buzz
Adventurer
The following is 99% true.
The first RPG I ever owned was the original blue-book Basic D&D set. There were no dice in the box, only a cardstock page with "chits" I was supposed to cut out and jumble in a cup. I had a nagging feeling, even then, that this was a totally stupid concept. Being a kid, I had to wait until mom could get me to the one hobby store in town so I could buy dice. The dice I bought got chipped all to heck pretty quickly. I had no clue how to read the d4 (it had an "A" in one spot, I swear), so I kind of winged it.
The first time I played the game, it was just me and my pal Hussein. Spontaneously inventing multiclassing, we both ran elven fighter/magic-users, and we played through some of Keep on the Borderlands. Since I was the DM and a player, I would look up cool locations on the map and say, "Dude, we need to go to room 35; there's a minotaur there." When we did, Hussein attacked the minotaur, and then we had to stop so I could figure out what "hit points" were.
I didn't actually play D&D again until after I'd gotten the AD&D PHB, DMG, and MM for Christmas (or a birthday; I dunno). I promptly wrote my name on the inside covers with a calligraphy pen. On the back page of the DMG, I scribbled out an attack table "for Monks and Bards" that determined whether or not you made your opponent puke when you hit them with a bo stick.
(Actually reading the books came later. Way later.)
As Pat Pulling had not yet ruined it for everybody, my junior high actually offered a D&D "minicourse"; you got about 45 minutes every other day or so to play D&D. The older kids refused to play with me or my peers, so we kinda fumbled our way through Into the Unknown and Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Playing the former (which you had to stock with monsters yourself), I had one hallway where a "baby platinum dragon" behind a secret door gave you gold coins. I learned from one player that there was only one platinum dragon, and he was not a baby.
I did not run that module again.
I had some idea that all the distances being measured in "inches" had to do with using miniature figures. I bought a starter pack from Grenadier that came with runny paint and a semi-broken plastic brush. I painted three of them before I gave up. No, I did not read the instructions.
Still, I tried to use the minis. There were no office superstores back then, so even if I had known about gridded flip-charts, I wouldn't have known where to buy them. I had seen ads in Dragon for a battlemat that you could write on with a grease pencil, but I figured owning only three poorly-painted minis wasn't adequate justification for such an accessory. So, I mostly just set them on the table, nearby my character sheet.
"Is that what your character looks like?"
"No. But I painted it myself."
I'm pretty sure that most of the AD&D I played then was in name only; none of us really knew how all the rules worked. This did not stop us from getting into debates, however.
"Willie, how the heck does your ninja have gas pellets?"
"Dude, he's got a ninja belt! It's got like 100 pockets!"
"Did you write down everything that's in them?"
"That'd take forever! It's 100 pockets!"
Naturally, I quickly realized that AD&D was severly flawed. I went on to spend my allowance on vastly superior RPGs like Element Masters and The Mechanoid Invasion. Attempts to get my friends to play these vastly superior RPGs were met with great resistance, however. This is likely because my pitch was generally:
"AD&D sucks. We should totally play [insert game] instead! [Insert frothy raving about said game's awesomeness]."
"Okay, let's play."
"Uh, I don't really have anything prepared. Let's just play AD&D."
Prepping an adventure and providing pre-gens? Totally unheard of.
We went on to play some enjoyable AD&D games. It was a formidable task, though. We all lived far enough away that we needed rides from our parents, and parents just don't prioritize gaming like regular people. We tried riding the bus a few times, but it was about as enjoyable as... well, riding the bus. There was no Web in those days on which to look up schedules or routes, so you kind of just walked to a major road and hoped real hard.
Ergo, D&D was relegated to organized sleepovers. Once a month if you were lucky.
Sleepovers at my pal Rich's worked best, as he had a spacious basement with a sizable table. Sleepovers at my house were problematic, as my RPG collection was outmatched in quantity and quality by my brother's collection of '70s porn. Keeping said collection in my room probably didn't help.
"Okay, so you are all brought before the wizard, and... Hey, where did Anthony go?"
"I think he went into the closet."
"Oh, God."
We never played campaigns; we met too infrequently. We played through a lot of modules, though. Lots of modules that were seemingly all written for "7-8 PCs". All four of us. With our three PCs. I guess Mr. Gygax just knew a lot more gamers than we did.
At some point, I managed to write some adventures on my own. These adventures featured a lot of maps. World maps, location maps, dungeon maps, map handouts for the players... not a heck of a lot of free will ("And so, as your character reaches into the trapped chest..." "Hey!"), but totally covered in the map department.
Eventually, we started to figure out the rules ("Wait... that's how initiative works?"), and were also getting to driving age, so meeting up was becoming easier. The days of multi-pocketed ninjas were behind us. Things were getting good.
So, naturally, we stopped playing. It's amazing how the threat of never being touched in that way by a real, live girl can mess with an adolescent boy's priorities.
Nowadays, I can drive, I have disposable income, I have a group with 7-8 players, and I possess the cognitive capacity to understand rule texts. I own a battlemat, can buy pre-painted minis, and, being married, am fairly confident I will be touched in that way by my wife at some point between now and Christmas. Gaming is easy, and gaming is good.
But, thinking back... I don't know how I ever managed to game as a kid.
