Actually, BattleTech did. 

We bought the Macross RPG to find out why they had the same machines.

Kind of an odd question for me. Books definitely came first, but I can't really trace the causality from one to the other. I was reading Brian Jacques' Redwall series starting around the age of 4 or 5, and I guess those have to be counted as fantasy. Think I started the Lone Wolf books around the 4th grade, and those may or may not count as roleplaying. Then things get very hazy, because D&D, Magic: The Gathering, fantasy videogames (particularly Dragon Quest and Ogre Battle IIRC), Tolkien and the Dragonlance books all got introduced into my life within a very short time of each other.

In the end, I think this comes down to generational differences. For people born during or after the 80s, fantasy was just a much more prevalent thing in popular society. Hell, Pokemon was the biggest thing in the world for a couple of years in the late 90s, and that's arguably fantasy.

I know I got introduced to D&D because my best friend at the time got given it for Christmas. Why he did is kind of an interesting question, because he was noticeably less interested in fantasy than I was. He also read the Lone Wolf books, but I think the appeal for both of us actually was more about D&D's connection to history. In the early days, we were constantly homebrewing classes to make them into "historical" soldier types (according to our juvenile understanding of them): Hoplite, duelist, cataphract, dragoon and so on. I know a lot of my early campaign settings were just thinly veiled excuses to smash different historical cultures together, possibly giving some of them pointy ears to justify it still being D&D.

For me, it was RPGs first, sort of. I was interested in D&D years before I could understand and play it. My best friend in preschool in 1975 had an older brother who played D&D, and older brothers were cool. So when we played "Let's Pretend", we called it "playing D&D".

I later got into SF and fantasy books, but a lot of my taste in grade school was terrible, like Piers Anthony. It wasn't until undergrad that I started getting better read in SF and fantasy.

edit: oops wrong thread for the reply i posted, trying again:

It was games first for me, I'd be an unread drunk retard if not for rpgs and dice, which forced me to learn to read better and then look stuff up...like, wtf is brigadine? better look it up...a roman market stall would look like...better look it up, and so on.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 03, 2024, 02:22:12 PM
My first expose to RPGs was the AD&D Coloring Album.

https://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2011/10/greg-irons-advanced-dungeons-and.html

I was fascinated both by the incredible art, and the sample dungeon game. I was 10 years old at the time, so my memories of what I was into are hazy. I don't think D&D got me into fantasy literature, so much as I was interested in the genre and it was an obvious fit.

Classic Babboon-headed hobgoblins even.

Books and comics got me into RPGs. And playing in school social sims which were doing the rounds around the same time.

The John Carter of Mars books in particular. And the At the Earths Core series being another.

I remember seeing the The Hobbit (Rankin-Bass) when it was televised in the 70s. That's the first "fantasy" media that I remember blowing me away. Later I found a copy of the novel at a garage sale for 15 cents, and I read that many times. Luckily for me, my father was also a sci-fi and fantasy fiction fan, and he had several shelves full of paperback fantasy and sci-fi novels (Burroughs, Herbert, Howard, Heinlein, Moorcock, Tolkien, a big collection of yellow-spined DAW paperbacks, many more). And it was actually my father that introduced me to D&D. I had heard about it at school, but never played it, and I mentioned it to my parents. To my surprise, my dad had recently acquired a copy of the Holmes basic set, and one evening he created a dungeon (the dungeon of the evil wizard, Kraylor) and ran me through it (I played multiple characters). My elf was slain by a giant spider, but my other characters (several dwarves and a human warrior, if I recall correctly) made it out laden with treasure. Dad didn't stick with it, but I was hooked for life.

Quote from: jhkim on January 03, 2024, 09:28:11 PMI later got into SF and fantasy books, but a lot of my taste in grade school was terrible, like Piers Anthony. It wasn't until undergrad that I started getting better read in SF and fantasy.

Reading Piers Anthony is an odd experience.  Most everything he wrote was in trilogies and series, and frequently the first book was great.  After that the quality plummeted.  I have to wonder if he hired ghostwriters for the later books.

Quote from: Mishihari on January 04, 2024, 04:11:19 AM

Quote from: jhkim on January 03, 2024, 09:28:11 PMI later got into SF and fantasy books, but a lot of my taste in grade school was terrible, like Piers Anthony. It wasn't until undergrad that I started getting better read in SF and fantasy.

Reading Piers Anthony is an odd experience.  Most everything he wrote was in trilogies and series, and frequently the first book was great.  After that the quality plummeted.  I have to wonder if he hired ghostwriters for the later books.

Even his one-offs are odd. What I found was that alot of his stories end in an unsatisfactory manner one way or another. Or they go off on some weirdass tangent.

Video games got me into TTRPGs (or more precisely, a friend of mine after I brought up NES's Dragon Warrior while discussing video games). I didn't even read anything or care about academic stuff till I got into TTRPGs (I didn't grow up in the most nurturing environment and school was like jail to me). They were basically the reason I started reading. First novel I ever read was The Verdant Passage, first book of Dark Sun's Prism Pentad series.

for me, personally, computer rpgs were first. then a colleague who ran an AD&D game got me to try it. and these days i read about games more than i actually play >_>

I'm surprised by the diversity of directions people came into the hobby from.  I started with fantasy books and kind of assumed most folks did the same.

Now I'm wondering if this has any effect on how we play the games.  I play primarily to go sightseeing in the fantasy worlds I read about.  If someone else is playing to reenact the combats from their video game in a more flexible form, frex, we're going to have very different goals and approaches to play.

I also think it's generational to a fair degree.  Older people like me almost certainly read a lot more books than younger generations when we were kids (as well as currently).  And we didn't have all these MMORPGs and console games to introduce us to D&D and other RPGs and their tropes.  Of course this is also why newer editions of D&D have become more video-gamey with lame ass mechanics like short and long rests.

Yes - Conan and Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser.

I started with:

• Tolkien. My friends and I were all deep into the lore. In retrospect, the love for Tolkien's worldbuilding is probably the thing that most echoed into my RPG play
• ERB
• Buscema's Conan

We rolled up our first characters in the Summer of '77. Mine was a Thief named Orion.

The Rankin/Bass Hobbit movie came out a few months later, nearly simultaneously with the AD&D Monster Manual. Coincidence? I think not.

I learned of REH and Leiber through Appendix N in '78, and devoured it. Followed by Vance, Dunsany, and the rest.