My Life in Gaming 4: The Fallow Years
Once again cut due to Extreme Geekiness...
So, I have told of highlights of my gaming career from the autumn of 1976 until the summer of 1984. While there were several other games that I played in that time (and I forgot to mention things like The Fantasy Trip), I think I covered the real high points.
From the autumn of 1984 until the summer of 1988 gaming, for me, was almost entirely conceptual...
The school where I went, Plymouth State College, was small. There were 3000 students on the campus. I was in a tiny major -- Medieval Studies. The year I entered, one other person declared the major; the year behind me, three people did, making it the all-time highwater mark for the major. Most of the guys on this campus were into mainstream Metal (which people now call "Hair Bands") music and sports; the gals were more into Madonna and clothes. There was a fair-sized counterculture on the campus, especially given its size, including a Medieval sub-set ... but the medievalists were all anti-gaming, due to the local Queen Bee of the group (who was also my girlfriend -- we never, ever saw eye-to-eye on gaming, one of many factors leading to our breakup). To be fair, she was also anti-SCA, so the group followed her on that as well ... which led to amusing times when she ran across a LARP group that she enjoyed... but that was, like most things-gaming and me in NH, a one-off.
So, for four years I hid my interest ... kind of.
I brought a couple of my game books with me -- RuneQuest and FASA Star Trek. I hoped that I might be able to interest someone in one of these games, but nothing ever came of it. I ended up picking up several FASA Star Trek supplements in my time out there as well as the first editions of HarnMaster. These two games created an "out" for me in a profound yet simple way -- character creation in both could be quite time consuming, especially if you went into every detail. As such, I could have a significant "game fix" simply by making a group of allied characters -- the officers of a small starship, a lance of troops, etc. I also started to create The Unplayable Game, a fantasy game that used HarnMaster as a basis ... and then got even more complicated (including borrowing some rather baroque notions from AH's Powers & Perils, one of the all-time worst rpgs I ever ran across). The game was never really meant to be playable -- it was a concept to keep me entertained during long winter days when snowbound in the apartment and Robin was needlepointing.
Eventually I had access to two games in the area -- AD&D and GURPS. The former was run by a nice-enough guy who was a terrible GM. Now I had already fallen away from D&D years prior, but this game really convinced me I didn't want to go back. I ended up playing in about 5-6 sessions over a two year period, borrowed the game books a couple of times, and gave the whole thing up as a bad nightmare -- I simply couldn't "go back" to hit points, character classes, and the dreaded THAC0. The game was still all about killing and equipment with nothing that really stretched out beyond that. The latter was a different matter...
I was invited by a local inhabitant, Steffan O'Sullivan (famed for several GURPS supplements and the biggest fan of Bunnies & Burrows, any edition or incarnation, that I have or ever will meet in my life), invited me to join his merry crew ... which proved to be one other guy. I forget this guy's name, but he was ex-Army on a medical discharge (developed some severe back problems) who also had Short Man's Syndrome -- he was about 5'3" and felt that everyone else looked down on him. Steffan introduced me to GURPS and I ended up picking up the game. At first I loved the open-ended aspect of it ... but then I learned to loathe it. First of all it was too open; the notion of a "universal" system, the False Grail of so many gamers, sounds tempting, but it simply never works -- there are too many assumptions that end up getting crammed into such a set of rules, relative "weights" of different concepts (magic vs. mechanics, for example) that it will never truly be universal, but only "jack of all trades, master of none". Steffan was a nice guy and it was nice to have someone to talk shop with, but the rules annoyed me -- the rules never got out of the way! Every time you turned around, you were confronted by the rules. In the end, I had a very hard time suspending disbelief long enough to play -- I felt like I was Working With A Set Of Strict Rules rather than relaxing and playing a social game. (That and the ex-Army guy was really annoying.) So, again, after maybe six sessions, I had no more games.
While I loved my time in college, the friends I made in the local community (almost none of them actually in school), the hiking, and many other aspects of my time in New Hampshire, gaming almost died in me. Sure, I corresponded with game companies and wrote a couple letters to game magazines, but in the main, there was nothing.
But I left, came to Santa Barbara ... and, well, that is another entry...
