Just how popular was DnD? Did kids really play it during lunch? (red box nostalgia)

[AbdulAlhazred]

I started playing in the mid-70's in Boy Scouts with the original 3 books. A couple of the older guys snagged a set and grudgingly let us play with them. Pretty soon we got our own books. I don't recall ever actually playing at school, but I also don't remember that we had much free time during school hours either.

After school we'd game. In the summer we'd game, etc. In 10th grade we moved to a town that had a LARGE gaming club and so we'd all head over there as soon as school was out or whenever and play games constantly all day. There were a fairly numerous group of us. That ended in 1980 when I moved again. At college from 81-85 we played a lot in the dorms too.

I'm not sure how POPULAR D&D was back in those days. It was well enough known with all the weirdo "D&D IS TEH DEVILLLLL!" people running around, but NOTHING was more socially unacceptable than being a gamer, that's for sure.

 

[Infiniti2000]

Not popular in any of the schools I attended, either, and I never even gamed until I got to college in '87. In fact I only ever recall one instance i saw of gaming but that was in middle school only. Strangely I was never in that crowd myself anyway. From a Breakfast Club perspective I would be a jock until college.

 

[surfarcher]

I started playing in grade 5 ont he weekends. By the first year of high school we were playing at lunch, after school and all day saturday.

Everyone brought dice and character sheets. A few of us brought books. I always have the red books, plus the expert and companion ones, in my bag.

Life was good.

 

[Mapache]

I think I spent more lunches during late elementary school and most of middle school playing D&D than I did anything else. (Except, y'know, eating.)

Of course, we didn't normally have the books with us at school, so we made most it up off the top of our heads. (And boy did that lead to some, uh, "interesting" results.) But we were still gaming.

I started playing at lunch in middle school in 1990. I was aware there were books, but the idea that you needed dice to play D&D didn't even occur to me until I eventually tracked down a copy of the PHB and DMG from the library and read them. My formative role-playing experiences were a little more GM-fiat-powered than most people's…

 

[reticent]

Yes, literally over lunch circa 1986. Though we quickly upgraded to AD&D.

 

[asdfff]

Thanks for all the memories shared so far...it's amazing to think that a game that's now so niche used to sold in (even grocery) stores, in the same class as Monopoly or Uno.

It's also neat to hear about quick traveller and D&D sessions, as if talking about "a quick game of halo" today. Which I guess really are equivalents.

 

[Andramelech]

5th Grade on the same bench at lunch, (not enough time at snack). We played the basic set (red box), then moved on to the expert set. All this crazy religious nonsense started about D&D being satanic. You guys laugh about it now, but it was serious stuff. We had to do everything stealth like, me especially. That was kind of why we played at school, to hide it from our idiot parents. I still give my mom crap about it today. In junior high We started Advanced D&D. In my middle school it was the Asian kids that were into cool like Tolkien. I still remember the first time I saw a kid reading "The Silmarillion", and made the connection between that, the Hobbit, and D&D. The guys I played with in Jr High were cool kids that kept it a secret that they played D&D from girls or douchebags. I remember a popular kid found out I played, and invited me over. He had all these bitchen Voltron toys and a bunch of Elric books. He asked me not to tell anyone he played D&D. I did the same untill some guy in that movie "airheads", said "Hey, I played D&D too!!". We started all saying that, and embracing our nerdiness. I still get uneasy when my nerd friends talk about D&D in public though. Old habits, you know..

 

[giant.robot]

My friends and I started in elementary school in the late 80s early 90s. Somebody's older brother had a couple AD&D books and one of us finally got a Basic Set box. We managed to play at lunch sometimes but the way my school was arranged you just couldn't hang out in the cafeteria the entire time, they eventually booted you out. On Fridays the last two hours or so of the day were like free periods where you could go outside and run around, stay in and play board games, or finish up assignments. My group all looked like we were studying because we had lined paper filled with numbers and written blocks of text and were drawing all over graph paper.

In later years fewer people kept playing since it was no longer the cool thing to do. Those of us that kept playing would get together in the library at lunch or in study periods and played. It was actually rare that we got together and gamed outside of school. Most of us has both video games and sports to occupy our weekends.

Playing in school actually turned out to be pretty cool because we could photocopy a drawing of a knight or viking warrior and say "hey this is Cedric of Felhold" or a picture of a castle and decide that was the ruined keep of Stormreach. Various history or mythology books provided no end to adventuring material. We could take some Greek myth or play, add a few Beholders, and have the next few weeks of adventuring. We probably learned more world history researching D&D adventures than we learned in our actual classes.

 

[Mr. Wilson]

We played Magic during lunch and played RPGs after school (we actually played way more TMNT, Rifts, and WoD then we did DnD.)

Middle School 94-96, high school 96-99.

 

[wedgeski]

In the early to mid-80's we played D&D in every spare second we could find. Before registration (20 minutes), during morning break (15 minutes), at lunch (55 minutes, we all brought packed lunches and could eat on the go), during afternoon break (10 minutes) and while waiting for the bus to take us home (25 minutes).

Since I went to an all-boys school, we did not play D&D on the bus, even though we could have, because y'know, there were girls and stuff there.