This entry is about the the influence that a player's experience of entry into the hobby of role-playing games has on subsequent preferences. It ends with questions for you, the reader.
UPDATE: I hope that younger players will leave a response, too. I do like to hear from the other guys who are 45-55 years old, but not just them! All players, please respond. Even a brief answer will be interesting.
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Each one of us begins playing role-playing games somewhere, somehow, with some rules (or lack of rules), and with some other people. That last factor--our fellow gamers at the start--may be the most formative, because others contribute to our experience with different expectations, preferences, and prior experiences of their own. Different player groups produce different styles of play.
I think the people we play with at the start condition some of our preferences for a long time to come.
Reading other gamers' blogs and talking to friends about these games, I am struck by how different the individual's experiences of getting started with role-playing games can be.
One older blogger left a note of thanks in memory of his RPG mentors in the Boston area, including the famous early GM Glen Blacow. This player learned to play with a band of more mature players who helped him figure it out.
One blogger described his pride at his "initiation" into a grown-up game, as it seemed, and to hang around the teenagers who treated him like a younger brother (or guinea pig), giving him the sense of belonging to a nascent tradition. This impression shaped his lasting ideals for play that persist today.
Another older blogger describes a truly obnoxious friend who introduced him to the concepts of fantasy adventure role-playing games without any discernible or consistent rules. But it was enough of an introduction for him to continue, despite the yuckiness of it all.
These older players started in the '70s, when role-playing games were young, but they learned from older, still earlier, adopters.
Starting out alone
My own experience began with a gift. I received a copy of Moldvay's Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in the boxed set in 1981, when it was new. The kid who gave it to me as a birthday gift had never played it, either. His mother probably picked it up for me because it looked neat and was new on the store shelves. Nobody I knew then had played a role-playing game. I had no group to join. I learned to play from Moldvay's book by study and trial and error. I read and re-read the examples of play. I must have been doing something right, because I kept going and players from school played along with me.
The box included a promotional booklet called "Gateway to Adventure," an advertisement for TSR's products at the time. I read it over and over as a boy, imagining just how wonderful it would be to have, to read, to play all those other TSR games. I also studied some issues of Dragon magazine, fascinated by the advertisements for game products within. When I appeared to my large extended family to be obsessed with D&D and fantasy games, people started giving me role-playing game products as gifts at birthdays and appropriate holidays. I doubt they knew the difference between D&D and other game systems (like DragonQuest and the Palladium Role-Playing Game) and the adventure modules that they were giving to me once I exhibited this preference, so I ended up with a bunch of different things, while there was no incentive from any other players to continue to use one system alone.
That's how I learned my way around the hobby: by myself, self-taught, trying things out on my friends, and attempting to play with new rules every so often. Probably solo Tunnels & Trolls modules, choose-your-own-adventure books, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and Lone Wolf gamebooks played a large role in shaping my outlook, too.
When I did meet other already-existing player groups early on in high school, they were also unlike die-hard D&D fans. These players used home rules they lovingly wrote themselves, not rules from a book published by a company.
At least by the time Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play and GURPS came out in 1986, I never looked back at D&D. The only other "early" game I would play thereafter was Call of Cthulhu, which gave me and my friends great fun over many years.
Most of my life, I never thought about these starting conditions as a factor in the formation of my preferences later, preferences which remain now.
But if I had begun by joining an existing group of players, and if I had begun just two years earlier and was just two years older, when fewer well-produced alternatives to D&D existed, and those that did were not explained clearly as Moldvay's Basic was, or if I had never seen those alternatives--if it has all been just a little different--there is a good chance I would not have become so eclectic in my tastes and become so aloof to D&D. Maybe I would be like those many other older guys for whom D&D was and always will be the role-playing game, the one game to rule them all. Maybe, if I had not started alone, finding my own way, and with immediate access to multiple rule sets, I would have had the idea that there was a right way to play that older guys knew, and if I could just figure out the secrets of it, I'd be the best GM ever, or run the ideal role-playing game.
But no, I never even considered those as possibilities.
If I had begun by joining an older group of players, maybe my experience of D&D would also have been connected with feeling more grown up and accepted.
If I had begun by playing with a relative, maybe my experience would have been one of family solidarity. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I began playing games with my father as GM. It's unthinkable, given what kind of person he was, but there must be plenty of players now who were introduced by a mentoring parent through actual play.
Kids these days
My kids started playing RPGs when I ran games for them, starting with Hero Kids when they were about eight years old. The year before last, we played Advanced Fighting Fantasy for a little while, until my son got excited about Fifth Edition D&D through exposure from schoolmates sharing D&D books on the playground. But he did not have to learn how to play from the books on his own. I think for a kid his age, even a bright one, that would be pretty tough, given the complexity of the Fifth Edition (as compared with Moldvay's Basic).
The only reason I ran 5e was to show him how it worked. I wanted him to see an example of play by trying it. I think all will agree that just trying it is the best way to introduce role-playing games.
Immediately my son began running his own game for some friends from school, insisting on using his beloved 5e books and shaking his head at my favored older edition. He also refuses to use any published modules. He wants it to be his own. There are, however, quite distinct parallels between events, motifs, and structures that he has experienced as a player in my settings and what he uses with his own players. Naturally, he absorbed what he was exposed to, and he adapts it for his own fun with his friends. He is full of his own creative ideas, but there is an element of imitation in his story, following the games that I run for him. I would bet that every player who runs games does exactly the same thing, unconsciously or not. We imitate inspiring material.