The first RPG I ever owned was the original blue-book Basic D&D set. There were no dice in the box, only a cardstock page with "chits" I was supposed to cut out and jumble in a cup. I had a nagging feeling, even then, that this was a totally stupid concept. Being a kid, I had to wait until mom could get me to the one hobby store in town so I could buy dice. The dice I bought got chipped all to heck pretty quickly. I had no clue how to read the d4 (it had an "A" in one spot, I swear), so I kind of winged it.
The first time I played the game, it was just me and my pal Hussein. Spontaneously inventing multiclassing, we both ran elven fighter/magic-users, and we played through some of Keep on the Borderlands. Since I was the DM and a player, I would look up cool locations on the map and say, "Dude, we need to go to room 35; there's a minotaur there." When we did, Hussein attacked the minotaur, and then we had to stop so I could figure out what "hit points" were.
I didn't actually play D&D again until after I'd gotten the AD&D PHB, DMG, and MM for Christmas (or a birthday; I dunno). I promptly wrote my name on the inside covers with a calligraphy pen. On the back page of the DMG, I scribbled out an attack table "for Monks and Bards" that determined whether or not you made your opponent puke when you hit them with a bo stick.
(Actually reading the books came later. Way later.)
As Pat Pulling had not yet ruined it for everybody, my junior high actually offered a D&D "minicourse"; you got about 45 minutes every other day or so to play D&D. The older kids refused to play with me or my peers, so we kinda fumbled our way through Into the Unknown and Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Playing the former (which you had to stock with monsters yourself), I had one hallway where a "baby platinum dragon" behind a secret door gave you gold coins. I learned from one player that there was only one platinum dragon, and he was not a baby.
I did not run that module again.
I had some idea that all the distances being measured in "inches" had to do with using miniature figures. I bought a starter pack from Grenadier that came with runny paint and a semi-broken plastic brush. I painted three of them before I gave up. No, I did not read the instructions.
Still, I tried to use the minis. There were no office superstores back then, so even if I had known about gridded flip-charts, I wouldn't have known where to buy them. I had seen ads in Dragon for a battlemat that you could write on with a grease pencil, but I figured owning only three poorly-painted minis wasn't adequate justification for such an accessory. So, I mostly just set them on the table, nearby my character sheet.
"Is that what your character looks like?"
"No. But I painted it myself."
I'm pretty sure that most of the AD&D I played then was in name only; none of us really knew how all the rules worked. This did not stop us from getting into debates, however.
"Willie, how the heck does your ninja have gas pellets?"
"Dude, he's got a ninja belt! It's got like 100 pockets!"
"Did you write down everything that's in them?"
"That'd take forever! It's 100 pockets!"
Naturally, I quickly realized that AD&D was severly flawed. I went on to spend my allowance on vastly superior RPGs like Element Masters and The Mechanoid Invasion. Attempts to get my friends to play these vastly superior RPGs were met with great resistance, however. This is likely because my pitch was generally:
"AD&D sucks. We should totally play [insert game] instead! [Insert frothy raving about said game's awesomeness]."
"Okay, let's play."
"Uh, I don't really have anything prepared. Let's just play AD&D."
Prepping an adventure and providing pre-gens? Totally unheard of.
We went on to play some enjoyable AD&D games. It was a formidable task, though. We all lived far enough away that we needed rides from our parents, and parents just don't prioritize gaming like regular people. We tried riding the bus a few times, but it was about as enjoyable as... well, riding the bus. There was no Web in those days on which to look up schedules or routes, so you kind of just walked to a major road and hoped real hard.
Ergo, D&D was relegated to organized sleepovers. Once a month if you were lucky.
Sleepovers at my pal Rich's worked best, as he had a spacious basement with a sizable table. Sleepovers at my house were problematic, as my RPG collection was outmatched in quantity and quality by my brother's collection of '70s porn. Keeping said collection in my room probably didn't help.
"Okay, so you are all brought before the wizard, and... Hey, where did Anthony go?"
"I think he went into the closet."
"Oh, God."
We never played campaigns; we met too infrequently. We played through a lot of modules, though. Lots of modules that were seemingly all written for "7-8 PCs". All four of us. With our three PCs. I guess Mr. Gygax just knew a lot more gamers than we did.
At some point, I managed to write some adventures on my own. These adventures featured a lot of maps. World maps, location maps, dungeon maps, map handouts for the players... not a heck of a lot of free will ("And so, as your character reaches into the trapped chest..." "Hey!"), but totally covered in the map department.
Eventually, we started to figure out the rules ("Wait... that's how initiative works?"), and were also getting to driving age, so meeting up was becoming easier. The days of multi-pocketed ninjas were behind us. Things were getting good.
So, naturally, we stopped playing. It's amazing how the threat of never being touched in that way by a real, live girl can mess with an adolescent boy's priorities.
Nowadays, I can drive, I have disposable income, I have a group with 7-8 players, and I possess the cognitive capacity to understand rule texts. I own a battlemat, can buy pre-painted minis, and, being married, am fairly confident I will be touched in that way by my wife at some point between now and Christmas. Gaming is easy, and gaming is good.
But, thinking back... I don't know how I ever managed to game as a kid.
!
