RPG Evolution - True Tales from Stranger Things: Kids on Bikes

Stranger Things tells a tale of inter-dimensional entities battling kids in the 80s. To get around, the kids use their bikes, a genre that launched its own RPG. And yes, kids really did have that much freedom then.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

It's Not for Everybody​

It's worth noting that despite the reputation of the Kids on Bikes genre taking place in the Midwest, my experience was in the Long Island suburbs. There are a few elements required for a Stranger Things-style of gaming, so being a kid on bike was potentially feasible anywhere :

• A lot of kids of similar age within biking distance. I grew up surrounded by kids all the same age. We all walked to school, and later took the bus, together. Two of the kids were my next door neighbors, and one a little further (we're still Facebook friends). The rest were from the surrounding area and could bike to meet up.
• Stay-at-home parents. Most kids didn't understand this at the time but parents trusted that if there was one stay-at-home parent (almost always a mom), then that was the default parent to talk to if there were issues. My mom didn't work until I was in high school, so it was usually her.
• A place to game. Not every house was suitable for this: some were too small, some were too raucous, some had siblings that wouldn't let you play in peace for hours at a time. That was usually my house.
• Kids have free time. None of our families could afford to send us to camp, go on vacations for long periods of time, or otherwise keep us occupied. We filled that time with Dungeons & Dragons.

Did Parents Really Let Their Kids Do That?​

Yes, or at least my parents did.

My best friend was a few blocks over, and I would ride my bike to visit and vice versa. We did this just about every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and practically every day during the summer. We would also sleep over each other's houses for as long as we were able, sometimes several days in a row.

How Did Parents Keep Track?​

Because we played Dungeons & Dragons, our parents were collectively happy with the assumption that all of us were easy to find at one house. This expanded to playing Laser Tag at certain houses where we could range freely (this was one case where my house wasn't suitable but two of my friends' houses near open land were perfect for).

During the day, when we were playing outside (which we did often, usually street hockey), our parents would simply open the door and shout out our names. My one friend's dad could whistle a high-pitched whistle that was unmistakable and could be heard at a distance.

You also knew generally when you had to be home. Mostly, we woke up, had breakfast, watched cartoons, ate lunch, and then left to play whatever until dinner time.

What If You Got Lost?​

With no cell phones and no maps, this rarely happened. But it did happen at least once, when we tried to go to a new friend's house on our bikes, and my one friend peeled off in one direction while I was looking the other way. I got so lost I had to bike home.

There were a few times where I miscalculated how far away my house was from other places and attempted to walk home, including wrong bus stops. You only have to make that mistake once to learn the hard way the geography of your home town.

In short, it wasn't much of an issue because everyone was within walking distance and if things really got confusing, you just went back to where you started which was home (or home base, if you knew a friend's house nearby).

Add this all up and it was fertile ground for tabletop gaming, with a large enough group that we never lacked players for a good five years, from seventh grade to graduation.

You Turn: Were you a kid on a bike?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

yes, kids really did have that much freedom then.

In the country?

Absolutely.

But a lot of us are about your age (I assume, I'm 44, so born 1978) and grew up in cities, and kids did not, typically, have that much freedom in cities, I'd suggest (at least in London anyway). It's interesting though that whenever I went to the countryside suddenly things did open up and we could just wander around doing whatever idiotic things a lot of the time. I'm pretty sure if I was a kid today my parents would want to know my schedule, ensure I had a map and a phone, and so on if I got in a little sailboat, but back then at age 11-12, say, if I was in the country I be dropped by harbour with a couple of friends, and their parents would be like "Be back by 5pm!", and it'd be like 10.30am...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It turns out that kids who only ever play safe games on padded surfaces don't build up the bone mass that they need to avoid breaks from less traumatic hits.

Whilst I agree with a lot of what you're saying, from a scientific POV this is completely untrue. Bone mass has absolutely nothing to do with whether you "only play safe games" or not. It has everything to do with genetics, exercise and diet. You've got kids who would have got a lot of breaks in an earlier era as well. Some kids just break a lot too - you could compare my brother and I, who had nearly identical upbringings, and plenty of "rough sports", but he's had multiple breaks, and I've had zero, and I don't it's a mere coincidence I have a much larger frame (and always did, despite actually playing sports less than him). Also people take stuff to the ER now that they wouldn't have when I was kid, and that saves lives and prevents injuries worsening, frankly. Like, when I was 12 or 13, I gashed my leg open, a couple of inches wide, an inch deep, tons of blood though I didn't sever anything. Neighbour who was a doctor just sewed it up. No way that'd happen today. Not learning to manage risk can be a real issue, though I think it's fairly easy to fix and some people just have common sense no matter what. We all knew kids who couldn't manage risk in the '80s though, too.

