Three decades of playing roles
I’m pretty sure I began playing Dungeons & Dragons around 1978 – after Star Wars but before Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I vaguely recall hearing about it from school friends, but have a clear memory of sitting in a sickbed opening the box my mom had purchased for me. The game came with cardboard chits you were supposed to shake in a cup for random rolls, but there was a dice accessory available that she got me soon after: 5 Platonic solids of very very cheap plastic. The 20-sided die was marked 1-10 (0, really) twice: you had to mark half the faces with a colored Sharpie to know which ones were 11-20.
After playing a lot of tabletop games with my school friends, I soon picked up Gamma World (post-nuclear-holocaust, with unplayably weak characters) and Top Secret (modern espionage, with unpleasantly complicated gun combat). Those didn’t fit the bill, so I moved to Advanced D&D (three large hardcovers full of detailed rules), and Traveller (three small black booklets which tried to define a galaxy). AD&D was the only one that stuck, and I rolled up a lot of characters and sketched out several overly-complex dungeons. Our local AD&D group was known for both sadistic game referees (I learned about keeping backup copies of character sheets) and “Monty Haul” campaigns (easy loot-fests with treasure such as swords that added 85% to your normal chances of killing things). Neither version was much fun. and I eventually shelved all the books.
The Star Trek, Ringworld, Doctor Who, and Robotech RPGs fell into my collection in the next decade, but they were ‘virtual RPGs’, in that I rarely had anyone to game with and I mainly had to imagine playing them. All of them used systems with dozens of specific skills, which meant you could count on none of the characters having a necessary one at a vital point in the game. (“What do you mean, no one learned Medieval Bavarian Science-Fiction Literature?”) I recall a rare Robotech game that consisted mainly of a 3-hour mecha combat session, followed by complete failure in the adventure, as our characters had not solved a puzzle that the referee had forgotten to give us.
In 1989 I returned to frequent gaming with the release of Shadowrun. Many people deride the game’s setting, but I found the mix of magic and high-tech exhilarating. (Besides, I was recovering from the auto accident about then, and it was something I could do with visiting friends without much physical stress.) The near-future time period meant that so much game-world explanation could be skipped when bringing players in, there was a fully-fleshed default place to start my campaign, and the tone and plots were rife with possibilities for actual role-playing (as opposed to simple quest-completing and loot-collection). I fell in love, and managed to assemble a rotating player group of almost 20 people.
Now, the first edition had rules issues, but we worked around those, and the second edition cleaned most of them up. Computer hacking, an important part of the fiction off which the game was based, never fit well into the evening sessions, but we learned to work around that problem too. I actually got my mom into the games – her character is visible in the Ruth Thompson group portrait commissioned by Jonny Miller. Our Shadowrun campaign set a record by lasting almost 15 off-and-on years, but power creep and real-life scheduling difficulties eventually killed that too, and we moved on.
Since then, I’ve managed to get some real play-time in Deadlands, which we all loved even though the players and ref were playing two separate conflicting games; and an excellent game that took me over a decade to understand why you’d play it: Paranoia. I’m in a Marvel Super Heroes game now that’s great fun when I’m not dealing with the RL scheduling issues, and I’ve got a longer list of ‘virtual’ games on my shelf, some of which I really ought to grit my teeth and unload. This isn’t even the whole story: there’s an entire miniatures-gaming branch which has led directly to me working for NASA. But D&D remains my first love, and last night I brushed off some of the old modules for a memory-lane trip.
30 years.
Awesome 🙂
I wish I’d been able to stick with your Shadowrun game long enough to find out how the famous but mysterious super-rich guy kept reappearing each day after getting gunned down or otherwise being killed in various ways . . .
Heh. The players never found that out. I’m saving that one for the next version of the campaign, which I’ll run someday…