My son runs 5e games for four eleven- and twelve-year-old friends. The entire campaign, based on weekly sessions, has been via Zoom with kids from his school, but it seems to work. His friends were all new players. They all learned to play from him. Some of them got copies of the 5e Players Handbook or Starter Set to understand the rules and the character possibilities better, but their experience, and the play style and aesthetic values my son expresses through his game, are conditioned by his own exposure to the games that I run for him. Also, I ask him questions about his campaign to encourage him. "Are you giving the players choices?" is the most frequent one. I hope that this is a good influence, but it's not my game; it's theirs. The more they play, the more excited his players are becoming. Their campaign has substance now and it continues to grow.
My son's start is so unlike my own start that I can't imagine what he will prefer in years to come, if he even sticks to the hobby.
How you started
If you are reading this, I would like to know how you started. Yes, you! Please leave a comment, as long as you want within what the comment field allows, telling us truthfully as much as you want along these lines:
1. The year you began, and with which role-playing game
2. Did you figure it out alone, or were you introduced by a lone but experienced GM, or by joining a preexisting group?
3. What was your first group like? Was it private among friends, in a game store, or in a club? Were they older, younger than you? Did their style of play shape the way you played later?
4. Your favorite role-playing game. (Was it the game you started with?)
5. Anything else you want to share reflecting the impact of how you started on how you play(ed).
It's never too late to leave your response.
My first RPG was Runequest (in the second-edition boxed set published by Games Workshop in 1980). I got it for my ninth birthday. A friend had been introduced to the game by his brother, who was much older (six years at least, I think) and had several of the supplements. It was my main RPG for many years; I was always the GM. I also designed a game of my own that got quite a bit of traction at primary and secondary school (I think it was basically the RuneQuest system simplified to use a d20 instead of percentile dice). I'd forgotten all about that until a friend reminded me a couple of years ago.
ReplyDeleteMy various overlapping and schismatic gaming groups were always composed of friends in the same year at school - both primary and secondary. At secondary school, I sometimes played in episodic AD&D, Warhammer FRP and Paranoia games run by others, but for the most part I GMed RuneQuest, Dragon Warriors, Stormbringer and my own games. Right at the end of secondary school, some of us played for a year or two in groups with older people (twenties and thirties). But at that stage, sport, wargaming and typical teenage distractions were chipping away at the time available for RPGs.
RuneQuest is still probably my favourite game *in an ideal world*. For atmosphere, Dragon Warriors is great, though, and now I'm increasingly fond of various takes on OD&D and Basic D&D (Whitehack, The Black Hack, Swords and Wizardry and the Rules Cyclopedia). The genius of those systems is how easy it is to create and run large groups of monsters on the fly (compare and contrast with RuneQuest, where it's a fair bit of work to create a group of five broo). I like The Fantasy Trip a lot too, and I'd snap up Stormbringer in a trice if it were ever to come back into print. When my kids are a bit older, I fancy a go at Pendragon.
Starting with RuneQuest left me with a sort of puzzled disdain towards D&D in all its forms. Character classes? Armour class? Levels? No hit locations? Also, American games (RuneQuest very much excluded) often tended to get arms and armour 'wrong' in the eyes of British kids (possibly something to do with access to arms and armours in museums?). Oddly enough, I think that's still a feature: if you look at how cheap warhammers and poleaxes are in many D&D iterations, you get the strong impression that the game designers have never seen those knightly weapons in all their complex and precision-engineered glory!
Now I think about it, there was also a sense in the 80s that British games were just cooler. Dragon Warriors always seemed much more evocative than D&D, and British kids were probably much less exposed to the pulp tradition and so a bit puzzled by the more gonzo monsters and trappings of D&D. I'd still take John Blanche's illustrations over Larry Elmore's any day! And, for teenagers, there was also a sense that British game designers (and miniature sculptors/painters) were cool, edgy punks and metalheads or earnest scholars, while their US equivalents seemed to be portly, ponytailed gents in Hawaiian shirts.
RuneQuest bucked TSR's trend of 'inaccurate medievalism' and was published by Games Workshop (with superb miniatures by the Perry brothers), so it always got a pass even as those prejudices manifested.
Now, though, I can appreciate the charms of the US games much more. I like the gonzo aspects and the lurid, Paul Bunyan-esque aspects of some of the monsters. I'm all for orange hobgoblins and pig-faced orcs! And I can see how a Hyborian-style mash-up of historical periods can lead to tremendous games - and without all the effort required to keep the setting consistent (a huge preoccupation of mine as a teenage GM). I also now love science-fantasy and genre-bending elements, which I would have abhorred as a kid. And, after having huge amounts of fun with The Keep on the Borderlands, the Isle of Dread and the Lost City last year, I more than ready to concede that those Hawaiian-shirted grognards knew a trick or two.
Though I'm a US-American, I always preferred the British RPG materials a bit more, too--at least the ones that I saw. I too would take John Blanche over Elmore any day. I like the observation that the British players were more punky and the US players were more dorky. I think there is something to that.
DeleteBut how did you learn to be a GM?
I think that RPGs were sufficiently modish then that the concept of running a game was just 'in the air'. I certainly understood how an RPG was supposed to work before I opened that RuneQuest box for the first time. It was probably explained to me by the friend with the older brother (who I think also had Empire of the Petal Throne).
DeleteThe initial 'training ground' was The Rainbow Mounds in the Apple Lane supplement included in GW's RuneQuest 2 boxed set. I didn't run any 'dungeons' larger than that for a long time; I think most of our early games were outdoor adventures, often featuring ambushes in ruins or forests.
Now I think about it, I had the 1984 paperback Fighting Fantasy RPG, which included a small dungeon adventure. And White Dwarf was widely available - and full of great RPG articles and scenarios at that stage. But the main source of instruction must have been the local library, which had several books on RPGs, including J Eric Holmes' Fantasy Role-Playing Games. I recall taking that book out many times when I was at primary school.
