My Life in Gaming, Part 1
This will be an intermittent, utterly fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants series that I intend to post here about roleplaying games and my reactions thereto over time. Non-geeks should feel free to ignore... ;-)
Officially my roleplaying game life began on the Friday of Labor Day Weekend, 1976.
I say "officially" because I had really been in training long before then, but let's leave that to another entry. ;-)
How am I able to be so specific? Well, quite simply because I was preparing for (ugh) a Boy Scout mass camp-out (/ugh) and was already in uniform and helping to load up the van. It was at this point, maybe 20-25 minutes before roll-out, that the UPS driver came up to our house and handed me my latest package from dear old Brookhurst Hobbies (amazingly still in existence, although I have not done business with them in years). In the box was ... D&D.
Let's back up a bit.
I had been playing boardgames and miniature wargames since about 1970, 1971. While there were aspects of these that I liked, one of the things I loathed above all else were the arguments they entailed. "Nuh-uh! No way you had line-of-site on that unit!" "You only won because you pushed that unit forward when I wasn't looking!" "But those units couldn't be together on the same battlefield! In the history book I read..." **le sigh** I hated the arguments. I hated the winner/loser aspect. I liked painting the figures (I was never, ever as good as my brother Alex), I liked learning the rules, and I loved, loved, loved doing research on different eras, but my heart was never really in the American Civil War or WWII (or even the Napoleonic Wars ... at least at the time) as my friends' were. I liked fantasy -- Tolkein, of course, but also Fritz Leiber (huzzah for Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser!), Ursula LeGuin (Earthsea is dear to my heart), the Arthurian legends in their many incarnations and at the time Michael Moorcock ... although he fell off my "love list" a long time ago. I also liked select science fiction, but that is a different matter, at least for the moment.
Now I had picked up the Chainmail rules back under their yellow cover and was intrigued by the very, very brief fantasy supplement in the back. I had also found the supposedly Tolkein-based miniatures put out by Jack Scruby's Toy Soldier Factory in Cambria, CA; so, putting 2 and 2 together, I started setting up fantasy battles, but they were little loved. Meh, so be it.
In August of 1976, just before I was to enter my senior year in high school, I got a supplement to the Brookhurst Hobbies catalog. They were trying to talk about a new game, but had a terrible time trying to explain it. It ran more or less like this: "From TSR, a new wargame that apparently only uses pencil and paper where you play fantasy heroes. Three books in a box, $10." Now $10 was a lot of money to plunk down sight-unseen on a set of rules in those days, but I had liked their game (okay, technically then they were still Guidon Games) Chainmail and my brother had liked their ACW set of rules (I forget the title of those) and obviously they were working along the lines of where I generally wanted to go ... so I took the plunge. And there, just before the Boy Scout campout, came my box.
The smell of crude oil always takes me back to that first set...
The campout I was on was held in the beautiful burg of Coalinga, CA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga,_California
Most of the kids on the campout took the tour of the nearby drilling sites; I opted out.
In 1976, most of the Boy Scouts were into things like CB radios and the latest stadium rock act. It was also (aside from our Troop) a fairly conservative bunch of individuals. So imagine if you will a somewhat long-haired, scrawny kid who tended to mumble a lot trying to explain to people who had never dealt with wargames or AH/SPI boardgames, much less rpgs, about things like hit points, armour class, and ochre jellies... I mean, we are talking a language as foreign as Swahili to this group.
Luckily my friends in the wargaming circles were more open. And, much more luckily as it turned out, I had a set of dice for the game. The original game came with a sheet of paper with little squares numbered 1-20 that you could cut out and place in a cup to substitute for all those strange dice-shapes that were then so rare -- everyone had dice, but back at that time "dice" only meant d6. But at the Lawrence Hall of Science they wold packs of dice based on the Platonic Solids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid).
