverse - at least from the perspective of the interests which drew us into the hobby. The game had a significant presence on many college campuses and in hobby shops that sold models and wargames, but had not yet entered the mainstream. Some folks heard about the game through science-fiction fan clubs, while a more general interest in tabletop games brought others to D&D as "that new kind of game" everyone was talking about. Some discovered the game through their friendship with a gamer and still others came to it much like I did, through my previous interest in historical wargames. Eventually copies of the new game started to show up in book stores and toy shops where new audiences discovered it. As soon as the then "new" computers could handle the required coding, D&D made the jump to digital. All the while, more and more D&D was seeping into the collective conscious as part of our popular culture.
New players today come from an even broader and more diverse background than those early D&D pioneers. Video games, movies, toys, and music have all been influenced by elves, dwarves, magic users and the other fantasy tropes found in D&D. "Class" and "level" and "player character" have entered our cultural lexicon as familiar concepts even for those who have never "rolled the dice". Online gaming and stream views inspire many to try the game they watch. Each new perspective adds to the richness of the collective tapestry that is the D&D hobby.
This view, that it matters in some ways, is reinforced when I get to hobnob a bit with another gamer of my age or with one who is even a little older, and there seem to be precious few of the latter these days. Sharing stories with a fellow gamer who came to the hobby as an adult during the time I did has become a special treat (and almost a guilty pleasure) as we share a collective experience and a unique perspective. Not a better one, just one that is ours. This "shared experience" is true of younger hobbyists as well, as they also share a commonality together with their respective cohort. It has always been my experience that there is room at the gaming table for all and that each new (or old) player enriches us all by their enthusiasm for the game.
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