OtspIII wrote:A lot of people in this thread are citing metalheads and stoners as evidence that D&D had the potential for more mainstream appeal. I can't speak for previous decades, so correct me if things have drastically changed, but these days metalheads are seen almost more as a sub-division of 'nerd' than anything else; the Ranger to the nerd Fighter.
Back in the glory days, was D&D genuinely somewhat mainstream, or just mainstream with outsiders?
Well, at the school I went to (mature suburb, teetering between working and middle class) even the "mainstream" would probably have been considered quasi-outsiders at the richer and more cliquish outer suburban schools. I can honestly say that for a couple years, though, even the "popular" (athletic/"preppy") boys (the girls not so much) had at least a casual interest in D&D. They didn't have full sets of rulebooks and subscriptions to Dragon and weren't going to cons and all that, but a lot of them had maybe 1 or 2 books (maybe just a module or Dragon issue or a rulebook like
Fiend Folio) and characters on notebook paper rolled up in the cafeteria or during study hall.
This lasted, as I mentioned, from about 4th-6th grades. By 8th grade (and especially through high-school) it was only the intellectual wierdos (i.e. me and my friends) still playing rpgs, and even we weren't playing D&D -- we were playing Chaosium stuff (RQ, CoC,
Stormbringer) and
Traveller and
Dangerous Journeys and GURPS -- ironically still chasing the mantle of more "mature" and "adult" games just like when we'd been playing AD&D as tweens. Actually, there were a few kids still playing D&D, but they were "dorks" (if I've got the taxonomy right -- the lack of fashion sense and poor social skills of a nerd but without the intelligence) and we wanted nothing to do with them and would cringe when they'd try to bond with us and tell us about their games (which is when we came up with the saying that "all gaming stories suck, except ours"
).
