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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 8956897" data-attributes="member: 6796661">In my experience there are more gamers who started playing D&D a couple decades after I did exclaiming how people played in the 70s and 80s.  I mean, they must have picked up those stereotypes somewhere, but they rarely reflect how I remember gaming in the 80s. Maybe some of these stereotypes were very much the case in the 70s when it was dungeon crawling mixed with above-ground wargame battles. But that period, from what I've read, was very short. Very soon after D&D took off, people started to grok the new medium's potential. There was a lot of experimentation and styles of play from the very earliest days. To say that the first D&D gamers didn't care about character and story seems silly. The game arose from war gamers wanting to zoom into the level of individual characters and to allow them to grow and follow their development from game to game. And think how much of the game is based on stories of favored characters of those earliest gamers? Where do you think attributed spells got their names from? You can read the fanzines and see how the wargame reports of battles (in which there already were the seeds of playing out a role and making a story out of historical wargame sessions) developed into sharing stories of individual parties. Every generation of every fandom has its gatekeepers. Let them enjoy their self-constructed prisons while the rest of us enjoy playing a variety of games, in a variety of gaming styles, with an increasingly diverse and multi-generational fandom.</blockquote>

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