The Gamer's Journey. How did you get to be where you are today as a gamer?

[bigeshu]

I first encountered gaming in middle school when I overheard people talking about slaying orcs in the back of a math class. I asked about it and was told to mind my own business or that I would not understand. That was the end of that.

Fast forward to high school when a friend introduced me to Baldur's Gate and then told me about the game that it was based on. He introduced me to AD&D and I was hooked. I bought up a lot of the cheaper modules and adventure settings from my FLGS; Hollow Earth, Red Steel, Dark Sun, and played the Gold Box games. We moved on to 3.0 just as I started gaming and a guy I knew introduced me to Vampire and L5R and that's when my interest took off.

I preferred the narrative games my girlfriend liked and came to appreciate telling big stories and creating moral choices. This continued all the way through college where most of my game groups were classmates with shared interest.

I had a falling out with some friends though at that time as most of us moved away or moved on, some dropped out, but I kept on keeping on. Pounds of dice, new games, new supplements for old games, New groups. I never really got out of it. Even when I got into WoW, EQ2, and now GW2 (not at the same time, in that order).

You'll note that I don't talk alot about my social life outside of gaming and that's because I realize now that I've ignored a lot of the things going on in my town and home preferring gaming. For a while, before working on my own Kickstarter funded rpg, I was worried that to enjoy life I'd have to give up gaming. I realized that that was hogwash and that I could enjoy gaming and live a full life if I just partook in the things around me in moderation.

So yeah, gaming for nearly two decades now and still going strong.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

I started playing D&D when I was in junior high, back in the 70s. I gamed heavily through high school and into college, then sporadically after that. I have spent as much time GMing as playing.

As I have grown older (mid-40s now), I have had a hard time finding a decent gaming group. Most of the ones I encounter can't keep their minds on the game and want to spend 90% of the sessions chit-chatting about movies and such. If we only meet once a week for a few hours, I want to play the game during that time.

 

[bigeshu]

You know what? My group had a moment like that where we were doing the pre-game chatter. But instead of movies, video games and the like, we were complaining about mortgages. When it was pointed out we had a collective groan and facepalm.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I think my 'Gamer Journey' started with my love for Choose Your Own Adventure books as a young kid. I then discovered a Lone Wolf book at the library when I was in Year 8 (about 13yo). I was reading it in home group one morning when my teacher noticed what I was reading and asked if I had heard of D&D.

I think I had heard of it at that point, but didn't know much about it beyond the fact that it was fantasy based. She (yep, she) offered to DM a game for me and my friends at lunch-time once a week. It was at that point that I discovered a couple of my friends had played D&D before, as well as Werewolf, Vampire and Top Secret.

The lunch-time campaign only lasted a few months (I think she ran us through the Hidden Shrine of the Tamoachan), but that was more than enough to get me hooked. One of my other friends ran some short lived White Wolf campaigns before I was introduced into the game store in the city and joined a D&D campaign there.

That campaign went through many different players and DM's, but I played in it regularly every second Saturday for most of high school. All but one of my friends lost interest in gaming by the middle of high school (a couple even thought it was a bit childish that I still gamed), but that didn't phase me. I was still into it more than ever.

I stopped playing in my final year of high school at my parent's request to concentrate on my schoolwork (they had a fair enough point). After high school I went to university, but didn't find a gaming group for a couple of years (Australian universities aren't really gaming hubs like US colleges seem to be).

It wasn't until around the age of 20 that I happened upon another group through a friend of a friend. This group lasted for a couple of years, playing Ars Magica, Harn and some homebrewed systems. I dropped out of that group when I started a graduate diploma while working full-time (something had to give).

It took another couple of years before I finally decided I'd been gameless long enough and put together a new group, DM'ing for the first time ever. That group lasted 3 months before imploding over my ruling that a Paladin PC lost his powers for killing a drunk on the street that lunged at him with a dagger (ending my friendship of several year with the player of the Paladin at the same time).

About a year after that I put together another group, made up of a mix of old gamer friends and strangers who'd answered my 'Players Wanted' notice in a gaming store. I've now been DM'ing that group for 7 years.

That group has still had a few bumps and breaks along the way. There were 2 hiatuses after my wife gave birth to my 2 daughters and another when 2 players left the group after a dispute with another player. The group is still going strong though.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I started playing D&D when I was in junior high, back in the 70s. I gamed heavily through high school and into college, then sporadically after that. I have spent as much time GMing as playing.

