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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8830999">Things were so all over the map. I started in California in 86, where they played one way, then came back east and played initially with my cousin and a friend and a few others in middle school. In highschool there were a few different game groups. There was something of a shared culture there, but the older students had a different approach than we did. And when I went to the hobby shop at the mall, it almost sounded like people were playing a totally different game at times. Even at our own school among gamers my age there were big differences. I knew one GM at my school who had a rotating table of something like 10+ players, and he played in a style where the world kept moving between sessions. It was also every man for himself, with players constantly backstabbing one another (sometimes just to steal a magic item). To complicate it further most people didn't make it to every session. But it was enormously popular. He had people who weren't even gamers in it. By this point it was probably 1990, so far from the early days of the hobby. I knew another group with 2 Co-GMs. Also different editions were all available at that time. I ran 2E, so did a couple of other guys I knew. I played in a group that ran exclusively 1E. And the everyman for himself GM ran using D&D Rules Cyclopedia. I played in games that were heavily focused on the GM telling a story, in games where the GM had exhaustively mapped out a world, in games where time was tracked very carefully, in games where no one cared about time, games where 10 minute turns were an important part of dungeon exploration and games where turns weren't a thing. In the 2E era, even if you played by the book, so many rules were tagged as optional that those varied tremendously from table to table. Not everyone used Non-weapon proficiencies for example. Weapon speed wasn't universally used either. And a lot of people kludged 1E and 2E material together. And that is just D&D. That wasn't the only game being played. I remember huge, huge levels of difference between groups running Vampire the Masquerade. And there were GMs who preferred GURPS (the GM who ran the every man for himself group used to run a lot of GURPS campaigns too).</blockquote>

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