Look- lets just shut that stuff down right here and now.- its a stereotype that is innacurate and furthermore, serves no good purpose. I'd be willing to bet a lot of those you were thinking about when you composed that sentence were kids. Kida are noisy and they tend to have a clumsy grip of social niceties...and I'm sure even your childhood included screams and spazzing. Like it or not, within that crowd of kids are a large portion of the next wave of RPG and Wargame players.
I'm 37 & play RPGs, Wargames, CCGs (MTG, Doomtrooper, and a couple of others), and minis games (Chainmail, Confrontation), and that makes me old enough to remember when wargamers and other hobbyists complained about the "noisy, obnoxious" D&D players invading their stores.
The hobby would be better off if more gamers were willing to act like mentors. Personally, I've introduced a lot of noisy kids to the world of RPGs, mainly because I'm a responsible adult that parents trust. They know I'm not going to expose their kids to something that would harm them, and I'm going to teach them to play the right way- including how to behave in your GM's/host's house, how to be polite to other players, table etiquette, etc.
You know, I have a decent income, and every penny matters to me as well. I buy huge amounts of game product- games, supplements, minis, and Dwarven Forge - and in fact, I often buy duplicates of books I expect to get a lot of use. I own 3 3Ed PHBs, and 2 3.5PHBs, 2 Arcana Unearthed, 3 RIFTS main books, 3 Mutants & Masterminds main books, 3 Hero 5th edition hardcovers in addition to having a bucket of die and shelves of expansions, modules, sourcebooks etc. to 7 main RPGS and some Core books for lesser games (like Talisantha and GURPS)- all so that my players who are less well off don't have to buy product to game in my house. I'm even donating game stuff to the troops. But instead of buying at Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, B&N or Amazon, thereby saving myself thousands of dollars a year, I support my locals. The ONLY time I buy online is when product is absolutely inavailable to me otherwise, and even THEN, I don't shop the big guys.
For example, my LGS's only started carrying Confrontation minis this year, so I had been buying them from New Wave Games. Now that my LGS's have Confrontation, I buy it from the locals. Similarly, most of my LGS's wouldn't carry a certain few War Gods minis because the nudity of those particular minis went against their store policies. To obtain them, I had to go online.
And I'm still young enough to remember when I didn't have a lot of dough to spend on games. You know what? I just saved my money until I could afford to buy what I wanted. Once I had the Core books, the rest of the stuff didn't matter as much.
I also know what is like not to have a convenient game store. When I lived in Manhattan, Kansas, the local suppliers (not LGS's- book stores with RPG sections) only carried the same product for months on end- no special orders. To get the latest stuff, I often had to go on a 1-2 hour trip to Topeka, Wichita, or KC. That trip cost money.
It is my fervent hope that LGS's DON'T dissapear. While it is likely that the Internet can help satisfy the established base of the hobby, it can't draw people in like a LGS- no one surfing the net is going to accidentally find a page and wonder "What's with the funny die and the little metal warrior?" and have someone respond "That's D&D little fella! Its a game that lets you pretend to be in those books you like...with your buddies! Let me tell you more..."
That was my initial exposure, and that encounter sold me on the game. A little picture on the web with a block of text isn't going to sell itself like that salesman sold me that game.
