Gaming Ten Years Ago

-
Like so many others, I thought I'd take Lowell Francis' suggestion that we reminisce about what we were gaming ten years ago on our gaming blogs.

What's interesting for me is how ten years ago appears to be such a lull for so many gaming bloggers, and I am (or was) in the same boat.

Twelve years ago, I got a new position and a new assignment and was shipped out to a small, rural town in western Ohio.  I ended up staying there for eight years.

It would be impossible to try to sum up eight years of my life in a small frame of time.  Sublimely beautiful and deeply scarring might be a good try.  I'm still living with a lot of what happened in that time, not the least of which was the birth of my daughter (on the good side) and a lot of other stuff on the bad.  But let's stick to gaming.

I was in a very small town, and had little in the way of social outlets.  The internet put me in contact not with RPG enthusiasts, but GW-related wargamers, and so I shifted from running RPG's to wargaming around that period.  Eventually I tried doing RPG with wargamers, which didn't go well.

Finally I started recruiting friends that I had met in those first few years and introduced them to gaming.  Dungeons & Dragons was still really a standby for RPG's, and the OGL had made it a dominant force on game store bookshelves.  But I didn't care for Third Edition much, and when Castles & Crusades heralded the beginning of the Old School Renaissance, I was an early adopter.  I did a lot of reading on blogs and the like, re-discovering some of the core concepts of movement.  But even though I had been a really great GM of games like Champions, Star Wars, and Vampire, I was struggling with fantasy.  Partially it was because we were gaming with children and their parents.  Partially it was because I was unused to (and possibly ill-suited for) fantasy.  Partially it was all the other stuff.

Like I said, I was mostly wargaming then, with good friends and as a hobby it served me well.  When I finally left Ohio and came to Kansas, I realized I really wanted to do more RPG playing with people who really liked RPG's, and the larger college town had more people like that.  I've been gaming with this group now for almost five years, running mostly (but not exclusively) fantasy, and it has been going very well.

But ten years ago wasn't that place, not by a long shot.  And I don't mind saying I am glad to be gone from there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I moved ages ago, but forgot to tell anyone

-
 I decided to get my own domain name: strangevistas.org and have been posting there for over a year.  When Adam at Barking Alien mentioned that he wanted me to start blogging again, I realized that he might not know, and that likely others didn't as well. So, now you do.  See you soon!
Read more

RPG Review: Far Trek

-
Image
So, as I mentioned recently, I've got a lot of sentimentality for Star Trek RPG's, and Star Trek in general.  Three actual honest-to-God licensed ones exist in history: FASA's, Last Unicorn Games, and Decipher's.  I own the first two and have heard mixed things about the third. But there are also a lot of non-licensed Star Trek RPG's out there, and recently I saw that one of them, Far Trek , was offering a hard copy for a couple of bucks on Lulu.  Never one to let a deal go by I picked it up and thought I'd give you, gentle readers, my thoughts. Far Trek is a light-hearted, even breezy take on the Star Trek universe, almost exclusively the original series.  There rules incorporate stats, skills, and talents.  There are four stats: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, with the stats ranging from about a -2 to a +2, reflecting their modifier on the die roll.  I actually like this mechanic, which I first encountered in True20.  It doesn't ma
Read more

Heroes Against Darkness review

-
Image
For my birthday I picked up a print copy of Heroes Against Darkness  by Justin Halliday .  Why, might you ask, would I spent hard currency on a book that is offered as a .pdf for free? First, I like real books.  I read them better, and can do so in places other than in front of a computer monitor. Second, it's worth it.  Beats me if Halliday makes any money off the sale or not, but I hope he did, because offering this game for free was a very generous gift to the gaming world. Heroes Against Darkness is worth owning. (At least if you are me.  Your mileage may vary.) Heroes Against Darkness  is, by its own admission, a "fantasy heartbreaker," which is the usually derogatory term used by someone's homegrown version of Dungeons & Dragons.  If I had to summarize HAD's genetic heritage, I'd call it an early edition of D&D done using Fourth Edition mechanics.  If that early edition had 11 character classes. HAD has the standard D&D stat layou
Read more