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Like many important life lessons, I learned in a dirty gas station. :P
My first time gaming was with a student a couple years older than me that I knew from riding the same schoolbus. He worked at the gas station in town, so I went to find out what this gaming this was. I played one session of Palladium. Although the session was mediocre, the concept was intriguing, so I went and bought a couple AD&D books, and talked some classmates into coming over.
For the purposes of this, it would be a mix of learned from a friend and self-taught.
I was taught by an older group of peers. To a small extent my older brother, but mostly the older Boy Scouts in the troop. Gaming was a frequent activity on campouts, I can still remember sitting around listening to them play Shadowrun (which I've still never actually played).
1. Computer games, computer games, computer games! Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, etc proved to be GREAT ways for me to learn the rules
While I never played any of those games (or heard of most of them) my love of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon did help me learn how combat works, especially the concept of AoOs.
1. Computer games, computer games, computer games! Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights, etc proved to be GREAT ways for me to learn the rulesWhile I never played any of those games (or heard of most of them) my love of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon did help me learn how combat works, especially the concept of AoOs.
The only one I've never heard of is Planescape: Torment. I own NWN 1 and 2 and Icewind Dale, but have only played Baldur's Gate. Dungeon Seige (I think the name is) is another good one for learning RPG type rules.
•I was taught by peers who were already experienced players.
As an aside, I didn't become involved in roleplaying until I was over 30 years of age. The other players in my first group were all younger than me, although the GM was older.
I was somewhere between 21 and 25 years old when I started.
So are people learning the games later because its seen as more of an "old folks" game now? It seems to me more people here are picking it up as young adults rather than kids or teens. Maybe I'm mistaken though.
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Do people who learned the rules from books and computer games before joining a group feel that they hit the ground running, or was there a lot of adjustment to the actual dynamics of play and roleplay?
I think I hit the ground running once I found a real group, but that's probably partly because I spent a lot of time playing make-believe without rules as a kid, and later writing fiction.
And teamwork still took getting used to.
So are people learning the games later because its seen as more of an "old folks" game now? It seems to me more people here are picking it up as young adults rather than kids or teens. Maybe I'm mistaken though.
I don't know if it's seen as an old folks game so much as it's getting more socially acceptable for adults to play games.
I don't know if it's seen as an old folks game so much as it's getting more socially acceptable for adults to play games.
That is a good point. I have a group of friends that regularly gets together for a night of gaming (NOT rpg sadly, but mostly card or board games). We break out a nice bottle of whatever, pile on the snacks and turn it into a friendly few hours of social interaction. After work, life events and general chaos it makes a pleasant way to reconnect and wind down.
I first learned/played with my older brother running solo adventures. Than he went off to college :(
It took me 4 or 6 years to find another group to play with.
So I learned the mechanics and the basic of RPing from my brother but the group really opened my eyes to Role-playing.
My first campaign was a run through a labyrinthe in gamma world when I was 10. I had experienced being a cleric in specularum by the age of 12. I died a lot. Did not like dying a lot. Became a gm. So I was introduced to the game by peers of similar age, but learning the ropes of becmi/2e/palladium/cyberpunk was all pretty much self taught.
My younger brother was gaming with his university friends. So i'd hear some stories on the times he came back home. Becoming more curious he suggested starting PbP, and i did last year around juli.
Since a few months back, i passed the "fever" on to a friend and he in turn onto a friend of his. There's attempts to get a gaming group together in the future.
So are people learning the games later because its seen as more of an "old folks" game now? It seems to me more people here are picking it up as young adults rather than kids or teens. Maybe I'm mistaken though.
I don't want to blame video games (because honestly, I love video games), but as a child if you were to ask me which I would prefer, a video game that you can play by yourself or with a single friend or a book with rules that you have to get all your friends together at the same time and have someone who judges the rules, I would most definitely have chosen videogames.
I also believe that DnD was recovering from all the bad rep it garnered in the 80's. I remember faintly that DnD was associated with sitting in a dark, dank basement with a bunch of guys AKA obsessive, isolated, cultists. It may have not been true, but that was the impression that was given from the media and society while I was young and impressionable. Many of the games I had while I was growing up might have been based on or inspired DnD, but it never had quite the same stigma that was still lingering.
It was actually in a game design class where we were discussing the history of games where we learned a good number of us were actually interested in DnD, but none of us really knew where to start. Most people don't have the initiative to go out and purchase a book to be used with a group of people if they don't know anybody else is interested. Yet, it's really hard to bring that kind of thing up when there was such a huge stigma about it growing up (probably not going to be as hard for kids of the newer generations though).
Where do I fall as one that learned to game as an adult among other adults?
Sounds like either peers who were also learning or peers who were experienced players.
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That is a good point. I have a group of friends that regularly gets together for a night of gaming (NOT rpg sadly, but mostly card or board games). We break out a nice bottle of whatever, pile on the snacks and turn it into a friendly few hours of social interaction. After work, life events and general chaos it makes a pleasant way to reconnect and wind down.
I don't know if it's seen as an old folks game so much as it's getting more socially acceptable for adults to play games.
Although I don't have personal experience of this since I started gaming later in life, my impression is that most people in my age group (people who were teenagers in the 1970s when the original D&D rules were released) started playing as teens. But playing D&D was looked on then as something that only kids would do, and when you became an adult you were expected to find other hobbies. Some of my friends are still a bit reluctant to share with their co-workers that they play D&D, for example, because they fear being judged for their pasttime, a sad holdover from the anti-D&D paranoia of the 1980s.
Now, however, no one really thinks anything odd about a person in their 40s or 50s playing D&D. This is in part I think because playing online and console RPGs has made the concept of roleplaying games more socially acceptable.
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I was a child taught by adults in a game designed for or around kids.
When I was 10, my church put together a six-week summer program, with young adults teaching various hobbies to the middle-school-aged kids. Two young adults taught a group of (I think) ten of us to play D&D. This was in Georgia, which may quite possibly make us the only ten kids in the bible belt ever to be taught D&D in a church-organized official class.
After that, my next few opportunities to play were when some teens (peers of my oldest sister, who by the way didn't play or attend) invited me to play a few times. Since they were sixteen-ish and I was ten, I (still) think that was pretty awesome of them to put up with me...
So are people learning the games later because its seen as more of an "old folks" game now? It seems to me more people here are picking it up as young adults rather than kids or teens. Maybe I'm mistaken though.
It might just be that kid and teen players don't frequent the messageboards.
I learned with my older brother and my Godmother's two sons. The older of the two son's had player before, the rest of us had not.
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So are people learning the games later because its seen as more of an "old folks" game now? It seems to me more people here are picking it up as young adults rather than kids or teens. Maybe I'm mistaken though.It might just be that kid and teen players don't frequent the messageboards.
That too, it's a biased sample for sure.
When I was 10, my church put together a six-week summer program, with young adults teaching various hobbies to the middle-school-aged kids. Two young adults taught a group of (I think) ten of us to play D&D. This was in Georgia, which may quite possibly make us the only ten kids in the bible belt ever to be taught D&D in a church-organized official class.
Sounds like a cool church!