For you gamers, ever wonder why all the dice manufacturers talk about "high impact dice"? Well, this is because of those originals -- terrifically low impact. They were made from very soft plastic, as they were only meant as an amusement, a sort of "in joke" for physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians; the d20 became a round ball within about a week and a half. I know. It rolled away one day and was never seen again. Luckily by then Lou Zocchi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Zocchi) was selling more solid models out of Biloxi, MS. I met the man once at an early convention -- he was amazingly enthusiastic and would agree with almost anything as long as 1) it built enthusiasm for games in general and 2) made a sale.
Wow, that original game... It was amazing! Realistically this was a haphazard collection of notes strung together in a format that barely presented a playable game, but never mind that; it set my brain ablaze! No winners! No losers! Everyone on the same side! Of course I had to create dungeons ... that was the only place to really play a game, unless you were using AH's Outdoor Survival (...a game that, in our group, was only really loved by Lars...). So, dungeons I created ... until I got adventuresome and started to create a city you could go to between adventures, mainly as a shopping mall at first, but later as a place in and of itself. But the game had no rules for damage done in combat (...it was sort of implied...) and nonhumans (elves, dwarves, and hobbits -- still called such at the time, as they had not yet been sued by the Tolkein estate) were severely hampered. No, there were not "nonhuman classes"; that abomination only came about with the later-released "Basic Set", which we sneered at for being childlike. But still the nonhumans were restricted in how high they could advance in any given class -- hobbits were essentially SOL, especially as the Thief class only came in with the blessed Greyhawk supplement (which also, I might add, gave us the concept of damage by weapon).
Oh my, heady days indeed trying to puzzle out the rules, make stuff up as you went along, and all the rest. And I dutifully picked up the early TSR supplements ... as well as several fanon APA supplements that were never sanctioned; back in those days TSR didn't really complain as much as it did later, before they became Big Business as rpgs took off.
I was The Ref (a nickname that I had prior to D&D). The gang met in The Dungeon (the big room downstairs ... also named prior to D&D) every weekend ... and some weekdays as well. And my hobbying life would never be the same.
In future episodes of this journal, I will talk about specific games I have known and loved/hated, how gaming has evolved over my lifetime, people and personalities I have met, non-gamer reaction to gaming and the like. Any comments, suggest, nostalgic remembrances and suchlike are welcome and strongly encouraged!
Officially my roleplaying game life began on the Friday of Labor Day Weekend, 1976.
I say "officially" because I had really been in training long before then, but let's leave that to another entry. ;-)
How am I able to be so specific? Well, quite simply because I was preparing for (ugh) a Boy Scout mass camp-out (/ugh) and was already in uniform and helping to load up the van. It was at this point, maybe 20-25 minutes before roll-out, that the UPS driver came up to our house and handed me my latest package from dear old Brookhurst Hobbies (amazingly still in existence, although I have not done business with them in years). In the box was ... D&D.
Let's back up a bit.
I had been playing boardgames and miniature wargames since about 1970, 1971. While there were aspects of these that I liked, one of the things I loathed above all else were the arguments they entailed. "Nuh-uh! No way you had line-of-site on that unit!" "You only won because you pushed that unit forward when I wasn't looking!" "But those units couldn't be together on the same battlefield! In the history book I read..." **le sigh** I hated the arguments. I hated the winner/loser aspect. I liked painting the figures (I was never, ever as good as my brother Alex), I liked learning the rules, and I loved, loved, loved doing research on different eras, but my heart was never really in the American Civil War or WWII (or even the Napoleonic Wars ... at least at the time) as my friends' were. I liked fantasy -- Tolkein, of course, but also Fritz Leiber (huzzah for Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser!), Ursula LeGuin (Earthsea is dear to my heart), the Arthurian legends in their many incarnations and at the time Michael Moorcock ... although he fell off my "love list" a long time ago. I also liked select science fiction, but that is a different matter, at least for the moment.
Now I had picked up the Chainmail rules back under their yellow cover and was intrigued by the very, very brief fantasy supplement in the back. I had also found the supposedly Tolkein-based miniatures put out by Jack Scruby's Toy Soldier Factory in Cambria, CA; so, putting 2 and 2 together, I started setting up fantasy battles, but they were little loved. Meh, so be it.