As I have grown older (mid-40s now), I have had a hard time finding a decent gaming group. Most of the ones I encounter can't keep their minds on the game and want to spend 90% of the sessions chit-chatting about movies and such. If we only meet once a week for a few hours, I want to play the game during that time.

This happens in my game from time to time. Definitely not 90% of the time, but we can sometimes lose 15 minutes of game time on some sort of random tangent.

I don't mind it too much though as everyone seems happy to get involved in the discussion and just hang out a bit. It's probably the one time each fortnight that most of us get a chance to 'get our nerd on' and talk about things our non-nerdy friends, family and work collegues have no interest in discussing.

If half the group was sitting there bored, waiting for the game to start again it would obviously be completely different, but it doesn't seem that way in my game.

Olaf the Stout

 

[delericho]

As I have grown older (mid-40s now), I have had a hard time finding a decent gaming group. Most of the ones I encounter can't keep their minds on the game and want to spend 90% of the sessions chit-chatting about movies and such. If we only meet once a week for a few hours, I want to play the game during that time.

My group has a semi-official policy that if the group gets sidetracked, any member of the group can declare "GAME!", at which point we all collectively need to set aside the current discussion (no matter how interesting) and get back to the play. It's surprisingly effective.

 

[delericho]

Like many, I started in high school, although I had had some limited exposure via the "Fighting Fantasy" gamebooks prior to that point.

Anyway, there was a club in the school that met at lunchtimes, once a week. The first game I played was AD&D 1st Edition, run by a guy called Erik. He was actually only there for a few weeks before disappearing off to university, but by then I was hooked.

After Erik left, we had a few people try to fill his shoes, mostly with Basic D&D (though there was one homebrew system). But the DMs were never terribly good. It wasn't too long before I decided I could do a better job, and I've been the GM pretty much ever since.

My first efforts at DMing were actually a proto-ruleset half understood from the "What is Dungeons & Dragons" book, although I quickly got myself the BECMI D&D Red Box. I then advanced to the Expert Set and the Companion Sets. However, the owner of the FLGS advised against the Master Set, and so I jumped to AD&D 2nd Edition shortly thereafter. And that was high school.

(In amongst those years, I also played a little Star Wars d6, a little Shadowrun, and a little TMNT, but none of these really 'stuck'.)

It's perhaps worth noting that over the years I have run many campaigns, but there are four that have stuck in my mind as the best of the bunch - ones where the group of players, the ruleset, and the storylines have all come together to produce something special. The first of these was little more than a sub-Tolkien AD&D campaign that I ran in high school, but which was a huge amount of fun for all it's flaws.

For the first year when I was at university, I didn't play at all - the high school group had long since split up, and I was focussed on my studies. However, in second year I encountered the gaming society (GUGS), where I played Vampire: the Masquerade, with side helpings of most of the other Storyteller games. During those summers, I ran a campaign "Rivers of Time", that eventually lasted 5 years realtime (2,300 years in-game), which I count as one of my "big four" campaigns.

About a year before 3e was released, I decided to give AD&D another play, and ran my last 2nd Ed campaign. It was a very interesting experience - much of what we'd done in high school was... less than 100% rules-legal, and consequently this new campaign was very different. Anyway, it ended the day I got my 3e PHB.

The university group stayed together for many years. We played small amounts of a lot of different games, but our favourites were D&D 3e (3.0 and then 3.5e), and Vampire. Unfortunately, as time went on the group gradually drifted apart, until finally we reached a point where there were only four of us, and we ended up cancelling almost every session. (It was with this group that I ran the "Shackled City" campaign, the third of my "big four" campaigns.)

About four years ago, I finally got sick of never quite getting a game, and decided that the time had come to actually do something about it. So, I started up what was, then, a D&D Meetup site, and thus started putting together a new group. After a little while we abandoned Meetup for Groupspaces and then abandoned Groupspaces for a custom-built site that we have full control of: Falkirk RPG.

And that has been working extremely well. We play a whole bunch of games, with D&D remaining the most popular (and D&D 3.5e for me). And here I've been running the fourth of my "big four" campaigns, which is expected to complete at the start of next month.

And that's more or less it. After my current campaign ends, I'm going to be taking a long break from D&D (all versions), and am hoping to actually play for a while. My next campaign, though, is provisionally scheduled to start in October, and will use the SWSE rules.

