Gaming Generation Gap

[Mark]

Maybe we could avoid discussion of edition in this thread?

 

[Ahnehnois]

I am in the twentysomething crowd and began playing just before the advent of 3.0

I haven't read a great deal of fantasy, largely because the time i used tp devote to reading I now devote to D&D. My D&D is influenced heavily by Battlestar Galactica-not to say I have robots in full plate but I get my plot structures and character concepts from that line of thinking. Of fantasy authors, I am familiar with and influenced by only Tolkien and Lovecraft, and even in these I am not expert.

 

[Ariosto]

The interesting thing is that it's a generation gap of CULTURE, not age.

Indeed. I don't think a few more years makes much difference in the appeal (or lack thereof) of E.R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, Abe Merritt, or Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is not really a matter either of when one was born or how old one is now.

Much of the inspiration for D&D came from well outside popular culture. That was where heroic fantasy, science fiction, and (to a lesser degree) supernatural horror largely resided in the early 1970s -- along with medieval military history and other hobby-horses.

The game itself was a phenomenon that not only helped to popularize fantasy beyond fandom but to shape what genre fantasy was popular. The movies of Spielberg and Lucas kicked the spread to mass media into high gear.

The wainscot society of hardcore literary devotees has not necessarily shrunk. It simply was never numerous enough to make of anything the smash hits that D&D and Traveller became -- any more than Star Trek could have become a huge franchise based solely on the few souls to whom (e.g.) Harlan Ellison and James Blish are household names.

In the field of RPGs, D&D may no longer get the lion's share of that demographic, either. It is, after all, no longer literally "the only game in town."

 

[Ariosto]

For my part, I credit D&D with turning me on to genre fantasy. Before I encountered the game, I was immersed in science fiction. Apart from classic tales of myth and legend, the realm of swordsmen and sorcery was something I generally passed over (with a bit of prejudice) on the bookshelves.

I had read The Hobbit, and the Chronicles of Narnia (which my grandparents sent for the sake of religious allegory, and were more appreciated than later offerings of George MacDonald's Highland romances). With the blithe precociousness of a literary omnivore, I had even dipped (quite ignorant of the scandal once attached to it) into Cabell's Jurgen.

Not everything published in the "Frodo Lives!" fantasy craze, and the (partly) D&D-fueled explosion afterward, lived down to the garish covers -- but enough did to steer me quite firmly for a while back to rocketships and ray guns. At least a "proper" SF novel was still not so likely to turn out to be pornography of some stripe (simply boring before a certain age) as something involving "mighty thews".

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Its not always just literature. I was basically chided by two different 50-something gamers for liking Dark Sun (actually one them called it a steaming pile and the other one was not that far behind him, though they have never met). For them D&D itself was innovative. You got to play a single person with a personality instead of a unit, the Norse Gods and the Celtic Gods were a refreshing change from all the Greek Mythology they (and I) were forced to read in grade school, and elves, dwarves, halflings, half-orcs, and gnomes were something that wasn't human, even the Vancian system was completely liberating compared to the choices you had in a wargame, and you played something other than a soldier.

Whereas for me being in my 30s, all that was standard and you found it every where with the same variations on a theme: Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Kulthea, Perilous Realms, etc. etc. I had seen so many versions of the Orient that even that seemed a bit mudane (Oriental Adventures, Bushido, etc). So I naturally loved Dark Sun, Maztica, the Old Empires, Empire of the Petal Throne (yes I know how old it really is), and other games like that that broke the standard mold and went in their own direction. I still play standard fantasy, but give me a few odd hooks and I can be reeled in.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I started with fantasy kid lit when I was six (I was reading at 4). I read Oz and Narnia in the first grade, the Hobbit in second, and the LorR in 4th ( I got a lot more out of them when I read them as a teenager). Read lots of adolescent SF too - Alan Dean Foster was a mainstay, as were comic books. I discovered Amber in Jr High and just kept going with other new stuff in HS.

When I discovered D&D when I was 11 or so, I was already a huge fantasy/science fiction fan.

I never read Vance, and I read Conan, Elric and Leiber after I discovered D&D . Read them - hated them, but read them (I find I generally just don't like S&S as a subgenre).

