I have been thinking about what kind of background leads people to play and more importantly create indie RPGs? I hear most people talk about how they grew up playing DnD but eventually grew out of it. I'm wondering if there are any notable exceptions in the design community?

I'm wondering this for a few reasons

I cant possibly be the only person into this that has never played DnD.

What other backgrounds are there and how can they be used to expand the player base for these games?

In knowing the background of players and their previous experience what are concepts that need to be explained better and what can be explained more quickly?

if there really is a common background then what effect has that singular perspective had on RPGs?

As I'm not from the DnD background I will offer an explanation of my gaming heritage.

I learned to game early on with monopoly, checkers, ect. This love led to playing the decipher star wars TCG and then more complex American board games and eventually euro games along the way I played miniatures and even dabbled in a little west end games star wars role playing but had mostly forgotten about it by the time I started designing my own games.

What brought me to role playing games after i had started designing was a friend who role played using a home brew system that was developed by his old gaming group. That created a unique culture in the gaming group where if someone would want to run a game they would just make up a whole new system, none of them were really much good and they were mostly variants on eachother but it was cheaper and in most cases easyer then figureing out a game from a book.

i had been role playing in my adult life for years before I picked up a book and tried to learn a game from it.

A friend of mine readed and old line of books where reader was confronted to a decision over the story each few pages, and then each choice lead to a different page of the same book. Among those books, a couple had a simple 2d6 combat mechanic. He started to tell the stories of these books at school, and since many on his friends enjoyed it a lot, he designed a few rules and made a few stories of his own. Later someone introduced him to 2nd edition, but since he didn't went too deep in there, it wasn't till a few years later he came back to rpg's with WoD. That was when we meet and again, by telling what happened on the sessions of his group, I became interested in RPGs.

I once played a game designed by him, and it resembles the books he readed in the aspect that you can actually build a complex character... that can die in the first two minutes of play :D not a flaw of the system, but the way he learned and likes to play whenever he gets to be GM.

My RPG background started with the JRPG Final Fantasy... from there, AD&D. After that, I began designing my own systems (about 11 or 12 at this point). I could never afford gaming books back then so it was a good solution. I had a good source of people to play with, so my games were always changing. Theeen... everyone left. x_x

I started out reading Choose Your Own Adventure books way back in the day when I was a little kid (when Edward Packard was still writing them).

Then I graduated to the D&D "Red Box" that my friends and I used to pass around and hide out with (this was when D&D was perceived as devil worship).  We'd play behind the bleachers during recess.  From there I started playing Call of Cthulhu, various other editions/versions of D&D, the Old World of Darkness, TORG, Cyberpunk, Ars Magica, GURPS and I don't know how many "indie" games.