NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 8969224" data-attributes="member: 6671663">That‘s almost my cue. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I started playing in 1977, aged 12, taught by classmates in school. I grew up in Pasadena, CA. Dad worked for Jet Propulsion Labs. (If you saw the ‘90s movie Arrival, with Charlie Sheen? Sheen had to have been working in Dad’s office or at least on the same floor,  dealing with ranging systems for the Deep Space Network.) My high school had 700 students, the smallest of Pasadena’s four public high schools, and we had speakers of 48 first languages other than English. I had classmates and friends who lived in the Northwest Pasadena ghetto (2nd largest in Los Angeles after Watts), and others who lived in South Pasadena, with a median household income just behind Beverly Hills.What I mean is, if you look up “cosmopolitan”, there’s one of my class photos.The center of gravity for gaming there was the Caltech Gaming Club and the nearby bookstore Book Village. The guy who ran it was active in SoCal sf fandom, and carried Lee Gold’s RPG fanzine Alarums & Excursions. I got the blue box and a couple issues of A&E (31 and 32, I think) at the same time. I therefore played face to face in groups that were pretty Gygaxian, with up to 10-12 players with PCs (often two PCs each if fewer than six or so players) plus NPC followers, a designated caller, the whole nine yards. Meanwhile, I was reading each month about wildly different styles of play, from the hellhole of New York City hyper competition (Paranoia is a not very exaggerated satire of it) to Dave Hargrave’s glorious excess in Arduin to Lee’s and others‘ roleplaying- and storytelling-oriented campaigns.Gradually I realized some things.* Since I wasn’t available to play as often as others, I was always going to have some of the lowest-level characters. I was never going to get high-level play at all. The Caltech club reset its campaigns each year, and the local high school DMs did the same. So building up over multiple years wasn’t an option. Starting at a level higher than 1st was regarded as a form of cheating, getting power I hadn‘t “earned“.* None of this was what I actually wanted in the first place. I’d been lured in with the promise of participating in fantasy adventures like I loved reading, but dungeon-oriented quasi-militaristic campaigning wasn’t that. There were only small scraps of wilderness to get through to find the dungeons, not marvelous worlds to explore. There was no social engagement at all, precious little opportunity to develop any sort of PC personality.* Few of the people I was playing with actually liked or cared about me very much. I was desperate enough for community that I’d put up with a lot of grunt work.in my last couple years of high school, I sort of blossomed socially, becoming part of the music, theater, and journalism scene. Gaming withered as I started spending time with people who did like me and helped to grow further. I didn’t play again until college, and then it was Call of Cthulhu (with Jason Carl, now a prominent social media person for the World of Darkness), RuneQuest, and other games, played in ways very unlike what I’d started with.</blockquote>

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