Did a FLGS introduce you to the hobby?
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jgbrowning
Hero
I never saw a FLGS till I was 18. I'd been gaming since 10...
joe b.
joe b.
Henry
Autoexreginated
Unseelie said:
Ditto. My first experience was with the Moldvay Red Box D&D set back in '81 in a Circus World Toy Store (a chain that was around when I was a kid). I thought it was a neat new board game with wizards and warriors, and was surprised when I found it had all these neat new rules for your "man" and NO BOARD!
I got most of my other stuff from the B-Dalton Bookstore in my mall. I had never even HEARD of a Game Store until I looked at the ads in a Dragon Magazine years later for these far-off mystical places like "crazy Egor's" and "the hit pointe".
I was lucky in that my Dalton's carried a fairly well-stocked 3 or 4 shelves of hardback 1st edition stuff and dragon magazine. Had that store not been around, I likely would have given up D&D somewhere around 1983 or so.
Bards R Us
First Post
Voted other. Got interested after playing CRPGs like Baldurs Gate 2, Planescape and Temple of Elemental Evil. Although hearing about PnP roleplaying on Bioware's NWN boards as well as talking to an employee at my local WotC store helped as well. I had known friends in junior high who had played also though I never got to play until now. Which is kinda ironic for me, as I would NEVER guessed I would be playing DnD or other RPGs 20 years later (I'm 30), hehe.
Gutboy Barrelhouse
First Post
Saw the Basic box set my freshman year of college in my Friendly College-Town Head Shop
G'day
I read an article (On Evenings Beyond the Fields We Know by John M Ford) about role-playing games in 1979 (it was in the July issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine). I thought they sounded really stupid.
Then I moved to Sydney and started at a new school. I made new friends (including Ian Grojnowski, Bill Plant, Paul Tritter, Michael Barr-David… If you're reading this guys, get in touch). They invited me to join their D&D game. The game stank (sorry, Ian, but it did). But I suddenly got it, and have been hooked ever since.
Then I went around to the Unfriendly Local Gaming Store (Napoleon's Military Bookshop) and got fobbed off with the Basic D&D boxed set (with die-cut randomiser chits, because of President Carter's oil embargo).
Regards,
Agback
I read an article (On Evenings Beyond the Fields We Know by John M Ford) about role-playing games in 1979 (it was in the July issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine). I thought they sounded really stupid.
Then I moved to Sydney and started at a new school. I made new friends (including Ian Grojnowski, Bill Plant, Paul Tritter, Michael Barr-David… If you're reading this guys, get in touch). They invited me to join their D&D game. The game stank (sorry, Ian, but it did). But I suddenly got it, and have been hooked ever since.
Then I went around to the Unfriendly Local Gaming Store (Napoleon's Military Bookshop) and got fobbed off with the Basic D&D boxed set (with die-cut randomiser chits, because of President Carter's oil embargo).
Regards,
Agback
Depends on how you define 'The Hobby'
If your speaking strictly of RPGs, these games are naturally played with a circle of your close friends and the occasional new player who one of the players in your group knows. (one of the main reasons RPGs have trouble finding new players, in my opinion)
But if you define the hobby as rpgs, wargames, and card games, then FLGS plays an important role in the hobby. Competive hobby games allow gamers a way to play more casually or take a break from long-term RPG campaigns. These other avenues still support our interests, while also giving us a place to participate in activities with other gamers who we aren't close with. The FLGS gives gamers a gathering place to play Magic or Warhammer (for example) without inviting strangers into their home, and gives them greater resources for terrain, play space, tournaments, and other face to face social events that the internet cannot provide. Then from the players of these games, a gamer might met other people to role play with.
For the pure role player, you may not see the FLGS as essential to the survival of the hobby, but you need to look at the whole ecology of our industry and realize that without game stores, CCGs and Wargames would have a very difficult time surviving, and without those games the distribution of ALL hobby products is difficult to maintain. Bottomline - rpgs would lose the ability to be manufactured and shipped in a printed form, pushing the role playing market completely onto the internet and gamers would only find each other through chat, forums or their own limited social circles, having no centralized gathering place acting as a 'watering hole' for them.
Even worse, I feel, is with that event the quality of roleplaying products goes down the tubes COMPLETELY for those of us who prefer printed products over PDFs or software.
I may not have learned to role play from a FLGS, but because of them they have kept my interest in multiple products and allowed me to meet others who play the same games.
And one other point I would like to add, that this poll is unintentiaonlly misrepresenting the facts of our hobby. According to industry demographics, most current rpgers learned to play BEFORE (during the 80's basically) the CCG boom (which happened in the 90's) that gave birth to the current game store model. The truth is, the RPG market is aging faster than it is pulling in new, younger players due to the very nature of how the game is played. Because role players rarely play outside their group of friends and a successful game requires a good DM to run, roleplaying has many factors stacked against it to keep it a growing industry, compared other hobby or video games (which allow you to play without a referee and with or against anyone regardless of their age).
My two cents, thanks for listening...err reading :/
Nate
If your speaking strictly of RPGs, these games are naturally played with a circle of your close friends and the occasional new player who one of the players in your group knows. (one of the main reasons RPGs have trouble finding new players, in my opinion)
But if you define the hobby as rpgs, wargames, and card games, then FLGS plays an important role in the hobby. Competive hobby games allow gamers a way to play more casually or take a break from long-term RPG campaigns. These other avenues still support our interests, while also giving us a place to participate in activities with other gamers who we aren't close with. The FLGS gives gamers a gathering place to play Magic or Warhammer (for example) without inviting strangers into their home, and gives them greater resources for terrain, play space, tournaments, and other face to face social events that the internet cannot provide. Then from the players of these games, a gamer might met other people to role play with.
For the pure role player, you may not see the FLGS as essential to the survival of the hobby, but you need to look at the whole ecology of our industry and realize that without game stores, CCGs and Wargames would have a very difficult time surviving, and without those games the distribution of ALL hobby products is difficult to maintain. Bottomline - rpgs would lose the ability to be manufactured and shipped in a printed form, pushing the role playing market completely onto the internet and gamers would only find each other through chat, forums or their own limited social circles, having no centralized gathering place acting as a 'watering hole' for them.
Even worse, I feel, is with that event the quality of roleplaying products goes down the tubes COMPLETELY for those of us who prefer printed products over PDFs or software.
I may not have learned to role play from a FLGS, but because of them they have kept my interest in multiple products and allowed me to meet others who play the same games.
And one other point I would like to add, that this poll is unintentiaonlly misrepresenting the facts of our hobby. According to industry demographics, most current rpgers learned to play BEFORE (during the 80's basically) the CCG boom (which happened in the 90's) that gave birth to the current game store model. The truth is, the RPG market is aging faster than it is pulling in new, younger players due to the very nature of how the game is played. Because role players rarely play outside their group of friends and a successful game requires a good DM to run, roleplaying has many factors stacked against it to keep it a growing industry, compared other hobby or video games (which allow you to play without a referee and with or against anyone regardless of their age).
My two cents, thanks for listening...err reading :/
Nate
buzz said:
My boxed set came with the chits and a little printed slip explaining that they couldn't get dice because of the oil shortage. We figured that the importers (Jedko) had opened the boxes, replaced the dice with cheap chits, and re-done the shrink-wrapping.
Regards,
Agback
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