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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6653898" data-attributes="member: 996">Contrary anecdote:  I played 1e from 1980 on, and attended conventions, so saw lot's of D&D being played.  AD&D was played heavily, 0D&D still saw some play, BECMI hardly at all.  Mini's were the norm, lots of them, all lead - they got pretty damn heavy, en masse.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  Even then, though, there was a generational split.  Kids, like myself, who had entered the hobby as teens with D&D usually had only a few minis, for our characters (if that), and improvised for everything else (dice and pencils saw a lot of re-purposing back in the day).  Established gamers had armies of Napoleonics or whatever, and were much more into collecting and painting minis, monster as well as character.  I fought a lot of Orcs that looked suspiciously like grenadiers back in the day.  (Heck, Grenadier was the company that made the second-best fantasy minis - after Ral Partha, of course.)The idea of a 'board' was an outsider misperception based on the prevalence of family boardgames in the 50s-70s, though, you're right about that.  No battlemasts for the first half of the 80s (I first encountered those playing Champions!).  Mostly bare table-tops, but DMs with that wargaming background might break out terrain.  By the 90s, things had changed.  The old-school wargamers weren't so much in evidence, and RP, including the elitist 'role not roll' BS, was taking center stage.  D&D lagged that trend, as always, but I can see how, if you started with BECMI/RC or 2e, you might have missed the wargaming influence to an extent.Where Mind's Eye Theatre - I mean, Theater of the Mind - came into vogue was with the rise of Storyteller games, and the role v roll 'debate' (a conflict comparable to the edition war in counter productive rancor and futility, but with all D&D firmly on the "Roll Playing" side of the divide).  That's also when we got the bad-rules-make-good-games and less-is-more 'Rules Lite' philosophies, and extreme case of those ideas, Freestyle RP, being tried out.</blockquote>

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