Tom Van Winkle's Return to Gaming

If you have never experienced it before, what is generic for others can be fun for you. Your first of anything can be a thrill. When you arrive, moreover, with the knowledge that seemingly everybody else has tried this special thing before you, you want the generic--for social reasons. You do not want to feel left out of a shared experience. This may apply to just about any experience, but here I'm talking about fantasy role-playing games. For a gamer of a certain age, like me, generic is just no longer much fun, unless I'm introducing a new player and I can vicariously experience the generic as fresh. Even then, I'm soon ready to switch gears into something fresh and new for me. So what has made fantasy role-playing generic, so awfully generic? Here are some thoughts about that. 1. Fantasy game worlds were intended as generic from the outset to make them accessible. The more generic your game world is, the less explaining you have to do and the more easily you can ...

I was the only kid I knew who had a copy of Tunnels & Trolls . I still never met anybody who advocated for T&T. I bought it in the Fifth Edition box set, published in 1979, in the seventh printing from 1983. I did run T&T for a few friends, but the main appeal was the solo adventures and the ease of play. I found that the game runs much more easily than D&D. In the modern (and mistaken) term, it was pure "OSR," in just every way. No other games were available for solo adventures like those, except for the bounty emerging from the UK as the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (from 1982), Steve Jackson's related Sorcery! four-book series (1983-85, by far the best of all the gamebooks), and the exciting Lone Wolf series (1984 onward) along the same lines. There were lots of T&T solo adventures, many of them not good, but some of them fun and interesting. They kept me engaged and I played them over several times each, at least. (Solo adventures address th...