1980ish and I was in middle school. A friend set up a game of Holmes blue-book for me. He is freaking brilliant so I assume he learned it himself but I never asked him. It was a blast so started DMing myself.
ReplyDeleteInitially I ran a game for a few close friends and it was insanely monty haul. Then a friend of my brothers (football player, currently Col in the Army) mocked us for the monty haul elements. I restructured, shifted to AD&D and the Football Player joined the group. He was right, the game was better at lower power levels. Anyway it all broke up after university.
We played AD&D on Greyhawk, then RuneQuest 2 on Harn (with a brief flirtation with Harnmaster). Others in the group GM'd Twilight 2000, Traveller 2300 and Star Frontiers but none of those lasted more than a few games. I think the GMs in question didn't enjoy being a game master as much as a player.
1. 1981, Basic D&D and AD&D. See #2.
ReplyDelete2. Two teens, sons of my mom's friend, taught me to play. They ran me with a mix of my D&D set and AD&D, which they played. I subsequently went right to AD&D but played with a weird mix of partially understood rules.
3. I assembled a lot of like-minded 4th graders and we played. We frequently fragmented into other groups. No one outside our immediate grade played with us. My first mixed-age group was in Junior High when a kid one year older played with us.
4. GURPS. Not what I started with.
5. I think the weird mix of rules, and frequent rules arguments by kids who half-remembered the rules, heavily influenced my Rule Zero-heavy play style and rules writing style. Also, my general wariness playing with other gamers, as opposed to playing with friends who like to game. Later experience didn't cure me of that.
1. Basic D&D. I was probably 12.
ReplyDelete2. I was playing and collecting the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks as a child, so I had an idea of the fantasy gaming genre from those, but no actual RPG experience until I was 12 or so, when I met a kid at my school who had (or his big brother did) D&D Basic (fairly certain this would have been the Moldvay version although I didn't know the differences at the time). My friend GM'd a campaign for a bunch of us for what seems like a while; I only have bits of details of it all now. I don't recall now how much my friend already knew, but I presume that he had played with his older brother before he GM'd for us.
3. My first group was all friends in my year at school; we were all about 12. The friend who had D&D Basic was the GM and owned the only copy of the rules. The campaign was set in a world that I think my friend made up. Our first dungeon was a ruined castle with the physical layout of our school (which seemed very cool to me at the time), but I don't think the GM revealed that until afterwards. I think we went from Basic to Expert, and I recall that his big brother had AD&D which I got the sense was "more grown up and better". My friend wanted to migrate the campaign to AD&D but I don't know if that actually happened. The same friend ran a TMNT campaign (Palladium system) for us; I think that went on for a while, but this was probably all in space of about 1 year. The friend's older brother ran a Traveller game for us; fairly certain the original GDW rules. I think it was a one-shot; in any event my character survived chargen, but died to a trap or environmental hazard of some kind.
The next year I moved school. I don't think any of the kids my age played or knew anything about RPGs. I didn't own a published RPG ruleset, but I did know the Fighting Fantasy gamebook rules and I had the FF monster book Out of the Pit, and so I created my own RPG based on those rules but with different PC race/class options. I recall that I had enough sense of the arbitrary race/class split specific to Basic D&D, that in my FF-based homebrew I gave each race two class options (possibly more) to choose from, e.g. Adventurer or Thief, in the case of the halfling. I ran that for a while before I wanted to try something new. I think that was largely boredom on my part stocking an entire dungeon by hand manually; the dungeon layout and stocking had to "make sense" for the adventure - I don't think that nonsensical "gonzo" dungeons were a thing in my experience. I GM'd Paranoia 2e briefly, and various games in the Palladium system (Fantasy, Robotech, Superheroes) which seemed superior to D&D to my teenage mind.
4. GURPS. I stopped playing RPGs for several years after school due to lack of friends or colleagues who played. I stayed interested in RPGs, collecting many different books along the years. GURPS Basic 3rd Edition caught my eye as a detailed but flexible system, but I never had the chance to run or play it. Then GURPS 4e came out, and I started to collect those as they were published. I convinced a few friends (including my GF) to let me GM for them (only 1 of whom had RP'd before, although he was quite experienced) and I ran a GURPS fantasy campaign for a few years. Now I play/run RPGs at a gaming club (at least I did before the pandemic). As a player it will be whatever system the GM has decided to use for their game. As a GM it is almost always GURPS, unless running something specialised like Paranoia.
5. I think first as an inexperienced D&D player, and then later as a GM of my own game(s), I was used to the GM being the (relatively) experienced one and owning/knowing/teaching the rules, and being the authority. I think that "Rule Zero" was sort of intrinsic to that. I don't recall any rules arguments now (other RP arguments yes, but not rules), but I'm sure that as teenagers they must have happened.
1. 1981, Moldvay Basic set.
ReplyDelete2. My friend at school had an older brother who played D&D and had taught him. He passed his wisdom down to the rest of us, though eventually he also brought us his brother's penchant for monty haulism and power gaming.
3. We started as 3rd graders (I grew up in the US). We played at school during lunch and recess, and had 12 hour sessions at sleepovers. Other than the power-gamey brother, we had no outside influences so were left to forge our own path. The King Arthur legends were sort of a core 'text' for us, so we had Lawful characters ranging over the land to slay evil and right wrongs. We also developed the idea that the cleric was the most valuable party member (he alone had healing spells!) so was to be kept in the centre of the marching order and defended at all costs -- even by the unarmoured magic-user.
4. I'm bad at picking favourites, but probably Das Schwarze Auge. Traveller and Call of Cthulhu / Runequest/ BRP in general are runners up.
5. The way I started didn't really shape how I played as I got older except as something to grow out of. But it does make me grit my teeth when the OSR people bang on about how it was in the olden days.
