Graph Paper Games

After eight years of living in a very small town, first gaming with friends I could coerce into gaming with me and then later shifting to gaming at gaming stores, I moved again for work. This time, thankfully I was in a larger community and a college town.  I went from having a gaming store be a half-hour drive away to having one three blocks from my house. Moreover, I also knew how to find other gamers, either by trawling gaming stores, the internet, or just my community of friends. I also knew I didn't want to spend two years waiting for gamers to fall out of the sky like I had previously.  I immediately arranged to run a game at the local gaming store and put up a notice on Meetup, which is a great tool for finding other gamers in your area.  That was my short-term goal. Long term, I knew I'd be making other friends that I could try to game with me.  I had gotten over my aversion to letting the public know what I did as a hobby years before.  I think ...

So in my last installment of this gaming autobiography, I ended having left a city of two million to take a new job in a city of twenty thousand.  Also, this wasn't a suburb of a larger city, this was a small failed rustbelt town where the closest gaming store was easily more than twenty miles away. Complicating matters, I had one small child and closely thereafter another.  My wife and I were both working, so there was lots of things going on.  While things like the internet were helping me find people to do wargames with, I was less willing to try to find other gamers, having had some back experiences with gaming with strangers.  You can play Warhammer against a stranger in a gaming store, leave and never see him again if you don't want.  It's harder (and a little more intrusive) getting out of doing a roleplaying game with someone who has been in your house. After over two years of no gaming whatsoever, I got so hungry to do some gaming that I realized th...

When I left college, I returned to my home town, or rather my new home town since my parents had moved while I was in college.  That meant I didn't know anyone, didn't have much of a job, and was kind of at loose ends.  I thankfully found a reasonable-paying job (it was a different era back then), located the stores that sold gaming material, and began to look for a new group. It didn't work out well.  I was back out in the MidWest and the pickings were surprisingly slim.  In the end I risked something I will probably never do again: I put up a sign at a gaming store saying I was running a Star Wars game and was looking for players. I got Brooding Guy, Quiet Guy, Jackass Guy, and Socially Inept Teenager.  I also recruiting my new girlfriend, who had some experience gaming although it wasn't really her thing.  (Later, she'd become Irene, my roller derby-playing, zombie-fighting partner over at Hard Boiled Zombies )  I liked most of them well enough, e...

Previously, I wrote about my start in gaming; fumbling around but generally gaming a lot less than you might think.  All that changed when I went to college in New England, where both I think both the population density and cosmopolitan nature of the place lent itself better.  The college I attended actually had a school-sponsored club dedicated to playing roleplaying games as a way of encouraging non-fraternity activities.  What's more, when I got there I discovered that they played a game I thought I knew, but wasn't aware had advanced three editions. I ended up playing, and then later running, Champions 4th Ed. for over three years, often more than once a week.  It's a slow game, combat-wise, especially when you've got six or so players, but this was the gaming mainstay the entire time.  And I loved it.  There was the Knights of New York, FUNHOUSE, Vanguard and its spin-off team Vanguard Europe. We were a pretty mercurial group when it came to...

Barking Alien once posted his "life of gaming," and it was such a good read I thought I would do the same myself. Plus it is my 100th Post!  Woo Hoo! My first experience of roleplaying games came when my uncle gave me a gift certificate to Sears.  Now back in the day, the Sears-Roebuck catalog was a big honking deal at Christmastime because you could look at all these toys you couldn't find anywhere else.  But even more bizarre that year was that the Sears store was selling a box set of Basic Dungeons & Dragons.  I was a huge fan of knights as a kid, not to mention Narnia and the Lord of the Rings books (admittedly I had only seen the animated movies), so I managed to talk my parents into letting me buy the box set. Despite the assertions that this game was huge, I found it very difficult to find people to game with me.  My sister was only marginally interested in hanging out with me, since we were getting into full-blown sibling rivalry (plus ...