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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 5685626" data-attributes="member: 8447">Obviously I can't speak for "most", but I can speak for my own group.  I don't know if you would even call us a "club" -- maybe we were.  We were a group of friends, all in our teens, between 14 and 17 as of 1975 when we got into pre-1st ed D&D.  Back in 1970, my brother had gotten his first Avalon Hill boardgame and he & I played it to death; in 1972 we found out about miniatures wargaming through Jack Scruby's old Toy Soldier Factory in Cambria, CA.  We gathered up a group of buddies and started playing these every weekend.  Several times severe arguments broke out over line-of-site, bumped units, and even poor winners and losers -- heck, figure our ages and go from there.  This was grating on my nerves and I took to, instead of actually playing the games, developing scenarios for the battles.I was already familiar with Guidon Games, later TSR, through their game Chainmail.  I got a supplement from old Brookhurst Hobbies in Anaheim announcing D&D, but the store wasn't really sure how to advertise it.  "A wargame using paper and pencil, no minis, and lots of imagination, set in the Middle Ages with dragons" was pretty much how the ad-copy went.  So our group essentially drifted from miniatures battles over to D&D.  There were no game stores in our hometown of Santa Rosa, CA, so our contact with other rpgers was limited at first, especially with few driver's licenses and fewer cars between us.  We got down to Berkeley and San Francisco a few times to visit the game stores there, and one trip out to Concord to go to Dave Hargrave's shop (one visit was enough for us).  And, of course, there were sojourns down to DunDraCon at the Dunfey Hotel near SFO.  The thing was, since the rules were so sketchy, we had to make a lot of stuff up.  Also since so many of the monsters struck as purely goofy (heck, since about age 9 I had had the set of Japanese rubber monsters that became the inspirations to Gygax for the rust monster and the bullette, for example), our game took on a pretty goofy tone to begin with.  It wasn't until we picked up Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, and RuneQuest that we became really serious in our gaming tone.   I don't know if any of that helps answer your questions, but I hope it does.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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