1. 1987, AD&D kitbashed with Mentzer Basic D&D.
ReplyDelete2. I figured it out alone, with my brother and cousin. What happened was that the year before I had entered junior high, and some of my new friends there played D&D. It sounded cool, and read up and asked questions. The problem was that I never could get to their houses to play. I asked my grandmother for a PHB (and OA and WSG, thinking I needed those) for Christmas, and she revealed that she had bought Mentzer's Basic Set a few years ago, thinking it would be a good game to spring on us when we were old enough, which obviously we were. So I got those three books, the Mentzer Basic Set, and the Forgotten Realms boxed set that my grandmother had also bought me (I told her I needed a module), and on Christmas morning figured out how to play one of the adventures in the GM book for the FR set.
4. GURPS. Turned onto it by a classmate a few years later. I also had trouble getting folks to play; my classmates were heavily into AD&D 2e and the Palladium stuff (TMNT and Robotech).
5. I remember when I first got the FR boxed set and thinking that I wanted some kind of open-ended campaign centered around a caravan. A picaresque set of adventures, using a word I didn't know at the time. I obviously was interested in outdoor adventures from my choice of the Wilderness Survival Guide. I however moved towards more and more structured adventures until encountering the OSR around 2010 or so, when I had an epiphany and went hard the other way. The hexcrawls discussed were the kinds of adventures I had wanted to play back in the mid-1980s but didn't understand it.
I was introduced to AD&D in 1979 (I think) when my visiting half-brother, who was much older than me, condescended to play a single one-on-one session with me. It wasn’t enough for me to understand the mechanics, but I was hooked. Thereafter all my meager allowance went to gaming. I think I started with Melee because it was all that I could afford, but that was unsatisfactory. So I saved up and bought a DMG, mostly because Appendix E included monster stats – two birds! So I was building dungeons using Appendix A and C before I had enough information to do CharGen. It took a couple of months to get a PH, and I could never find a new MM so I ended up buying a well-used copy for the price of a new one. I still have all three books, although my DMG is on its second application of duct tape to the spine. My first set of dice were terribly made.
ReplyDeleteI introduced the game to my friends, even before I scored that MM. All of whom were a year or two older than me, and had more money than me, and could afford modules, so I DMed less often than they did. But I have to say my first teacher was really the DMG. My friends all had very different DMing styles, and I’m sure I picked up a little here and a little there. My group was a mix of couch potatoes and more physical types, and I remember arguments in which athletes actually demonstrated the actions they wanted to do, which couch potato DMs had ruled impossible; I think that helped foster a distain for rules that didn’t reflect reality (or at least slavish devotion to rules that didn’t always reflect reality) and my frustration with the AD&D combat system.
We played a little Gamma World and a little Rolemaster, but mostly it was heavily houseruled AD&D (with simplified initiative mechanics). I didn’t know there was any other kind until encountering AD&D purists on the internet. In fact, once I started reading Dragon magazine, which was packed with houserules, it seemed like that was the way it was intended to be played. Gygax’ odd rant against houserules at first confused me and then pissed me off; I don’t know about his impact on my playstyle, but I think reconciling the fact that I loved the game to the point of obsession but was deeply annoyed by its author probably had a big impact on my worldview.
Later, when I was able to afford them, I read other systems to raid their mechanics and implied settings for ideas, but we never actually played any of them.
Now, my favourite game is D&D 4e, although I continue to frequently turn to the 1e DMG for inspiration. My game isn’t very combat heavy, but when there is combat I prefer it if strategy and tactics really matter, and 4e scratches that itch. I had spent years trying to make 1e do what I wanted, and it turned out to be way easier to adapt 4e to a 1e(ish) playstyle than to modify 1e combat to be remotely interesting to me. I completely skipped 3e. I am learning 5e, but only because it is what my older kids play, and I want my youngest to learn the game he is most likely to be able to play with his friends.
1. My first encounter with what was then called "fantasy roleplaying games" was a fateful collision in late 1980/early 1981 in my junior high school (middle school) library. My first session was OD&D.
ReplyDelete2. The game was run by a fellow 7th grader. He was a very stingy DM who had learned from college gamers, and to be called a Monty Haul DM was a severe insult.
3. He'd been running sessions for a handful of my classmates, and they had varying degrees of knowledge about the system, but we were very much following his template as we branched out to other games. We always played at someone's house, and I can only recall playing at a game store once, primarily because it was a 2 hour bus ride to the store. So it was bedroom and basement gaming for us.
The philosophy in this early gaming circle was very much "the DM is there to make you work for everything your characters get, and if you screw up he will destroy your character." So when I met other gamers in high school and the composition of my gaming group changed, I brought that philosophy with me. But I eventually realized that constant pressure, unrelenting tension, was not as fun as allowing players to relish their victories from time to time before applying the screws. Over the years my play style continued to evolve and I'd say that now it's quite far removed from what it was when I first started running games.
4. I've played dozens of games, and it's really impossible for me to say which is my favorite. It's like music or movies or books – there are several I hold close to my heart, but for different reasons, suiting different needs. I can say that D&D and d20 fantasy with classes & levels is not my thing and hasn't been for a long time. Recent favorites include Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (for the resolution mechanics and the tools it gives a GM for creating adventures), and Degenesis (for the setting's depth and evocativeness). RuneQuest will always hold a special place in my heart, and I know I'll eventually run a campaign using the latest incarnation.
5. This is a fascinating topic. It also makes me think about two big factors that are seldom discussed in tabletop roleplaying circles: 1) Whether you started playing before the Web (and actual play videos in particular) changed everything, and 2) Whether you primarily play with a core group of friends or game often with with people you don't know (through conventions or online). Those two factors have a huge impact on our baseline gaming style, how we interact with game products, and the importance of safety tools.
