I got into Ravenloft when the blackbox came out. I think I was about 13-14 (long time ago!). I was into Gothic horror stuff so this seemed a dream come true. Unfortunatley my game group werent as into the idea,
being about 14 the emphasis was on who could kill the most stuff and get the coolest magical weapons to kill more stuff with.
I got bored with the endless dungeon crawls they loved after a while and planned to try Ravenloft on them. I designed an adventure based loosely on Ship of horror that involved bring them to RL on a ship conducting an illegal trade in corpses for necromancers. I threw everything I had into the descriptions and played up the atmosphere, and had combat play only a minor part. At the end of the first session one of them turned to me and said "that was awesome, really gave me the creeps lets do it again".
Suffice to say we played only RL for quite a few years after that.
So in a long winded answer to this post, I think RL can be relevant to anyone if they are given the chance, although I think you need to have an appreciation for the atmosphere of gothic horror (but then I was lucky Bram Stokers Dracula came out about this time and it generated a lot of interets in the whole vampire thing).