What were early gaming clubs like?

[Katemare]

I know this forum sees many old-time gamers. I have a question for them which is very interesting for me and the Russian RPG community as whole.

What were early gaming clubs like? I can't find much info about it, only a few posts which don't go into details. Both personal accounts and weblinks would be very helpful.

Were RPG clubs mostly run in hobby stores or at schools? Were they hybrid wargames/RPG clubs more often than not? What kind of events they held? Were they free to visit all day or only in after-school hours?

What was the regular life of the club like? Was there established community in each club, the traditions? Was there membership? Did visitors of the club knew what's going on in each others' group? What was discussed? What was posted on the walls? Did it the club make group's RPG experience more meaningful, fulfilling? If so, why?

One of the most interesting questions that we can't agree on: was there competitive angle to RPG clubs? I don't necessary mean tournaments, but did specific modules have reputation for being hard, and people trying to beat them because of that? Did they compare results afterwards, did they acknowledge the most skilled gaming group? If so, was that a wide-spread practice?

And even if there's no question for it aboves, I'm very interested to hear various details about early gaming clubs. Thank you %)

 

[Glyfair]

In my experience (going to back to the late 70s) most gaming clubs tied to RPGs were tied to gaming stores. at least were in Delaware. My high school had a gaming club called the "tacticans" that played D&D but they were mostly under the rader.

In the early 80s friends of mine started an gaming store and there has always been in some fashion a game club attached (to this day). In the beginning the gaming was in the store. The first time they outgrew their location and moved to another location in the mini-mall (where they spent most of the 80s and some of the 90s) and the old store area became a gaming club. For a while there was a monthly fee to join (to defray expenses) but more often then not it has been completely free as long as you have space to play. Of course, the store gets first call for their events.

Every other gaming store in the area had some sort of gaming area as well. I never heard of any other gaming clubs, although I expect various schools had them as well.

Of course, before RPGs wargamers used to have their wargame clubs. I have never been aware of any specifically. However, an acquaintance from the main gaming store used to own one of the taverns/college hangout in the area. I understand he used to use the large upstairs rooms to host wargames with a special focus on those that take weeks. months and years to complete.

 

[Wombat]

Obviously I can't speak for "most", but I can speak for my own group.

I don't know if you would even call us a "club" -- maybe we were. We were a group of friends, all in our teens, between 14 and 17 as of 1975 when we got into pre-1st ed D&D. Back in 1970, my brother had gotten his first Avalon Hill boardgame and he & I played it to death; in 1972 we found out about miniatures wargaming through Jack Scruby's old Toy Soldier Factory in Cambria, CA. We gathered up a group of buddies and started playing these every weekend. Several times severe arguments broke out over line-of-site, bumped units, and even poor winners and losers -- heck, figure our ages and go from there. This was grating on my nerves and I took to, instead of actually playing the games, developing scenarios for the battles.

I was already familiar with Guidon Games, later TSR, through their game Chainmail. I got a supplement from old Brookhurst Hobbies in Anaheim announcing D&D, but the store wasn't really sure how to advertise it. "A wargame using paper and pencil, no minis, and lots of imagination, set in the Middle Ages with dragons" was pretty much how the ad-copy went.

So our group essentially drifted from miniatures battles over to D&D. There were no game stores in our hometown of Santa Rosa, CA, so our contact with other rpgers was limited at first, especially with few driver's licenses and fewer cars between us. We got down to Berkeley and San Francisco a few times to visit the game stores there, and one trip out to Concord to go to Dave Hargrave's shop (one visit was enough for us). And, of course, there were sojourns down to DunDraCon at the Dunfey Hotel near SFO.

The thing was, since the rules were so sketchy, we had to make a lot of stuff up. Also since so many of the monsters struck as purely goofy (heck, since about age 9 I had had the set of Japanese rubber monsters that became the inspirations to Gygax for the rust monster and the bullette, for example), our game took on a pretty goofy tone to begin with. It wasn't until we picked up Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, and RuneQuest that we became really serious in our gaming tone.

I don't know if any of that helps answer your questions, but I hope it does.

 

[Katemare]

Glyfair, Wombat, thank you, it's very interesting %) For Russia and CIS, RPGs begun in 90s, and even with present widespread Internet access, it's hard to reconstruct what happened across the ocean some 40 years ago.

 

[Janx]

a side topic, relevant to russion gamers, was in the early days of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic, somebody ran a serious looking ad as a practical joke, about female Russian Gamers looking for american men.

It was styled after the mail order bride concept, but the idea being, here was a hot chick looking for somebody to play D&D with.

Not that anybody here took that as an actual stereotype, though I imagine more than a few were hopeful that somewhere, there was a country that had too many beautiful gamer girls looking for somebody to game with.

 

[Katemare]

Well, you've missed your chance when I visited Brooklyn, NY, this spring %) Too bad, I was really looking to meet the RPG crowd. Though I plan to visit every year or so.

