Ralif Redhammer
Legend
I honestly didn't even know about those sorts of proclamations coming through until relatively recently.
Indeed, people's gaming experiences were so variable back then. For me, living in rural Upstate NY in the 80s, that sort of a giant group would've been amazing and almost unbelievable. I'm sure there were some gaming clubs at the local colleges, but I was certainly too young to be a part of them.
And in places where there were relatively good communication channels, it wasn't too long before a fair number of people started to view a lot of Gygax' pronouncements with more than a bit of an eyeroll. It was nice that he'd written the game and all (at least before the perennial Gygax versus Arneson arguments started to solidly kick in) but telling people, effectively, that the fairly successful games they ran were "doing it wrong" or "weren't D&D" was, shall we say, a hard sell.
Indeed, people's gaming experiences were so variable back then. For me, living in rural Upstate NY in the 80s, that sort of a giant group would've been amazing and almost unbelievable. I'm sure there were some gaming clubs at the local colleges, but I was certainly too young to be a part of them.
It could go the other way, too, though; if you lived in the Greater Los Angeles area at the time, besides whatever local game clubs might exist, you had pretty massive groups associated with LASFS (the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society), a well known variant based in CalTech, and frankly, a pretty regular schedule of SF and wargaming conventions that always had some D&D associated, and various groups that rotated around one of several game shops. From what I understood at the time, the Bay Area was much the same, and not far off for San Diego. So while it was possible to game in isolation, it was really easy to encounter and move into a much larger local ecosystem of players.