Were you RPGing before you even knew it?

[Tinker Gnome]

I was just thinking back to my adolescence and I remembered that my friends and I used to take our Dragon Ball Z toys and make up our own characters(I used my Trunks action figure as an Android instead) and create stats for them and RP out different plots. This was before I had ever played DnD or any sort of roleplaying game.

 

[op1983]

Good point. I bought a lot of action figures cause I liked the way they looked. But had no idea of their true origins. So, I made them up. And played stories with other friends of mine.

For that matter we did quite a bit of LARPing too. Super heroes soldiers medieval fighters and so on. Just never thought of it as such.

 

[El Mahdi]

I was less about action figures than I was constructing entire bases. My brother and I would combine different toy sets, such as; girder-and-panel sets, hot-wheels tracks, toy cars and planes, and legos (for making buildings, aircraft, spacecraft, and anything else we could think up) - and turn our entire room into a sprawling military base. So I guess I was more into world building than character creation as a kid. Even then, I guess I was practicing to be a DM.

 

[Woas]

Yup. We called it simply, "Quest". Diceless RPGing. We would play on the bus, at lunch, after school. It was grand. All genres too... whatever was the most recent meme in our young, social consciousness (aka: Jurassic Park, James Bond, Red Wall novels, Last of the Mahicans, Super Mario Bros., Batman...)

 

[Starbuck_II]

I was just thinking back to my adolescence and I remembered that my friends and I used to take our Dragon Ball Z toys and make up our own characters(I used my Trunks action figure as an Android instead) and create stats for them and RP out different plots. This was before I had ever played DnD or any sort of roleplaying game.

Well, this was after playing roleplaying video games like Final Fantasy 1.

But I used to make my own roleplaying game: it was a little bit like D&D in some aspects but more wargamey (granted D&D came from wargames so that seems weird to realize for me).

Basically, there were like ten nations. And the characters worked as mercenies for the nations as they fought.

First, the characters were stuck in a gladitorial match as slaves and had to rely on each other to survive.

I still have the notes/nation states. I actually played out each nations wars on my own time that didn't involve the party.

Basically, it mostly my bro and me that played. Elementary school I invented this game. Lost interest after a year or so (I was young).

This was before I played D&D (well AD&D) in high school.

 

[ppaladin123]

When I was six I used to play "army" in the backyard with neighborhood kids. We had imaginary guns and fought imaginary enemies. Sometimes we got shot and enacted dying scenes.

Sometimes we were medieval knights instead and used sticks as swords. There were particularly vicious thorn bushes that we imagined were dragons. We rescued princesses and had (primitive) character traits.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Yeah, we called it 'cops & robbers', 'cowboys & indians', and 'war' (or 'army'). Today it would be called LARPing, but we just called it playing. Of course, this was about a decade before D&D was even invented...

 

[jmucchiello]

Yeah, we called it 'cops & robbers', 'cowboys & indians', and 'war' (or 'army'). Today it would be called LARPing, but we just called it playing. Of course, this was about a decade before D&D was even invented...

Yeah, I was doing this at the same time D&D was being invented.

However, I think the difference between cops & robbers etc. and RPGs (or even LARPs) is the non-existence of stats. No one ever claimed "You missed me cause my dodge is 17!" They just said "You missed." "No I didn't" "Yes you did" "No I didn't" "Bang! Doesn't matter now you're dead" "I can't be dead cause I already shot you" "No, you missed" "Ad nauseum".

Unlike the youngsters here, we didn't have video games to inform us there could be stats.

 

[Betote]

Absolutely. In addition to "cops & robbers", "cowboys & indians" and other "pre-LARPing", we had tabletop HeroQuest/Zelda made-up games about Dragonball Z and WWF (it had an F back then) wrestlers

And I'm making damn sure that my students have some other RP experiences, too

 

[Wombat]

Sure was.

Besides all the "make believe" games when I was a kid (most of which involved changing roles when I switched hats), many of the board games (wargames and otherwise) and certainly all of my miniatures wargames ended up having "personalities" attached to the tokens, players, and situations.

So at that points, I've been roleplaying for nearly 50 years now