 

[Blue Orange]

Whilst I agree with a lot of what you're saying, from a scientific POV this is completely untrue. Bone mass has absolutely nothing to do with whether you "only play safe games" or not. You've got kids who would have got a lot of breaks in an earlier era as well. Some kids just break a lot too - you could compare my brother and I, who had nearly identical upbringings, and plenty of "rough sports", but he's had multiple breaks, and I've had zero, and I don't it's a mere coincidence I have a much larger frame (and always did, despite actually playing sports less than him). Also people take stuff to the ER now that they wouldn't have when I was kid, and that saves lives and prevents injuries worsening, frankly. Like, when I was 12 or 13, I gashed my leg open, a couple of inches wide, an inch deep, tons of blood though I didn't sever anything. Neighbour who was a doctor just sewed it up. No way that'd happen today. Not learning to manage risk can be a real issue, though I think it's fairly easy to fix and some people just have common sense no matter what.

Could be they just aren't playing as much outside at all (less physical play in total), and that's depressing bone mass.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Could be they just aren't playing as much outside at all (less physical play in total), and that's depressing bone mass.

Yeah less exercise, less physical play definitely could, but you can play safe and be tough as hell in bone/muscle terms (you might be surprised by how much certain things hurt but...). My sister, who is a lot younger than me, certainly did, and never got any breaks, but she has the same tough frame as me, and not the more gracile frame of my bro (though damn he really muscled up as an adult in his 30s!).

 

[Dungeonosophy]

You Turn: Were you a kid on a bike?

Yeah, we were Kids on Bikes in the 80s, but my D&D buddies (other than my two brothers) weren’t within biking distance.

I lived not in the flat suburban Midwest, but in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. My family lived on “The Ridge”, upon which a lot of houses had been built in the 70s, including our own. We (my brothers and I) biked all over The Ridge, and down and up wooded deer paths on its backlots and hillsides, which we called The Trail. As a kid, I made a map of The Trail and all its significant locales, such as the Spooky Pine Forest. I guess the closest thing to being “lost” is when we explored a far end of The Trail and didn’t know where it would come out. But it eventually curved back around to known lands.

Our only biking buddy on The Ridge was a country lad who wasn’t into D&D.

Our three regular D&D buddies lived relatively far away (for a bike). One lived on another mountain which could only be reached via the busy state highway, one lived down a distant “holler” which could hardly be reached with a 4X4, and the other lived in another community altogether. So our bike adventures didn’t overlap with our D&D (BXCMI and AD&D 1e and 2e) adventures.

 

[Nylanfs]

I grew up in a small rural town, I would regularly ride my bike to the two closest towns to raid their libraries for new scifi books. They were 7 and 12 miles away.

 

[Dungeonosophy]

I grew up in a small rural town, I would regularly ride my bike to the two closest towns to raid their libraries for new scifi books. They were 7 and 12 miles away.

What state?

 

[Mannahnin]

Absolutely kids on bikes. In rural Epping, New Hampshire from the early 80s to '87, suburban Pennsylvania (Lansdale, outside Philadelphia) from '87 to '90, and suburban Washington (Burien, south of Seattle) '90 to '93. Biking in the neighborhood (and father, in NH, as it was a rural area), and to local parks, stores, arcades, bowling alleys, parks, libraries, and just into the woods and trails in Epping.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Its funny. I just spoke with my eife and some friends who are 5 to 10 years younger. And they are not hooked by stranger things. Probably they lack the nostalgia i have.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Class Action Park is wild, that's for sure. Definitely a documentary worth checking out.

People who weren’t there really have no concept of how deeply weird the 80s was for being a kid. From Seeing movies my grade school self had no business seeing, to there being toys aimed at kids based on those movies, to just how far we could roam. A real good documentary to get a sense of it is “Class Action Park” it was on HBO Max when I watched it. Watch it, then if something comes up in a game just think “is it worse than letting your kid go to Action Park, if no let it continue.” But yeah parents and kids of the time had this weird oblivious sense that everything would work out for the best.

For the first part of my childhood, I lived in a suburb outside of NYC. I have fond memories of roaming about, especially on Halloween. Then my family moved to a rural area of upstate New York. I road my bicycle around a little, but things were so far away that we'd have to be dropped off at a friend's place first to do anything. The only way out of where we lived was a highway that routinely had accidents on it (at least twice our house was saved from being hit by a car by some large old trees) and there was no world where my parents ever would've let me bike on it. To be fair, knowing young me, I wouldn't have done so even if they had.

Of course, once we were at one of friend's houses that lived in town, we would be back to roaming all over. Heck, even when it was at another place in the woods, we would still go far afield into the forests. When we weren't playing D&D or Nintendo or watching some movie on VHS, that is.