This Side of the Dice #2

This week I would like to give a brief history of my gaming career. I say "gaming", but I guess I really mean table top gaming? I mean, video games are all fun and what not, and have probably been a major influence in my life, but I don't think my experience has been much different from most of the community.

Going back, way back, to my first experience with table top games, I was about seven or eight years old. I don't know how or why my brother got it, but one day the Dungeons and Dragons Red box just sort of appeared. This was my first experience with Dungeons and Dragons, and let me tell you, I had no clue what was going on. The concept of role-playing was easy. As a little tike I could imagine up just about anything and pantomimed out my character's actions. No, it was mixing the "game" concepts into the fantasy play that were completely forgien to me.

After the Red Box quickly came 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Oh yeah, we skipped all those intervening steps and skipped straight to the latest and greatest! At this point, I seem to recall that my parents might have actually been encouraging me to play D&D to help with my penmanship and math skills. Remember, this was before the internet, personal scanners, and portable document formats. If you wanted character sheets, you went and bought a packet of them. If you had a pocket full of cash, you could even photo copy some! Being a little kid, I didn't have access to these advanced and strange technologies... or money. I had graph paper and a pencil. Every character was written out line by line.

Next came a time in gaming that I think just about everyone in 1990 went through who was about my age. Why play Dungeons and Dragons when you could play a character in the world of your favorite cartoon characters! Thats right. I am talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And with TMNT came the system that had won the liscence. Palladium. This is about where something changed in my brain. Suddenly, there was a need to understand every aspect of character building and design. Min-maxing and power gaming occured.

Now, before this time, the games were mostly being run by my older brother, and were largely a procession of combat. Even at this early stage of my role-playing career, I was coming up with some seriously gimmicky, schtick characters. I remember one character was based off of Yorick from Quest for Glory 1 and was essentially a vest and fez wearing illusionist that rode around on a magic carpet. This type of character became rarer and rarer as the depths of the Palladium library of games were delved. Friends introduced us to the Robotech RPG (this is actually how I got into anime), Heroes Unlimited, and the previously mentioned TMNT. At this point the games were not just a series of combat encounters, but they were an exercise in how to generate the largest body count possible. Giving a budding adolecent psyche a protoculture powered mech with autocannons and an excuse to use them will pretty much end in this predictable fashion.

With my pre-adolecent bloodlust sated, my group of friends and I moved on to something meatier to sink our teeth into. It was about this time that we had begun to become experts on Star Wars. Any weekend my friends came over, we would probably watch Star Wars, quoting it line by line while eating maccaroni and cheese. And then something happened. My friend who had played RPGs with me before came to my house one day with the West End Star Wars second edition rulebook. At that point, my relationship with Star Wars changed. This was no longer something that I had the luxury to passively enjoy. No, this was something I now needed to explore and discect. The games we ran at this point evolved, and I am sad to say, my maturity as a player had not.

If my silly character concepts were out of place in Dungeons and Dragons and over looked during the Palladium years, they became starkly out of place in comparison to the serious business of what we were now trying to achieve. Playing Star Wars was no longer a self-centered, personal means of self-indulgence. The group was now trying to achieve something ephemeral. We were attempting to create stories and plots. We were trying to create characters with detailed histories and ... MOTIVATIONS? It was at this point where I had my first attempt at attempting to really figure out how to run a living, breathing campaign rather than what ammounted to a half-hour episode of a cartoon. It was at this point that there was a shift in my life and when I entered High School, gaming as a hobby nearly ceased.

Flash forward to my sophmore year of college. The previous year, a friend of mine had introduced me to Warhammer Fantasy Battles. This friend had also tried to run a campaign of AD&D with myself and one other person. This was my reawakening to gaming. After five years of nothing, I had a breif taste of what I had before. And it was pretty... meh. I continued to play Warhammer with my friend, but we never really attempted to continue the D&D game.

When my friend graduated, I was now at a loss for anyone to do any gaming with. On a lark, I was showing my roommate around the hobby store I frequented and the shop's proprietor, June, asked me if I had ever played Dungeons and Dragons. I said, "Yes, I have, why do you ask?" and she told me about a group that was forming to play 3rd Edition D&D. I introduce myself to the group, sat in on their game one time and immediately bought a player's handbook. This group was fun, energetic and engaging and we played regularly for the next five years. And like Prometheus, I decided I would bring role-playing games back to my friends at college. I gathered up anyone I could find who seemed interested and ran a few games. I even ran my first game of Call of Cthulhu in college.

After college the group I gamed with also became the people I hung out with and I met more and more people through them. It was also with this group that I began to really think about role-playing and how the games were run and played. Two members of this group were seriously old school role-playing gamers and introduced me to an array of systems and genres. I began to learn what I liked and how I liked things run. I collected everyhing D20 and began gaming with my brother again with his group of friends. And now I am writing this blog!

Also, if you've read to this point and read the last entry, please leave a comment (which hopefully work on this one) about your favorite or worst experiences with roleplaying games!