 

[Razjah]

I started with 4e. Well, really I started role playing when I was little and played with my brother in our back yard acting out the coolest scenes from Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, Power Rangers, and anything else that caught our fancy. I learned to play Magic around 8-9 and how to actually play around 10. I started going to game stores around 13 or 14 when the local card shop (it was mostly sports collectibles) closed up.

When I was going to game stores I started learning about other types of games. I didn't play in an RPG until I was 18 and 4e had just come out. I thought it was awesome and sought out gamers in college. By my sophomore year I was president of a role playing games club and leading a group of people getting together for Magic. I learned 3.5, found Iron Heroes (love the no-magic feel), and then helped get games for the club (Mutants and Masterminds, Savage Worlds, Mouse Guard, Star Wars Saga Edition, and Corporation then added Vampire and Og plus some GM focused books from Engine Publishing). I tried to read about gaming as much as I could so that I could help bring information to the weekly discussions.

I have been primarily a GM since the start of my second year gaming. Which was mostly because I had to run games as president, and because I like to be a GM. Most other GMs don't seem to run the types of games I prefer and I feel like I do a lot of sitting around waiting during combats.

By the time I graduated I found that really enjoyed character driven games like Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard. I enjoy D&D games, but I often feel like I am playing the GM's Game. In games like Mouse Guard and even D&D where the GM lets the players have a lot of input in the world, it becomes Our Game*. I also have moved away from really crunchy games (well, I try to) but my current group seems to really love them.

I am currently playing in a Dresden Files game and seem to be the only one who isn't fawning over the FATE system and the upcoming FATE Core. Its pretty good though, I enjoy the game enough to want to keep going and I get along well with the group.

 

[Nytmare]

My father introduced me to D&D in 1980. He was a long time Avalon Hill war gamer and had just started playing the first interactive fiction games. Sadly neither one of us really "got it" (plus I was 6), so we instead focused on playing things like Zork and Cranston Manor in tandem. At first, he'd sit at the computer and I'd shout out directions and ideas. Eventually I graduated to making maps and keeping notes, and eventually I took over at the computer and dragged my little sisters into the co-pilot seat.

That red box stayed with me however, and I'd spend hours poring over the books and looking at the maps and pictures (especially the picture of my D&D girlfriend, Morgan Ironwolf, hubba hubba).

One summer, maybe 1984(?), I was signed up for a summer camp of sorts, where the kids were able to pick and choose their own activities. I absolutely hated the idea of losing my precious summer vacation till I looked over the list and saw that D&D was one of the activities offered. For the next two summers, I spent pretty much every day packed shoulder to shoulder with a dozen or so other burgeoning nerdlings in a hot, un-airconditioned home-ec room at one of the local middle schools. We played through the Keep at the Borderlands the first summer, and the Veiled Society the next and I have absolutely no idea how the DM managed to keep the lot of us in check for 2 and a half hours a day.

The following year was a bad one. The PTA caught wind of the D&D horror stories and warned all the local parents about how D&D (and KISS) were brainwashing their children and turning them into devil worshipers. Most of what little I had managed to collect with my allowance money was put into the trash. All told, I think I was only able to save the red box, my dice, and my summer camp character sheet.

D&D became a secret that the kids kept from their parents. We never got around to playing again, but everybody had their little hidden stash (almost always hidden in a clubhouse or stuffed into the back of a closet, and usually parked on top of a stack of dogeared Sears catalogs) We'd draw up maps and mazes and come up with plans about the games we were eventually going to run. D&D became a thing that we always talked about, but never did. Everything was always stories about old characters and games (and most of those were probably complete fabrications anyway) but there were easier things to play with that didn't risk the wrath of the parent collective.

In high school my circle of friends grew exponentially. Not only did my high school have a broader subsection of kids from the area, but I got involved in the governing body of an international club called Key Club, so I had friends in pretty much every high school in the state. Not only that, but the core group of those "other high school" kids were almost all gamers, and they all grew up outside the no-D&D zone I grew up in.

Suddenly, I was neck deep in role playing games. I was quickly brought up to speed as to what I had missed in recent D&D years (You can play as a Wemic? What the heck is a Myrmidon?!) and was introduced to the fact that there were OTHER role playing games out there. Paranoia, Mechwarrior, Rifts, and Call of Cthulhu became our mainstays, and I brought my newly found knowledge back to the game-less friends I had grown up with.