In August of 1976, just before I was to enter my senior year in high school, I got a supplement to the Brookhurst Hobbies catalog. They were trying to talk about a new game, but had a terrible time trying to explain it. It ran more or less like this: "From TSR, a new wargame that apparently only uses pencil and paper where you play fantasy heroes. Three books in a box, $10." Now $10 was a lot of money to plunk down sight-unseen on a set of rules in those days, but I had liked their game (okay, technically then they were still Guidon Games) Chainmail and my brother had liked their ACW set of rules (I forget the title of those) and obviously they were working along the lines of where I generally wanted to go ... so I took the plunge. And there, just before the Boy Scout campout, came my box.
The smell of crude oil always takes me back to that first set...
The campout I was on was held in the beautiful burg of Coalinga, CA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalinga,_California
Most of the kids on the campout took the tour of the nearby drilling sites; I opted out.
In 1976, most of the Boy Scouts were into things like CB radios and the latest stadium rock act. It was also (aside from our Troop) a fairly conservative bunch of individuals. So imagine if you will a somewhat long-haired, scrawny kid who tended to mumble a lot trying to explain to people who had never dealt with wargames or AH/SPI boardgames, much less rpgs, about things like hit points, armour class, and ochre jellies... I mean, we are talking a language as foreign as Swahili to this group.
Luckily my friends in the wargaming circles were more open. And, much more luckily as it turned out, I had a set of dice for the game. The original game came with a sheet of paper with little squares numbered 1-20 that you could cut out and place in a cup to substitute for all those strange dice-shapes that were then so rare -- everyone had dice, but back at that time "dice" only meant d6. But at the Lawrence Hall of Science they wold packs of dice based on the Platonic Solids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid).
For you gamers, ever wonder why all the dice manufacturers talk about "high impact dice"? Well, this is because of those originals -- terrifically low impact. They were made from very soft plastic, as they were only meant as an amusement, a sort of "in joke" for physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians; the d20 became a round ball within about a week and a half. I know. It rolled away one day and was never seen again. Luckily by then Lou Zocchi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Zocchi) was selling more solid models out of Biloxi, MS. I met the man once at an early convention -- he was amazingly enthusiastic and would agree with almost anything as long as 1) it built enthusiasm for games in general and 2) made a sale.
Wow, that original game... It was amazing! Realistically this was a haphazard collection of notes strung together in a format that barely presented a playable game, but never mind that; it set my brain ablaze! No winners! No losers! Everyone on the same side! Of course I had to create dungeons ... that was the only place to really play a game, unless you were using AH's Outdoor Survival (...a game that, in our group, was only really loved by Lars...). So, dungeons I created ... until I got adventuresome and started to create a city you could go to between adventures, mainly as a shopping mall at first, but later as a place in and of itself. But the game had no rules for damage done in combat (...it was sort of implied...) and nonhumans (elves, dwarves, and hobbits -- still called such at the time, as they had not yet been sued by the Tolkein estate) were severely hampered. No, there were not "nonhuman classes"; that abomination only came about with the later-released "Basic Set", which we sneered at for being childlike. But still the nonhumans were restricted in how high they could advance in any given class -- hobbits were essentially SOL, especially as the Thief class only came in with the blessed Greyhawk supplement (which also, I might add, gave us the concept of damage by weapon).
Oh my, heady days indeed trying to puzzle out the rules, make stuff up as you went along, and all the rest. And I dutifully picked up the early TSR supplements ... as well as several fanon APA supplements that were never sanctioned; back in those days TSR didn't really complain as much as it did later, before they became Big Business as rpgs took off.
I was The Ref (a nickname that I had prior to D&D). The gang met in The Dungeon (the big room downstairs ... also named prior to D&D) every weekend ... and some weekdays as well. And my hobbying life would never be the same.
In future episodes of this journal, I will talk about specific games I have known and loved/hated, how gaming has evolved over my lifetime, people and personalities I have met, non-gamer reaction to gaming and the like. Any comments, suggest, nostalgic remembrances and suchlike are welcome and strongly encouraged!