Though I've played at a handful of conventions, I much prefer playing with the same small group regularly. For me friendship is part of gaming, and as Peter D noted, I'm wary of investing time in gaming with strangers, mostly because in my experience the odds of it not working out well are significant.
I also don't care about what the "right" way to play a game is, and I don't bother spending much effort trying to find the answers online. This I think is generational. Coming up in the hobby in an era when it was assumed unclear rules would be adjudicated on the fly, I have no trouble just making a judgement call and going with it.
Also, because I game with friends I've known for years, we can and do delve into challenging subject matter such as gruesome horror without using tools that have been developed for situations when the players don't know each other very well. This is not to disparage those tools at all – I'm just noting that the default assumption used to be that you were playing with friends, and now the default assumption is that you're playing with someone you may have just encountered online.
Erik, thanks for stopping by and for sharing your response. I think you're right to point to the advent of immersive online video games as a turning point, when expectations of RPGs changed. (I have never played those games, and my kids haven't, either, so I'm not exactly sure about how to characterize that difference.)
DeleteThere does seem to be a pattern, even with just the stories folks have left here so far: When we move to new places, it can be hard to keep going in the hobby, because role-playing games often go hand-in-hand with close friendships between friends who see each other regularly.
1. Somewhere around 1984 or 1985, Basic D&D (Frank Mentzer, I believe). Pretty much after reading the Hobbit, which I think was 5th or 6th grade.
ReplyDelete2. Formally, through a PTO-sponsored Saturday morning extracurricular group/club; they had rocketry, various crafts, etc., and also had D&D. I think that was January of 5th or 6th grade. The DM, as I recall, was a high school kid. I played an Elf. The next year, they had the same club, and I played AD&D as a human druid.
3. The first “group” of any sort was the club, and I played with friends as well. However, in high school, I met up with a bunch of older kids (about 5-7 years older than me) from my summer job and played with that group in a pretty sustained campaign for a good period of time. They probably had some effect how I played, but it was not defining as it evolved over the course of 30+ years.
4. GURPS. It was not what I started with. I still enjoy D&D, and 5th edition is fun, but I prefer the less abstract combat of GURPS, particularly the Dungeon Fantasy RPG. The customization was very important to me as well. I really liked AD&D 2nd Edition’s Player’s Option book, which allowed you to mess around with classes and races, IIRC, which led to the possibility of a more customized class. The lack of defense rolls in D&D has always irked me.
5. It’s hard to say how much those early years influenced later gaming; not much, I think. I have good memories from them (bits and pieces here and there), but they are scattered and involved several groups with very different play styles. Looking at it a bit differently, I never played in a group where you had to watch your back, where other players were rivals or couldn’t be trusted, and just having knowledge of such groups’ existence probably defined how I play today. I much prefer the collaborative aspect of role-playing games to other games where you compete against friends and family (Monopoly, Munchkin, Catan, etc.). Those games can be a lot of fun as well, but I prefer games where you work with people rather than trying to screw them over.
1. Started in 1983 (Grade 5) with 1980 D&D Basic.
ReplyDelete2. My friend had been introduced to D&D a couple of weeks prior by his teacher, then in turn introduced the rest of us He was our de facto DM and by-and-large we figured it out ourselves.
3. We were all around the same age (grades 4-6) and gathered at whichever friend's parents would let us monopolize the kitchen table. Kitchen Table games have been our tradition since, regardless if a more suitable table is available.
4. While I still have a soft spot for BECMI D&D and 1e AD&D, my favourite is GURPS, followed closely by Car Wars.
5. AD&D 1e in particular influenced my schoolwork. My Grade 6 teacher noticed a rapid improvement in my grammar, punctuation, spelling, and organization of thoughts as I got deeper into gaming. It also led me to commit a cardinal Canadian sin: choosing another pastime rather than play hockey!
1) I began playing TTRPGs and D&D in the Fall of 2016 with both D&D 5e and AD&D. Technically I participated in a one-shot earlier in 2014, but it was a group that flamed up and sputtered out.
ReplyDelete2/3) To cover the next two points, I started out in a College Club that had enabled groups to meet and play together. The 5e groups was one where it was a mix of new and experienced players that had seen Critical Role (something I haven't heard of and haven't consistently watched). This shaped their view of D&D to be more story-driven with deadly hard-hitting combats (or you could say an echo of what the DM thought was D&D).
The AD&D group I had come into was different, it was a group consisting of members who regularly played with one another and for a long time. They were playing Keep on the Borderlands in an all Dwarf game, the DM had developed his own set of other Dwarf races pulled from different corners of fantasy (Flint Redbeard will be missed).
I feel like these two groups were like different sides of a coin and they kind of helped me get a taste of the new generation of D&D and old school when someone would usually only get exposure on one end or the other. The group of players I have come into will tell you that I'm in Old-School Wargamer who runs games better than Critical Role (or atleast games are very enjoyable in comparison to the Hollywood-ness of Critical Role) who can phone-in a whole session and still have a consistent thread running throughout.
It also enabled me to look at different rulesets and be willing to play different games (something that wasn't common at both the Club and modern 5e gamers without having to persuade them into something completely new).
4) It's currently a tie between Tall Tales (Mark Hunt's B/X Spaghetti Western ruleset), Pathfinder 2e and WEG Star Wars. Tall Tales (and B/X in general) is mentioned due to it being an easy to use Western ruleset but also being easy to bend and twist at a moment's notice. Pathfinder 2e is mentioned also because it strikes the balance between crunchy and flexible where within a 20 minute period I have 2 or 3 basic encounters ready and then run the rest of the session using the GM quick-reference on the back of the GM-screen. I mentioned WEG Star Wars because of the pulpy, star wars adventure you can get up into and because it's Star Wars.
