thread: 2006-10-17 : My roleplaying summary
On 2006-10-18, Valamir wrote:
My first RPG experience was at school in the second grade. It was D&D, ostensibly the Basic/Expert edition but at that time the GM (who interestingly went on to be captain of the high school football team and valedictorian years later) had forgotten his dice. So...we free formed it.
I of course knew nothing of how the game was supposed to play anyway. My clearest memories of that game are that the other characters were all 3-5 level and didn't have a magic-user. So...with no input of my own, my character was a 1st level Magic User...with magic missle...and a wand of fireballs one of the other characters had but couldn't use.
I remember the adventure had us raiding the fortress of an insanely high level evil druid (beats me). I remember there were henchmen with flame throwers mounted on the battlements (beats me) and I was instrumental in defeating them with my wand. I remember clearly leaping from my seat and shouting "fight fire with fire" while pantomiming with my pencil/wand. I remember later we got captured and put in a cell and when one of the other characters quaffed (yes, we actually said "quaffed" in the second grade) a potion of gasseous form and the GM had the druid capture him in a jar and put him back in the cell where he took damage when he went back into normal form inside the jar. I remember the other players getting bored because it was impossible to escape from this druid and deciding to kill me for XPs. I remember realizing for the first time just how few 2 hit points really was, and how puny 1 magic missile was. I died. I remember the rest of the session was spent with the other players doing sadistic things with my corpse (yes this was second grade) until class started.
I was totally hooked.
Not having any money to buy this wonderful new game I copied what rules I could from the GMs book and once at home typed them on my moms old college manual type writer on that wonderful Onion Skin paper that's almost impossible to find any more. I remember the type writer had 2 font sizes and could also type in red and could do bold by back spacing and typing the same letter over. I had my "rules" thus totally formatted with bold and red words and everything (I also remember having to use a lower case "l" for the number "1". Strange that.
I only had 4 monsters: Orcs, Skeletons, Green Dragons, and White Dragons (beats me) and pretty much all I did was draw mazes on notebook paper and little iconic pictures of the monsters at the various dead ends and then my brother tried to get through the maze and fought the monster when he hit a dead end...I was a good maze drawer...I totally killed him dead so many times that he ran out of character names and starting using random silly sounds like "cockycoo" and "jucalay" (yes, I still remember those names from the way back machine...strange that).
My mom and grandma eventually bought me the D&D Basic, Expert, and Companion sets for various holidays and then we got into AD&D not even realizing that it wasn't the same game at first.
Having no money, I went on to hack together rules for Star Frontiers, The Dungeon Boardgame, the old Conquistador board game, FASAs Star Trek simulator, some hashed together combination of Twilight 2000 and Mercenaries Spies and Private Eyes, and some total hack job of of the Marvel Super Hero game based solely on the section in the back of Dragon Magazine with no idea what any of the rules meant.
The big games we played as a kid other than D&D was Twilight 2000 (I so totally wanted to own a LAV-25 when I grew up), Top Secret S.I. (including the Freelancers superhero version), Fantasy Roleplaying (the Bruce Galloway game published in regualar book format which was 1/2 history book, 1/4 RPG, and 1/4 minis wargame with the coolest magic system evar), Pendragon (to death...at one time we were on our 5th or 6th generation knights), Star Frontiers (especially with the Knight Hawks supplement), and the original Star Wars RPG.
We flirted with some flavor of Traveler but quickly decided that game was way annoying. Oh, and a bunch of the old Fantasy Games Unlimited stuff they used to advertise in Dragon. Bushido, and Psi World, and whatever the Greek game was...They had a really cool Egypt game too "Valley of the Pharoahs" that rocked.
A ton of old Avalon Hill board games in there too.
I didn't own any of those games (except Top Secret S.I...somewhere along the line I got that) which is why I took to hacking together my friends games. But once I got a job and started making good money I had to go back and buy for myself all those old games I played but couldn't afford as a kid...god bless e-bay.
In college I played more AD&D, Cyberpunk 2020 (that and Top Secret SI became my first "gotta have 'em all" splat book obsessions), more Pendragon, a bunch of Heroes Unlimited, some Warhammer Fantasy, a dabbling of Rifts, some Villains and Vigilantes, an aborted attempt at Hero (in our quest to find a supers game that didn't suck), an even more aborted attempt at Fantasy Hero (gawd we hated that system with a passion), some brief flirtation with GURPs before realizing that point buy systems were a total pain in the ass. A bunch of Ars Magica (Lion Rampant version) and a bunch of original Vampire and Werewolf. I abandoned White Wolf after Mage proved to not be Ars Magica fast forwarded to modern times (which I still say it should have been dammit). Bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting like a couple sessions of Paranoia and Toon and oddball stuff like that.
Lots more Avalon Hill games thanks to Wargames West catalogs
Then after college, lets see. A bunch of L5R, 7th Sea, Deadlands, basically whatever was hot on the wall of splats at the game store I frequented. Got more into boardgaming, increasingly euro stuff. Tried to get back into an AD&D group...that was one of those less than fun groups although I snagged a couple of the regular players away for board games and a pretty cool Orkworld campaign I ran.
Also did a bunch of Napoleonic Minis in there and some micro armor, and dabbled in Games Workshop...but their rules all sucked and their minis were way too expensive.
I found Orkworld by following Wick's exodus from AEG which
took me to his design diary on Gaming Outpost where I found some squirrely bizarre thing claiming to be a roleplaying game called Sorcerer...of course me and my AD&D buddies knew it wasn't a real roleplaying game cuz it only had 3 stats and no skills and was by some dude who didn't even write for a real roleplaying company, but summoning demons sounded cool so we tried it. Of course it sucked. I mean really, how can you call it a roleplaying game when the initiative, to-hit, and damage is all one roll...I mean come on.
But that brought me to the Forge, and the rest is history.