College however was the real turning point for me. I went to college about 5 hours away from home and did a lot of damage. The first weekend there, I discovered that there was a university sponsored Gaming Club and slowly took over. In addition to that, I managed to place out of most of my "real" classes and accidentally worked my way into a class schedule where I didn't technically need to go to any classes. I was working towards a triple art major and had two semesters of classes whose final grades were entirely project based.

So I had an entire army (cult?) of gamers at my disposal, 90% of them either lived in the dorms with me, or within walking distance, and I had convinced myself that it wasn't really all that important to go to any of my classes.

Sundays was either D&D at my friend Rob's house or paintball, Mondays was Battletech, Tuesday was the night that we met up with Joe from the game store who was either running an Amber campaign or playtesting some new game called Magic, Wednesdays was Call of Cthulhu, Thursdays was Die Siedler von Catan and Dark Sun, Fridays was D&D and Improvs, Saturday was the gaming club from noon till midnight... The 90s were a freaking AMAZING time to be a college aged gamer.

Of course I flunked out of school, and did irreparable damage to some of my friends college careers in the process, but it didn't slow me down. I fell headfirst into my career of choice and started working in the local film industry. That meant that I might disappear off the face of the earth, and work maybe two solid months in a row, but then the project would wrap and I'd be gainfully unemployed till the next show started, three or four months down the line. Man, and when I wasn't working, I was playing twice as hard. Week long rounds of Assassin, field trips, 24 hour LARPS, scavenger hunts, guerilla theater, Magic tournaments, cream pie fights.

Eventually things slowed down. I started working more regularly. I got tired of bringing my games other places, so I built a game room in my house and started inviting people to come to me. Gaming became a twice a week, then once a week organized event. We had two, really intense D&D campaigns for a 8 or 9 year stretch, but it eventually fell apart. My circle of "gamer friends with free time" slowly shrank (and shrank). People moved away or got married and had kids. Now, game night is Friday night, but we're lucky if we can squeeze more than two of them out of a month. More often than not, only two of the expected four people show up and people have to leave early cause they have "things" to do on Saturday. So we get a couple of hours in of a boardgame or three and I count myself lucky.

Adulthood sneaks up on almost everyone I guess, one of these days it'll probably get me too.

 

[randomeric]

I started at about the age of 12. My best friend at the time got me started. AD&D hadn't come out yet and we had the small box set. White Dwarf was a general RPG magazine (not the Games Workshop catalog it has become today) and was that funky tall size that was normal in England at the time I am sure.

Our dungeons were just a set of rooms that filled the graph paper. Random encounters in every one of them. We played at the age we were at and as I matured so did my gaming.

One of my early characters was a Cleric/Magic-User who had psionics. I ended up in a psionic battle with Orcus and nearly won. I am sure we were very liberal with the rules!

Later on in High School, one of my favorite characters was a bard in a one-on-one game my friend Tom ran. The bard at that time could do very little. But playing for coin at the inns and fending off the hijix of the local faeries, was very fun.

My gaming group was a loyal set of High School friends who stayed that way until I left town for college.

Palladium, TMNT, and Bushido were games we branched into. Oh, Gamma World and Top Secret.

I don't recall any social 'stigma,' but that could have been me being naively unaware. It is nice not to care what other people think sometimes.

I lost track of gaming and picked it up again as I moved around.

I ended up in Cumberland, Md and found a few local guys to game with. 2nd ed D&D by then.

It wasn't until I hit Florida in 1998 that I really got back into it. D&D 2nd and 3rd, as well as Shadowrun, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Fading Suns, Silver Age Sentinels, some online stuff (City of Heroes, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Rift, and some other FTP).

Now, with the help of my friend Brent, I have launched a few modest games of my own.

When I got married three years ago, I managed to have found a girl who, though not a serious gamer herself, understood my passions.

In short, I ran down the isle in my tux wearing a super man cape. My nephew conducted the ceremony while holding my old 1st ed D&D Players Handbook (the ceremony tucked in the pages).

I have pictures to prove it.

I play two nights a week, playing and running games.

I write a bit of fiction and look forward one day to spending more time on games than this day job thing. Either I'll get lucky (with some hard work) or another 15 years goes by and I can retire.

Either way, it's been a good ride and I'd do it all over again!