More on this in the near future.
So, I have told of highlights of my gaming career from the autumn of 1976 until the summer of 1984. While there were several other games that I played in that time (and I forgot to mention things like The Fantasy Trip), I think I covered the real high points.
From the autumn of 1984 until the summer of 1988 gaming, for me, was almost entirely conceptual...
The school where I went, Plymouth State College, was small. There were 3000 students on the campus. I was in a tiny major -- Medieval Studies. The year I entered, one other person declared the major; the year behind me, three people did, making it the all-time highwater mark for the major. Most of the guys on this campus were into mainstream Metal (which people now call "Hair Bands") music and sports; the gals were more into Madonna and clothes. There was a fair-sized counterculture on the campus, especially given its size, including a Medieval sub-set ... but the medievalists were all anti-gaming, due to the local Queen Bee of the group (who was also my girlfriend -- we never, ever saw eye-to-eye on gaming, one of many factors leading to our breakup). To be fair, she was also anti-SCA, so the group followed her on that as well ... which led to amusing times when she ran across a LARP group that she enjoyed... but that was, like most things-gaming and me in NH, a one-off.
So, for four years I hid my interest ... kind of.
I brought a couple of my game books with me -- RuneQuest and FASA Star Trek. I hoped that I might be able to interest someone in one of these games, but nothing ever came of it. I ended up picking up several FASA Star Trek supplements in my time out there as well as the first editions of HarnMaster. These two games created an "out" for me in a profound yet simple way -- character creation in both could be quite time consuming, especially if you went into every detail. As such, I could have a significant "game fix" simply by making a group of allied characters -- the officers of a small starship, a lance of troops, etc. I also started to create The Unplayable Game, a fantasy game that used HarnMaster as a basis ... and then got even more complicated (including borrowing some rather baroque notions from AH's Powers & Perils, one of the all-time worst rpgs I ever ran across). The game was never really meant to be playable -- it was a concept to keep me entertained during long winter days when snowbound in the apartment and Robin was needlepointing.
Eventually I had access to two games in the area -- AD&D and GURPS. The former was run by a nice-enough guy who was a terrible GM. Now I had already fallen away from D&D years prior, but this game really convinced me I didn't want to go back. I ended up playing in about 5-6 sessions over a two year period, borrowed the game books a couple of times, and gave the whole thing up as a bad nightmare -- I simply couldn't "go back" to hit points, character classes, and the dreaded THAC0. The game was still all about killing and equipment with nothing that really stretched out beyond that. The latter was a different matter...
I was invited by a local inhabitant, Steffan O'Sullivan (famed for several GURPS supplements and the biggest fan of Bunnies & Burrows, any edition or incarnation, that I have or ever will meet in my life), invited me to join his merry crew ... which proved to be one other guy. I forget this guy's name, but he was ex-Army on a medical discharge (developed some severe back problems) who also had Short Man's Syndrome -- he was about 5'3" and felt that everyone else looked down on him. Steffan introduced me to GURPS and I ended up picking up the game. At first I loved the open-ended aspect of it ... but then I learned to loathe it. First of all it was too open; the notion of a "universal" system, the False Grail of so many gamers, sounds tempting, but it simply never works -- there are too many assumptions that end up getting crammed into such a set of rules, relative "weights" of different concepts (magic vs. mechanics, for example) that it will never truly be universal, but only "jack of all trades, master of none". Steffan was a nice guy and it was nice to have someone to talk shop with, but the rules annoyed me -- the rules never got out of the way! Every time you turned around, you were confronted by the rules. In the end, I had a very hard time suspending disbelief long enough to play -- I felt like I was Working With A Set Of Strict Rules rather than relaxing and playing a social game. (That and the ex-Army guy was really annoying.) So, again, after maybe six sessions, I had no more games.
While I loved my time in college, the friends I made in the local community (almost none of them actually in school), the hiking, and many other aspects of my time in New Hampshire, gaming almost died in me. Sure, I corresponded with game companies and wrote a couple letters to game magazines, but in the main, there was nothing.
But I left, came to Santa Barbara ... and, well, that is another entry...
More on this in the near future.