Was Chaosium's founder first to buy a copy of D&D?

Question

Quote

Alexander Dotor once interviewed Greg Stafford, during which Greg Stafford stated the following:

Greg Stafford: I knew about D&D. I had a friend in Lake Geneva who was picking up abelt buckle catalogue at the printer and he saw another guy there and asked what it was. They guy said, A fantasy game. My buddy said, Hey, I have a friend making one of those. Can I buy a copy from you? And he did. Well, The guy was Gary Gygax and the gaming system the first copy of D&D ever sold. We read it but if you know that game, it was editorially terrible. At Chaosium we thought about a role-playing game with Glorantha as gaming world, but we needed a gaming system. I finally met Steve Perrin who had developed a gaming system and he created our system: RuneQuest. It was published in 1978.

Question

Is this true (allowing for the difficulties that interviews with Californian Arkati Shaman-Publishers present to seekers of truth)? Did Stafford's friend acquire a copy of D&D directly from Gygax? Did he pay for it? (How much?) Were other copies sold beforehand?

Answer 1

D&D set the mode of play for RPG's through at least 1980... certain others deviate from the mode of play into more abstract in the 80's, and into more story driven in the 90's.

I'm rather certain that Greg was aware of RPGs before he bought a copy of D&D, as he was a game designer, and had seen play at conventions. (He's mentioned this in some discussions on WWG's Pendragon forums, now defunct.) When he wrote RQ with Steve Perrin, there were already at least 3 games on the market: D&D, Starfaring, and T&T. And Starfaring and T&T are in fact responses to D&D by Ken St. Andre.

Greg has not mentioned participation in the Braunstein games (which predate D&D by several years, and are part of the origin of D&D).

The quote in the question is the proof that D&D influenced RQ... Greg had a copy, found it editorially lacking, and set out to do better.

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Note: RPGGeek cites Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin codesgined RQ1, and it was published in 1978; Boardgame Geek notes that White Bear and Red Moon was published in 1975. That frames the timeframe for D&D influence on RQ1.

T&T was 1975, as was Starfaring. Both by Ken St. Andre.

Answer 2

Early Runequest is a combination of two things. The first is the setting, Glorantha, by Stafford. Glorantha was in development well before D&D became a major market force. In this regard it shares a similar history to Harn and Tekumal. Both of which preexisted D&D as their author's private creation.

The second was rules developed by Steve Perrin. These were directly impacted by D&D starting as a set of house rules for Perrin's campaign spreading throughout various West Coast groups. A copy of these rules are known as the Perrin Convention. They were first printed in All the World's Monsters II by Chaosium. In fact you can read them on page 4 of the full size preview.

As it wound up; Perrin's rules were combined with Stafford's Glorantha to make early Runequest. Runequest in turn was a major influence on the development and acceptance of skill based systems for roleplaying games. Which in turn worked it way into D&D starting with the Survival Guide proficiencies in late 1st edition AD&D.

Answer 3

The quote does seem to be trivia, rather than something interesting about the game per se. Furthermore, as hearsay it is interesting, but difficult to substantiate.