The only D&D books I have actually read were the first Dragonlance Trilogy. Never have read a Forgotten Realms book, nor any other gaming novels.

For editions, I started with the boxes, but moved quickly to AD&D. I play 4th now.

I'm 42.

 

[AFGNCAAP]

Well, as a member of the 30something crowd, I can say a lot of my formative years with D&D-esque materials were:

• Reading the Lloyd Alexander books after The Black Cauldron came out in theaters (IIRC, I was in elementary school at the time).
• Seeing movies like Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings, the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit, Conan the Barbarian, Excalibur, Dragonslayer, and the Disney Robin Hood and The Sword in the Stone (and, FWIW, the 'original' Star Wars trilogy).
• Cartoons like Masters of the Universe, Thundercats, and Dungeons & Dragons.

Around the end of middle school/start of junior high, I really got into D&D and computer games with a fantasy theme (Ultima, Might & Magic, Zork, the Gold Box games, etc.). I read the Dragonlance Chronicles & Legends then, followed by a successful read of The Hobbit and LOTR (tried many times when I was younger, but couldn't get into it). Read a fair amount of the D&D-based fiction, as well as Asprin's Myth Adventures series.

(FYI: I got into D&D around the end of 1st ed./rise of 2nd ed., and the reign of BECMI D&D.)

However, it wasn't until college that I got into Leiber, Howard, Moorcock, Vance, and other "formative" authors for D&D. I only did thanks to the "recommended reading" lists present in 1st ed./BECMI copies of the games.

My big D&D days of my "prime" happened to be during the days when Magic first took off, and the Storyteller system took hold (the days of the trend of trenchcoats & katanas, if you will); essentially back when FR was the uber-cool setting for D&D, but D&D was seen as gauche in some gaming circles, and not too trendy by some.

 

[Ariosto]

So I naturally loved Dark Sun, Maztica, the Old Empires, Empire of the Petal Throne (yes I know how old it really is).

I am not acquainted with Old Empires. I think Dark Sun (and Planescape) came out when I had washed my hands of TSR and moved on to other things -- but would probably have suffered (perhaps unfairly) from my weariness at the time of all things remotely "Orks ... in ... Spaaaace!" anyway.

Empire of the Petal Throne, though, rocks if anything harder given the conservatism into which the D&D scene has settled since its ambitious 1975 release. It was no more to mass-market tastes when it was also deluxe and costly than it is today.

 

[Orius]

Well, let's see I'm 32, and I started playing when I was 16. But I'd already had some degree of exposure to fantasy at the time. I'd read some of Narnia when I was 10, and then LotR about a year later. From there I read the Prydain books, Edding's Elenium, and a bunch of Conan stuff, not just Howard's stuff but the various Ace and Tor pastiches. There's maybe other stuff I'd forgotten, and I'd always known about LotR, because I had a coloring book based on Bakshi's film when I was a kid.

I'd also had some exposure to D&D itself on the fringes, I watched the cartoon every week, and had some of the toys and stuff that was being marketed to kids, and I had a couple of books like the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were D&D based (which introduced me to color-coded dragons, gorgons, elementals, and umber hulks that I remember) too, and later when I was starting out on the LotR, the local library had some of the Endless Quest books on the paperback rack that I enjoyed reading as well. So by the time I started D&D, I was somewhat well grounded in the ideas.

I was also influenced by 80's fantasy movies as well from childhood until I first played (some perhaps subconciously). At the very least they included Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer, Beastmaster, The Dark Crystal (from which I shamelessly ripped off some of my first homebrew monsters), The Neverending Story, Labyrinth, Willow, and possibly Krull.

 

[Daern]

book club

Its fun when your gaming group functions as a bit of a book club. For a while my group was passing around the RR Martin books and then we all got into Bernard Cornwell's Arthurian books.
Also, for what its worth, the Loyd Alexander Prydain Chronicles are really great, young adult fantasy.
Some of the old pulp S&S stuff is not that incredible in a literary sense, but I think the Howard short stories and the Clark Ashton Smith stories are pretty unique pieces of writing.
and I started with the red box in i think '87 and i do wish there would be a 4e edition with all elmore art...