Does High Fantasy + Old School = ?

[Holy Bovine]

High School Gaming?

For those of you who gamed back in high school (or do now!), give us all some idea what your games are like, please. My own gaming groups back in those days did not game at school, but played regularly on weekend in a gaming club and sometimes after school at one of our houses. How about you?

If I get what you are asking - yes I did play in my high school. My friends and I made sure we had 2 free periods back to back together (lunch was easy but I had to take Home Ec!) so we would play for about 2 hours every weekday. We rarely saw each other on weekends mainly due to the fact the school was on the border between two cities and kids from both cities' suburbs went there. Summer gaming actually kind of sucked with our normal group of 8 reduced to just 3 of us (and my cousin when he was in town for 2-3 weeks every summer).

The campaigns themsleves were always linked modules like Secret of Salt Marsh (never got too far in that one), Slavelords (got the the last module in that series) and the first 5 Dragonlance modules (forever cementing my dislike of DL ) amoung others. We had lots of fun ut they were little more than linked combat encounters back then. It wasn't until I got the university that I really learned how to roleplay a character and think about his motivations and drives.

 

[Skytheen]

Never played in school, but I remember rolling up Twilight 2000 characters in study hall.

 

[lutecius]

I played a lot in middle school (junior high) during the last years of ad&d1.
We had a club (mostly males, not all of them nerds, with a few cute girls), tried many other games (wfrp, bloodbowl, stormbringer, paranoia, marvel superheroes, toons...) and generally played disconnected adventures with a silly tone.

The best times were the 2 weeks after the final results, before the school closed for summer (class attendance was still required but of course no one cared... another quirk of the French education system). Those were basically all-day gaming, with school meals.

In high-school, finding an empty room was still easy but working around conflicting schedules became harder. This is when I started drifting away from gaming and developing more constructive interests such as partying, booze and seks. Unlike many others, I didn't play much in university and only came back to the fold with 3e.

 

[Mark]

In or out, at that time in your life, either way. I actually started earlier but figured there would be less people who could or would respond if I asked about that. However, if you did begin even younger, feel free to post to mention it. Thanks!

 

[diaglo]

In or out, at that time in your life, either way. I actually started earlier but figured there would be less people who could or would respond if I asked about that. However, if you did begin even younger, feel free to post to mention it. Thanks!

well then pre-elementary school gaming.
got my first set of minis when i turned 3.
cowboys and indians. plus some WWII.

wargaming was where it was at for me until i stumbled upon D&D.

 

[Kunimatyu]

Don't listen to the OSR, there's plenty of high fantasy in original D&D; it's not nearly as S&S as they say.

 

[Henry]

Oh, HECK no. Back in high school, we played the most money grubbing, DM vs. Players, high kill count games you could imagine. Not to say it wasn't loaded with over-powered magic items; our DM really knewo how to reward us after months of trying to kill us. But "high fantasy?" Pretty far from it, actually.

 

[Doug McCrae]

82->87. Every Saturday, rotation system for whose house we gamed at. We bought and played a tremendously wide variety of rpgs. We read White Dwarf all the time and Dragon occasionally. Villains & Vigilantes was what we played the most, two great campaigns which I remember very fondly, D&D in second place.

 

[Mark]

D&D was out standard but we also played Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World, Boot Hill, Traveler, lots of wargames and miniatures wargaming, too.

 

[coyote6]

During high school, we played Champions (lots of Champions), Twilight: 2000, BattleTech & MechWarrior, Stormbringer, Villains & Vigilantes, AD&D, basic D&D, and probably other things (e.g., I know we played Star Frontiers and Gamma World, but I don't remember if that was before or during HS).

We actually did play at school a few times; I think it was all V&V, but I don't really remember. I do remember making up Champions characters in class (couldn't really roll up characters for games with random char-gen in class, as the dice would be a bit obvious; but point-based character generation was pretty easy, as long as you could remember the rules!). Most of our games were on weekends, at my house; we'd play Saturday nights, sometimes until the sun came up Sunday morning.

Oh, there was also a time when one of us was getting ready to study abroad, making that quarter a wash for him. So some of us cut classes for most of the last two-three weeks before he left, and gamed most of the day. It was mostly Stormbringer, and maybe Champions & BattleTech (not sure -- I remember the Stormbringer, though, since the guy that was going to Japan managed to roll up a Melnibonean).

I think we played D&D mostly during 5th-8th grades; by high school, it wasn't our main game any more.

Edit: All in all, not very "high fantasy".