That depends on how "early" is "early".
The Wargames Club Era - 1965-1975
In the 70s, D&D grew out of the wargaming hobby. The wargame clubs in the 60s became the wargame clubs of the 70s. There was no difference between the two up until about 1975/76.
Wargames clubs were largely people who knew one another through meeting by accident and informally at the few stores in town where such games were sold. Sometimes there was a bulletin board or a small little handwritten or (less often) typed flyer that was taped to the shelf where the games were sold in the store.
Later, the owners of the stores would keep a running list of people's names and phone numbers on hand to give to other customers so that they could know who to call to play these Avalon Hill bookcase games with.
Diplomacy was a biggie. Some came to know one another through zines and local "conventions".
That's the environment into which D&D was initially born and so that's the model that prevailed throughout most of the mid-70s. Very,
very few stores had any play space ("organized" or otherwise) and very few attempted to. But there were groups of people who knew one another in town and obtained each other names and phone numbers through the stores. They would usually meet in somebody's basement to game on the weekends or whatever. Once or twice a year they might run a game day or "convention" in somebody's basement, a church hall or University Student Union building. Sometimes they would drive a few hundred miles or more for a "big" gathering of 50-100 or so like-minded hobbyists. This sort of organization happened organically and was tracked with paper, pens, rolodexes and notebooks with people's names, telephone numbers and addresses in them.
Connections between regions happened because somebody moved, or knew-a-guy-who-knew-a-guy -- and the names would be exchanged over time. A low-tech Linked-in or Facebook arrangement, essentially.
Instrumental in starting up regional conventions and networking across the country were magazines, local zines and newsletters. The owners of those publications had the addresses of all who subscribed to it. This "central registry" of subscribers was an ABSOLUTELY KEY database of names back in the day. (In many ways, it is still key. Paizo didn't start
Pathfinder from scratch. They had 100k+ e-mail addresses in their database after running
Dungeon and
Dragon magazine and a
lot of goodwill from that, too.)
That's the exact model in which TSR was founded and the Lake Geneva Wargames/Strategy Club gave birth to D&D (several years after it gave birth to Gencon in Gary's basement). It was a loose model of organization that was present throughout most of the USA and Canada at the time.
Mass-Market Success - 1975-1985
A change occurred in the late 70s as D&D initially hit and, especially after the third printing of OD&D, the game had begun to percolate down to school-aged kids; consequently, the appeal of the game greatly broadened over a very short period of time.
Initially the wargames "clubs" which had developed simply swelled in size, but the age differences among players became problematic for many. Many of the wargamers of that era had played D&D for the first two or three years or so after it was released. Moreover, the grognards
also liked their AH and SPI strategy games too and still wanted to play them. The new players who were drawn in by D&D didn't share much of the wargaming tradition with the grognards of the day -- except maybe a mutual enjoyment of RISK. This contributed to some estrangement between the emerging groups (many co-existed happily, too).
This caused a parallel club development as D&D now broadened and began to be played within a teenage kid's social circles, at school clubs and at universities, too.
By the time of the Blue Box and AD&D -- (and the notoriety and HUGE PR blitz that
the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III provided to the game), D&D had completely overwhelmed most of the wargames clubs which gave birth to it. The wargamers of the time soon found themselves on the outside of something which had been previously *their* hobby. They developed a bit of a chip on their shoulders over this -- a chip which remains QUITE FIRMLY STUCK THERE on the shoulders of many wargamers and boardgamers to this day, I might add. (Wargames and RPGs is the only TRUE "edition war" which persists in hobby games circles in real life terms -- and it remains a bit of a "great divide" to this day among many hobbyists.)
In terms of competition, the only thing I can really recall was whether or not somebody was deemed a "better" DM than others. Consequently, there was some competition to be invited to play with the "Great DMs" of the day and those campaigns felt more "exclusive". Or at least, we liked to pretend they did.
In general, no, there was no competition as such. The only
real competition was the split between wargamers and role-players. There was a TINY group of wargamers that never tried D&D. There was a larger group who tried it, played it only occasionally and preferred counters and hexes. There was a group in the middle who played both, often. On the RPG side, there was a group who occasionally played wargames. On the far side was the largest group of all -- those who played RPGs and only RPGs.
Store Lists, School Clubs. PolyHedron and Dragon Magazine - 1985-1995
In the 80s the RPGA expanded the model of organization a bit, but it was not yet a primary point of "first contact". Organized play space in stores was still relatively rare at the time and the RPGA was very much still a convention phenomena in its initial stages. This increased over time, especially in the mid-90s to late 90s as M:TG took off and the Internet arrived in full force.
I credit
Magic: The Gathering with being the true impetus for most stores to add play space in a BIG WAY around 1994-96, for the reason that it actually made them enough money to pay for the extra square footage to bother doing it. The stores that survived the "printer problems" of T$R's death spiral were the stores that sold a lot of
Magic: The Gathering instead. The ones that did not sell a lot of M:TG did not survive at all - they went under ca. 1998.
The Internet and Organized Play - 1995 to Present
Fast-forward to today and the internet as an organizational tool changes the means of both locating and communicating with other gamers. In-store play has grown greatly as a means of attaching to a group initially, too.
And ENWorld has a role to play there as well, of course. I am sure there are HUNDREDS and probably THOUSANDS of gamers who attached to a group over the past decade by finding a group through ENWorld, either directly or indirectly.