Anyone else to share your account of early RPG clubs? You can still end the holywar across the globe %)

 

[S'mon]

RPGing emerged out of the wargaming fraternity; my impression is that the earliest RPG clubs were wargames clubs that added RPGing. Looking at Blackmoor/The First Fantasy Campaign, it was clearly seen as a competitive exercise among the players, initially they would even play opposing Good and Evil sides, like the opposing forces in a wargame.
I suggest googling Blackmoor, Dave Arneson, Braunstein for the roots of the hobby. Many of the wargamers tended to be older, while the first wave of D&Ders was centred on University students, who often split off from the wargamers as they realised they wanted different things.

By the time second-generation RPGers got into it in the 1980s the hobby was very different, centred around groups of high school boys (ca 12-18) playing D&D with their friends, and far less emphasis on formal clubs.

 

[Stormonu]

I know this forum sees many old-time gamers. I have a question for them which is very interesting for me and the Russian RPG community as whole.

What were early gaming clubs like? I can't find much info about it, only a few posts which don't go into details. Both personal accounts and weblinks would be very helpful.

Were RPG clubs mostly run in hobby stores or at schools? Were they hybrid wargames/RPG clubs more often than not? What kind of events they held? Were they free to visit all day or only in after-school hours?

What was the regular life of the club like? Was there established community in each club, the traditions? Was there membership? Did visitors of the club knew what's going on in each others' group? What was discussed? What was posted on the walls? Did it the club make group's RPG experience more meaningful, fulfilling? If so, why?

One of the most interesting questions that we can't agree on: was there competitive angle to RPG clubs? I don't necessary mean tournaments, but did specific modules have reputation for being hard, and people trying to beat them because of that? Did they compare results afterwards, did they acknowledge the most skilled gaming group? If so, was that a wide-spread practice?

And even if there's no question for it aboves, I'm very interested to hear various details about early gaming clubs. Thank you %)

Back in the '80s, the first and only RPG club I knew of (and was a brief member of) was a D&D club at my high school. There was a small ($2 per month, I think) fee to use the facilities and it had a crowd of about 20 folks who would play during our 1 1/2 lunch hour and from 3 pm - 5 pm after school. Of course, the members were 9th-12th graders, so around the ages of 14-17, with a teacher/patron watching over the group.

There were about 4 different groups playing in that club and about 7 DMs total, and most of the players would switch up between adventures. About 3 of the DMs were pretty steady at only being DMs (back in the day when the DM books were forbidden territory for players to access), though the rest would regularly switch between being DMs or players.

Between adventures, the DMs there would often talk shop, either swapping DMing tips or nefarious ideas for "putting PCs back in their place" - usually consisting of deathtraps or devious monster encounters. Sometimes, the DMs would borrow or swap modules from other DMs (or players) to run their own group through something. The players from the various groups were constantly seeking play tips, strategies and swapping Dragon magazine articles - anything to try and boost their ability to survive the adventures coming up. However, talking about specific modules encounters was frowned upon, and could get you kicked out of a play group.

This was a time when a lot of the classic modules already existed, but being students, few folks had the money to afford any of them. If we had access to them, we ran them, but most of the time we were making our own stuff up. However, I do remember Tomb of Horrors being on the list of "the" module to beat, along with solving White Plume Mountain.

I don't remember any tournaments or competitions and the atmosphere was casual, though I do remember it being about the time Dragonlance was coming out, and the DM with a copy of the modules (DL1 & DL2) had an auction for who'd get to play, and what characters they would play. That auction (which I didn't participate in due to lack of funds) was what got me to hunt down and buy those modules at a later date (about the time DL5 came out) - and probably saved my interest in D&D, which was beginning to flag around that time.

After about 5 months, I quit the club due to the fact one of my player's couldn't keep paying the dues, and I began to question why they were even collecting money since we were playing in classrooms at school. So we just switched to playing in the school library and stopped associating with the club.

 

[Katemare]

S'mon, Stormonu, thank you, it's very interesting and makes things much clearer!

So, I guess that community was one of the decisive factors in RPGs' rise to popularity, but competitiveness - only at first, and groups/clubs tended to have own traditions.

More accounts are welcome %)

 

[Gilladian]

Well, I met my husband at the local gamers club meeting, way back in 1978, so I have fond memories of it!

The club was associated with the game store; at the time the name of it was "The Centurion", I think, in Copperas Cove, TX. Most of the folks were either army guys or HS and Jr. High students. I really only remember the club meeting about 3 times, honestly, and it was mostly to bring in a few dollars for the game store, which provided ample room to play, and never insisted we buy much beyond snacks from the candy machines.

Members were a mix of the (mostly older) miniature battle guys, and "us" RPGers. Mostly the club helped with scheduling use of the table-space so no one group could hog a table for more than 4 hours at a time on prime game-days. Those years were a LOT of fun!