Over at the forum that is my second home, they started a poll/thread about the age demographics of members with these categories
How many years have you seen so far?
Up to 20 years
21-30 years
31-40 years
41-50 years
51-60 years
61-70 years
71-80 years
81-90 years
91-100 years
101 years or more
Before we look at the results, let's put these ages in perspective. D&D was published in 1974, which is 47 years ago, which means that if you were 50 you were 3 years old that year and if you were 60 you were 13 that year. Since we know that D&D was first introduced to the war gaming community, that is to say virtually all adults or 18 and up, it means that those people are now 65 years old and up. Over the first few years D&D started to penetrate the college age market or that is the same age group of which now the 65 year olds are the young end of the original D&D players which the majority of the original players being over 70 years old/
So let's look at the results of the poll. As of today they have 98 votes and the poll is locked.
The up to 20 years group - 1 vote or roughly 1%.
The 21-30 years group - 4 votes or roughly 4%.
So we can see that this forum has not done much to attract youth to the forum to talk about OD&D.
How about the next part of the demographic?
The 31-40 years group - 18 votes or roughly 18%.
These people were not even a gleam in the eye at the time OD&D made its debut.
The 41-50 years group - 35 votes or roughly 36%.
Again most these people were not even born yet at the beginning of the RPG era.
The 51-60 years group - 37 votes or roughly 38%.
The oldest few of this group were 13 when OD&D began, but it would be a few years before D&D entered the older part of this demographic. These people were 4-13 years old when D&D began and the earliest that any of them began to play D&D was 1978 or 1979 and most of them did not start playing until 1982 or 1983.
See my previous post here. The first players from this group started playing with the second Gygaxian D&D was fully dominant and the later players of this group started playing as the third Gygaxian D&D became dominant.
As noted in my previous post this means that all of these people started playing under this paradigm, that is this philosophy,
3. Then there is the third Gygaxian, this is after the money went to his head and he started preaching that BtB AD&D is the One True AD&D and that any alternations mean you are not playing AD&D. This is the BtB zealotry and OneTrue Wayism. This was where the most damage was done to D&D and the whole RPG genre.
This is where the railroaded gaming, rules lawyers, munchkins (not defined by age), powergamers/min-maxers, murder-hobos and BtB zealots became the mainstream and continues to be the mainstream to this day. This is when all games moved from open-ended to closed. This was when people where told they had to buy the setting and buy the modules for the setting because DIY is too difficult for ordinary people.
So you need to ask the question of just how old school is this forum if in more exact numbers 97% of you membership was not part of the original few years of D&D players.
So how many of this forums members are old enough to be old school?
The 61-70 years group - 2 votes or roughly 2%.
and
The 71-80 group - 1 vote or roughly 1%.
These are respectively the 14-23 age group and the 24-33 age group. Of the first group, you are unlikely to be an original player if you are currently younger than 64. So this forum has 3% or less of its members are old enough to have played D&D in 1974, 1975 or 1976. Even by 1976 the descent into the madness of adventure modules had begun.
So we have a forum where 97% of its members did not start gaming under the original play style whose dominance only lasted barely 3 years before it was supplanted by a steadily more closed and less open-ended play style that became more railroaded and more murder-hobo by the year.
It would be of great interest to run this on the older forum that is primarily AD&D, to see if that forum skews older with a higher percentage that are 61 or older. My gut tells me it might be as much as 6% instead of 3% but not higher than 10% at a max.
The number of people that started playing D&D in 1974, 1975 or 1976, outside of the still living Twin Cities and Lake Geneva crowd, who are also active on forums/blogs or other social media are vanishingly small. There is a 3rd forum that is also primarily AD&D that is a few years older and much larger and I would bet that it skews younger than either of these first two forums.
So what do we learn here? That the vast majority of those who claim to be old school grognards are just talking through their hats, because they were not even around for the original play style of the original days. That original pool of DMs was so small, that few people ever played under those DMs outside of an appearance by one of them at a con. Many of even the oldest of the old school DMs at cons soon defaulted to Killer DM mode, because it was expected and because of other social factors.