These are not the systems I have started with (5e and AD&D), but they are both rulesets that I keep coming back and playing (at least in the case of 5e).
5) I feel like my experiences of interacting with the Role-Playing Forums present on Facebook had primed part of my mind on playing D&D and TTRPGs in general due to the character focused nature both TTRPGs and the Roleplaying Forums share. I can also say the copious amounts of D&D Tips videos I have watched online also shaped my tastes since many of these video were made by older Players from the 1e/2e/3e era and later. At the time of me joining, I wasn't truly involved with fantasy and sci-fi, so I came in as a clean slate for the most part so I kind of had been going with the flow.
I'm not sure where I am gonna go with my tastes in TTRPGs and Fantasy as a whole, but I can say that the AD&D and B/X style of gaming will stick with me for a long time since it's foundational.
1. 1981 (7th grade) with Moldovay Basic and AD&D. Didn't get a real game going until highschool in 82, mostly played Crypt of the Sorcererand Dungeon! Until then.
ReplyDelete2. The D&D club in freshman year of high school introduced me to people I played with for years, and one of whom I play OSE with today.
3.
Until then, I muddled through and rolled up tons of characters, and initally we played a mix of AD&D with BX modules. That club also wargamed, and p lo ayed Gamna World, MSH, Paranoia, Star Frontiers, and my cluster of friends played Nightlife and Palladium Fantasy, and anything else we could get, but mostly AD&D for years, partway into 2e, but before the splatbooks. I also had people playing a game I designed through college until
4. GURPS. My initial experiments were ahorrible kitchen sink mess, but I ran Fantasy, ported over CoC and VtM and ran a modern Horror game that eventually became a Horror/Cyberpunk game. I currently run a pbp of GURPS dungeon Fantasy., and an OSE game over google meet.
5.The wonderment of reading through my Dad's collection of sf and Swords&Sorcery (and a dedicated pursuit of Appendix N) greatly colored my preferences; I like building a world that has its own plans and agndas, which PC'swill interact with and screw up. I have been the DM for years and years (except for the 15 or so year gsp during which I played nothing, and gave away my stuff) and haven't been just a player in whatfeels like a very long time. There are just so many other stories to tell!
1. Somewhere around 2007-2009. I don’t think I actually started playing until 2008/2009 but I was rolling up characters with my dad and my uncle around ’07.
ReplyDelete2. My Dad (who also commented here) has been playing for years and probably started my younger brother and I as soon as we were old enough to understand the rules and probably right around when I read the Hobbit and immediately watched the Lord of the Rings movies after. We started with the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5E starter set. I remember playing as the pre-rolled character Regdar (Redgar?) who was a Human Fighter and I especially remember rolling terribly a bunch of times during our first session to the point where to this day when I roll poorly my brother still asks if my character attended “The Regdar School of Sucking.”
3. I played with my dad and my brother and my uncle for the first years that I played. My dad was the GM in my first 4-5 campaigns. I think that this group did impact my playstyle a fair amount as I was always drawn towards wizards because of the magic, but eventually settled in comfortably into the “Controller” roll because of the strategy aspect which helped our group. I still play with this group and I’ve played a wizard in most of the campaigns with that group.
4. GURPS/Dungeon Fantasy RPG. It wasn’t what I started with and I was hesitant when I started around 3-4 years ago because I had always loved D&D but I knew DFRPG was my new favorite within a couple of months. The high customization it probably what drew me in the most. I never liked to play fighters in D&D because it always felt like there were about 15 different possible fighter builds and they didn’t feel unique. With DF, it seems near infinite in the amount of ways to build a knight.
5. I think that starting by playing a Wizard and “Controller” type characters early on set up the playstyle that I eventually adopted. Having to learn rules about how magic worked and what you could and couldn’t do at a relatively young age set me up to better understand things like puzzles and tactics. In my current game with my original group, I play a very stingy wizard who doesn’t like to use too much fatigue when he doesn’t need to. Sometimes, for combat that means figuring out what type of attack, if costly would be a good way to dramatically shorten the fight to prevent using more fatigue down the line (the answer is often explosive lightning for the stunning aspect). I think the controller style play also played a part in my becoming a GM myself. I ran a couple of One-Shot adventures when I was in college and currently run my own DFRPG campaign. Later play with other players who played wizards has also impacted a degree of my playstyle.
I believe it was the fall of '89, late in elementary school years. I was already marked out as one of the nerdy outcast kids on the playground. At the start of the new school year, I discovered some of the other nerdy outcast kids talking about this weird game, D&D, that I'd sort of vaguely been aware of through seeing books here and there (remember when Waldenbooks sold those things?). I asked to try it on the playground, and someone said sure. Right there, with no dice, no rules, and no prepped adventure, I became an adventurer with a cheetah-shapeshifting cloak (!). I vaguely remember there was a black pudding or some other kind of ooze; I asked whether my character could turn into a cheetah and run across the ooze too quickly for it to hurt him. The GM said sure. There was a door, and I think Tiamat was on the other side (!). The end-of-recess bell rang.
ReplyDeleteI was totally hooked.
That group of nerdy outcast kids became MY group, and I became a D&D player. These were in the days when AD&D 2e was the reigning king, so we played that (ignoring plenty of rules, as most did). I also got a copy of the Expert Mentzer blue box (after all, I reasoned, I played *Advanced* D&D; what did I need a 'basic' box for? :-). I vaguely recognized that the two resources were essentially compatible and yet somehow different, a distinction that always puzzled me back then. I pored and pored over the descriptions of Mystara and the Isle of Dread module.
