Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 4994400" data-attributes="member: 54707">When I first started playing games there was no role-playing. But there were Wargames which I enjoyed and played a lot. I also played a lot of board games, Risk, Strategy, Battleship, Chess. But especially Chess and Risk. In the summer my buddies and I would have long three day tournaments. My buddies and I used to have camp outs in which we would dress up in home made armor and fight with wooden swords and shields and spears. I guess it was like Larping would become later, only we didn't pull any punches and often blooded each other up pretty good. Occasionally broke stuff too, like arms and hands. We didn't have any real rules except to win and no gouging out or stabbing out eyes or groins. Otherwise it was pretty much fair game, except you couldn't split skulls open either. Our parents didn't like us doing this, but we liked it a lot. We also had bottle-rocket fights and gun fights with bb and pellet rifles. So I guess you could call that live action wargaming. On camping trips we also used to make up ghost stories and stories involving knights and monsters and that kinda thing to tell our buddies. I also liked science (mainly physics and chemistry at that time) a lot and considered role play gaming a sort of science. A psychological one, though at that time I wouldn't have really known what to call it. Like Psy-ops. I also liked history a lot which was a natural tie-in.Mainly though I considered my Vadding activities to be the most direct tie-in. I've always considered role play gaming and exploration gaming to be a sort of "Vadding of the Mind." Similarly I always liked to wander the woods by myself, to track animals (never hunted much but I've always tracked), to fish, to watch and study animals, and to "adventure" out of doors. So it was a sort of natural tie-in between my "physical and real world interests" and my "imaginative" ones.I didn't really start reading any fantasy or LOTR types stuff until after I started playing D&D which I was introduced directly to through wargaming. After I started playing D&D though I liked reading fantasy real well for awhile there. But reading wasn't how I came at role playing. Fantasy reading was an after-thought or to be more precise, an after-effect.Though some of the very earliest books I can remember reading as a child were The Song of Roland, the Story of Siegfried (both juvenile versions of the poem and saga), Beowulf, the Iliad, the White Stag (a kid's book about Attila the Hun coming West by Lake Van), and a kid's book about a wild horse out West which unfortunately I can't remember but that I'd dearly like to read again. All of which made me want to have real-life adventures, but had a strong corresponding effect on my imagination.So I reckon I was pre-disposed. But not by fantasy. More by real world adventures, myth, camping, fighting, science, and wargaming.</blockquote>

Verification