NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 4866282" data-attributes="member: 467">To be sure. If we're moving beyond literary and other pop-culture influences (which I think we have) and moving in the direction of "formative gaming" I'd say that those initial experiences are as likely to produce positive preferences as they are negative ones. I am sure there are many people who, upon first encountering D&D or other rpgs, thought "Awesome, I get to be a mighty thewed barbarian/demon-sword wielding albino/boy wizard/whatever" and end up *not* getting to do those things and being disappointed. Assuming that person came back to the table, that initial disappointment is going to color their feelings about RPGs for some time, maybe even forever.Likewise any assumption or hope about gaming before actually engaging in it, from the joy of medieval simulation to kick-ass cinematic combat to deep immersion storytelling. The lucky ones, I think, are those who discover the game for themselves and form their own way to play from the outset (I am in this group*) or those that observe the game from outside, like what they see and are able to join in. There's still surprises, to be sure, in either of those cases, but I think disappointment and negative experiences are less likely.To veer back toward the OP a little bit more, after thinking on it some I would guess that the relationship between genre preference and gaming preferences are not just related, but interconnected and constantly informaing one another.  While I read the Hobbit and some other fantasy before I played D&D, finding D&D and falling in love with it led me to indulge in more fantasy, from the "old generation" classics like REH and LotR to "new generation" (at the time) stuff like the Dragon Lance Series and Feist. Add to that movies, video/computer games and comics, both old and new. It's a continuing process.* My father brought home the Red Box when I was 10.  Myself and my two brothers played together, occassionally with friends, for years before adding anything to our arsenal outside the next box (blue, green, black and gold, baby!). We created our own adventures, toyed with the rules and played "our own way".  To this day, I still have trouble running modules, as we never used them.</blockquote>

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