One of the biggest influences, back then, was that a family friend found out about my new hobby, and bequeathed two file-boxes packed full of his old D&D stuff. One was packed solid with old Dragon magazines; the other was full of old modules, books (Fiend Folio, Monster Manual 2e, Wilderness guide, Dungeoneering guide, the Grayhawk boxed set, the Forgotten Realms boxed set etc.). Looking back, I've realized that these materials - even though many of them were 1e products, and only some were B/X or BECMI - gave my own sense of D&D a much more 'old school' vibe than that of my friends and co-players. I loved it.
We also got into other things like Warhammer, Shadowrun (briefly), Battletech, etc.
Today, my favorite way to play is almost always very rules-light: I'm into FKR, Into the Odd, and the lighter sort of PbtA games. That's partly because life is just way too busy to burn my brain too much in my hobby (I'm an academic, so 'crunch' is sort of my professional life anyway) and partly because the rules-light approach always seems the fastest way to get right into what I really enjoy the most about rpgs.
1. It might have been 1992 or 1993 and the game was my homebrew, based on what I read about role=playing games in a magazine somewhere. In late 1994 I have been introduced to 'real' roleplaying games as my native Poland slowly opened to the West. First it was Warhammer FRP, then Vampire: The Masquerade and West End Games' Star Wars.
ReplyDelete2. I tried to figure it alone, but in the aforementioned 1994 I met a guy who was introducing me to Warhammer and a 'proper way' to GM. Funnily enough, my first attempts at roleplaying were very sandboxy, in a style not unlike to what OSR postulates, but my new friend scolded me for that, claiming roleplaying has to have a proper STORY. The friendship ended very soon (with him banging my girlfriend) so I was on my own again, but by that time, being the impressionable teenager I was, my head was filled with 1990s railroady storytelling crap.
3. There were no stores nor clubs in small towns like ours (and even gaming stores in big cities were little more than marketplace stands), so we were just a bunch of secondary-school friends.
4. I hate all of them. I mean, mechanically. I tinker to no end and then I hate my hacks too. There were only two games I enjoyed playing as written: Fiasco and VSCA's Hollowpoint. I love leafing through the games of my youth: first edition of WFRP, second editions of Vampire: the Masquerade and Star Wars but I have little desire to play them.
5. The very first post in this blog I stumbled upon was extremely salty "Myths of the Early OSR 1". I thus feel I need to add that around the turn of centuries I stopped playing — precisely because the high concepts of "personal drama" and "interactive literature" just didn't work in real life and. You might have quoted Bledshaw to mock him, but I belive he was right. Gaming table is not a place to explore one's psyche, especially not when supposed explorers are secondary- or high school kids. Our attempts at acting and weaving a narrative were laughably bad and I just couldn't help but feel disheartened, even back then. I returned to the hobby only on the wings of OSR. Maybe it's just I continued to be impressionable beyond my teenage years, but seeing an entire movement built around toppling the holy cows of narrative plots, staying-in-character and all that stuff was very liberating.
Thank you! I wish that more players from outside of the US and UK would contribute to this entry. The culture of role-playing games and the reactions aroused against different prevailing tendencies seem to vary widely from country to country. Some eastern Europeans I've communicated with came to the OSR as a reaction against how they started. It seems that the culture of "drama" there in the late '90s was highly pronounced.
DeleteI think we have to reckon with the possibility that the "storytelling" orientation in some European countries became obnoxious in a way that it never was for many in the USA. Until the mid-'90s, at least in my experience, this was never a "holy cow," as you put it, here. In other words, the names we give to tendencies have meant different things in practice.
Whether or not you think the gaming table is a place to explore the psyche, many players *do* think that. They have thought so since the very beginning of the RPG hobby--and even before the hobby took shape. The idea of "role-playing" originated in German psychotherapy, after all. I warmly recommend the books of Jon Peterson. Start with _The Elusive Shift_. You may not want to play that way, but others do play that way, and they have done so since the 1970s.
Of course, nobody should push you into playing as you do not wish to play. I hope that you will find rules that you do not hate, and that you enjoy yourself in the ways you find agreeable. Thank you again for stopping by.
1. 1987, 10 years old. 1983 Basic Box hand me down from a cousin. I requested it based on adds in comic books.
ReplyDelete2. I played the choose your own adventure in the box a bunch of times then took over a friends birthday party to DM Castle Caldwell.
3. I had a solid group in middle school that played long camping of WFRP and shadow run, but never had a really solid or long term dnd group in high school. Always the dm.
4. DnD. I’m still into the aesthetics of Elmore dnd essentially though I’ve made my own home rules etc.
5. DnD has been a lifelong obsession. It’s been a great private creative outlet, that, along with mini painting that really connects me to pure joy every time.
1. I don't precisely known when I started, I'm going to guess sometime mid 80s. I had somehow heard about Dungeons & Dragons - many people in my family played, and my mother explained the basic structure. I immediately took two of my siblings and played based on my assumptions. My recollection was it was a romp around a Zelda-esque fantasy land, and I specifically remember my siblings arguing with a giant and running from a werewolf.
ReplyDelete2. I learned mostly on my own based on my mom's descriptions of what playing was like. Eventually my uncle gave me the Mentzer Redbox, and I was invited to join a session from time to time. So I gradually picked up playstyle tips from family and friends.
3. My first group was my siblings, all slightly younger than myself. My second "group" was older family members who were mostly humoring me. It wasn't until sometime later in elementary school when I found a group of my peers to game with.
4. Whatever I'm hacking on in the moment. Right now that's a bunch of tools for running a Crusader Kings-styled game in tabletop form, but with goblins and wizards and usual fantasy hijinks. I also have a very strong fondness for OD&D and also freeform, so I'd probably say one of those.
5. I think a lot of my perspective on gaming was shaped by being simultaneously introduced to tabletop gaming, video games, fantasy literature and comics, all of that stuff. I think a lot of my fascination with things like freeform and the "FKR" comes down to chasing those childhood games with my siblings where we didn't "know" how to play, but had a great time nonetheless.
1. 2015, with D&D 5th Edition. Though I have a suspicion that I played a few hours of West End Star Wars d6 when I was a kid (which was likely just freeform with pew pew noises).
ReplyDelete2. I grew up playing board games, and lots of them, but RPGs were always suspect in my family and peer groups. Much later as an adult, I hosted monthly board game nights for local-ish college friends, and one of them, Jason, suggested that he could run a one-shot on a future evening (see 2015, above). We agreed, and I recall with fondness "Chet McMaster, Fighter" who drank a potion and later exploded at the end of the session. We never got together to play an RPG again with that group, but it planted the seed of the "adventure game" in my mind.
3. I moved from the above experience to play-by-forum on RPGGeek.com and played there with dozens of wonderful people for over a year before trying my hand at running games. I never had a single "group" but there were a lot of players I kept running into across all of those tables. I still play with some of them five years later, and in one of those cases, at the same online table since 2015.
4. Generally any freeform/ultralite/"FKR" (the vogue term these days) treatment of a campaign setting or book or show or film etc. My personal favorite is my own Galaxy Far Away, which I wrote to capture the whole of the Star Wars universe, which I could get lost in forever. If opting for a tad more structure, I'd go with the Into the Odd family of games, especially Cairn and Weird North.
5. For two years I assumed that anyone playing any RPG was just more and more of D&D 5e. There's nothing wrong with that game, but all of the players and DMs I knew were locked onto it with tunnel-vision, so I simply didn't know anything else was "fair game" for play. When I eventually branched out, I went all over the place. I wish there was more transparency about options when I first got rolling.
I think I started in 2016. I was in high school at the time, and while I think I was already doing some sort of proto-roleplaying & GM-ing with my little brother, my first introduction to roleplaying games as this mix of tabletop gaming & improvisation theater was through a game that was put together by a monitor at my school with whom a few friends & I had struck up a friendship.
ReplyDeleteThis monitor was quite older than us, & a much more experienced roleplayer at that, & they used the few games we played together as a mean of testing their home-made systems (I went through three completely distinct ones of these with them!).
This person, who was the GM, was someone I had a lot of respect & admiration for at the time, & they definitely informed some of my later taste in playstyle (although not necessarily in choice of game). They always wanted to put the narrative first, and hated who they called "players that just want to roll dice" (they went as far as stating that they did not even allowed character deaths to happen at their table(!) preferring other, more subtle threats).
Between their influence & my natural love of storytelling, it is no surprise I ended up being the narrative-focused, player-favouring GM I am today.
Another thing is (typing this comment just made me realise it) this overwhelming importance of home-made systems in my roleplaying gaming "origin story". This older friend made my schoolmates & I try three different systems they designed themselves ; then, when I went to uni, two other friends made me play their own home-made game systems (vastly different from one another, if I might add). The first "official" game system I played was *WH40K: Dark Heresy (1st edition)*!. That is absolutely wild.
I gather my utter lack of hesitation before hacking a system for a house rule or the speed at which I throw a rule I can't precisely remember out the window to improvise a ruling might come from these experiences of playing with GMs who just... made their own things.
It might also be why I do not have a favourite system. I might have an ideal one, concealed in the far reaches of my mind, made out of all the cool things I saw in the multitude of games I read, & played, & watched. But I never was truly satisfied with one system. I'm still looking, at the dismay of my more conservative friends (who'd like to play more than one campaign in the same game system), and I probably always will be.
I did not play much, later on, with a GM that is noticeably older than me, I don't think I like the patronizing aspect it can have (or rather, that it definitely had in my own limited experience), however a roleplaying group has always been more than just that: I started with friends trying out roleplaying and even those I first met as regular fellow roleplayers have become friends, or close aquaintances I communicate with regularly outside of games. In many aspects, roleplaying games invaded my life, and have become so integral to it that it is hard to evision myself outside of the hobby.
1. 2011, with Dungeons and Dragons 4e. It's much maligned by a lot of players now, but I still have very fond memories of that game. My first gaming session ever was played in my friend's garage, and I ran out of material in the third hour but we kept playing until dawn broke nearly 5 hours later. Still never quite had a manic gaming session like that.
ReplyDelete2. I mostly played with Armenian-Americans like myself who I had met through high school, and we all had firmly nerdy cultural diet. We grew up watching Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Marvel movies and with the ubiquity of computer role playing games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, convincing a bunch of guys to make believe was very easy.
3. I have always had a powerful obsession with gaming as a culture and art form, and fortunately gaming culture is very popular in this current generation. I've never felt the need to go to clubs or local game stores as I've always been blessed with gamer friendly peers who were willing to patronize the latest new fangled ruleset I had scrounged up from internet research.
4. Currently, I'm very enamored by the Burning Wheel family of games even if they are rather fragile experiences overall. I do enjoy Delta Green, Call of Cthulhu, and Dread quite a bit as I've always loved horror as a genre as well. Fiasco is very dear to my heart too and I've had great fun creating a SoCal themed Armenian playset for my friends. I'm very keen to try some of the OSR games out there to lure my 5e friends away from WotC, but that's a habit that's been hard for them to kick.
5. I've always been a "forever GM" and the "games guy" who's willing to research, acquire, and teach games to my social groups. Recently however, I've become a player in two different games for the first time in my life, and it feels embarrassing to say that I've learned more about the hobby through that simple experience than 15 years of reading rulebooks and planning my own sessions. It's been gratifying to see my former players conduct in ways unique to themselves and I've enjoyed discovering how I could add to that music.