My Life in Gaming: Santa Barbara Eclectic
Yadda, yadda, geekiness behind cut
So, on to Santa Barbara and my re-introduction to gaming...
As I said, my undergrad years were pretty well the nadir of me and gaming. For four years I had only slightly more individual sessions all total. Santa Barbara reversed that trend with a vengeance, and I am happy for that, not only for the games themselves, but also for the friends I found along the dice-strewn way.
I was in graduate school and, to be blunt, I was ill-prepared. PSC had been fun, but it really was a mediocre school; as such, when I arrived at UCSB, I had no idea at all what I had gotten myself involved in. Let us just say that I was not fully grad school material and leave it at that. But, as one of my contemporaries put it, "We are going to grad school to get teaching positions; Angus is here to make better games." Heck, if that is all I got out of the situation, I would be happy, but I got so much more. :-)
Now in my past I had fiddled around a bit with a grand variety of games; sure, I told you the "high points" in previous entries, but be assured that for every game I mentioned, there were at least three times that many that I sampled in one way or another, including some attempts at homebrews. I mean, I didn't touch on Chivalry & Sorcery, Tunnels & Trolls, Paranoia, Champions (later Heroes), Call of Cthulhu, Morrow Project, Metamorphosis: Alpha, and all the rest. The reasons I bring this up now is because I quickly found myself throw into the middle of a vast array of styles and types of games, many of them running simultaneously.
In this entry, I will tell you of the games I was in, as opposed to the ones I attempted to run...
Golden Heroes was the first one I was in, almost by accident. I received a rather vague invitation to a superhero game and decided to take it up (much to my girlfriend's chagrin). While I had looked at several superhero games in the past, and had played in Champions a fair amount thanks to part of the Santa Rosa crowd, comic book heroes and I were only on a vague hand-shake arrangement. I had never read them extensively (though I was soon to become a Neil Gaiman fanatic with the advent of Sandman), hod only watched some of the old campy Batman tv show, and was generally "illiterate" on the topic. Once you got beyond biggies like Superman, Batman, the X-Men (in a very general sense), the Hulk, and others of this range, I knew from nothing. So, here it was, my first game in Santa Barbara and I was rolling up a superhero and trying my best to keep my head above water. I loved the game, but my character was an utter Sad Sack ... you rolled randomly for powers, the GM had amended the charts without necessarily fully fleshing out the powers, and thus Synapse was born ... the would-be superhero with no discernible powers. Despite the fact that he was an utter flub, I rather enjoyed playing him simply for the notion of being the low-guy trying to make good. And at least I had great fun making fun of some of the Washington Powers That Be a la the late 1980s. And the cries of "Sanctuary!" and "Let my people go!" from a drunken Philippino Man-Bat on the Washington Mall was worth the price of admission all by itself! And I seriously doubt that Geraldo Rivera ever really did recover from his encounters with Captain Proton...
More successful as a character was my Star Trek entry, an andorian science officer aboard the-little-starship-that-could. I found that this was a "type" of character that I broadly enjoyed playing -- I was an outsider (most of the crew was human), but determined to be an insider, thus I took many human attitudes and tropes at face value and tried to prove that I was taking them seriously, even when I misunderstood or misapplied them. Sadly, like most of my times with Star Trek related games, the campaign didn't last anywhere near as long as I would have wanted it to.
Rather more successful for character development was the on-again/off-again Cyberpunk game and my odd character Ky O.T. Rampant, a netrunner and singer for the infamous band Dead Doonesbury. Coupled with RLF-X on his riflesyzer, the two of us cut a very strange path through the highways and byways of Night City. The Totentanz will never be the same after RLF's death and resurrection (thank you, Nurse Magruder! We owe you another beer malted!) and the infamous battle cry of "The mouse goes down!!" probably still puts fear into the hearts of some Disney executives... And how many games are you able to play in where you have a bunch of non-military/non-gun types given C4, having never heard of it before, and using half a pound to blow off the door of a safe haven ... and then try to serve a warrant for arrest on a Cthulhu-esque deity ... and live to tell the tale. After that Wendy and her mechanical Tinks were cake...
But strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, for me the best characters I ran were a viking would-be blacksmith and a Mallorian knight. The viking game was interesting in that it was fairly realistic (our treasures were things like bundles of sheep hides) and the dynamic of the group was amazing, but my poor little semi-viking was a hard luck case, through no fault of his own -- I just seemed to have some of the worst dice-luck in the world in that game. Yet somehow this made the character very endearing to me, even when dealing with his father's drunken ramblings about how good it was going to be to have sonny-boy pass along into the Saxon lands, where he would never bother an anvil-wight again. And Sir Escahalt, in a game of Pendragon, still sits close to my heart. One of the trinity of brothers, any of whom would have been great heroes if they hadn't had the poor timing to be born during the reign of King Arthur, thus rather eclipsing their efforts, Escahalt gave me a chance to actually act through the tales I loved so well. A bit of Chretien de Troyes, a bit of Sir Thomas Mallory, and a dash of the modern world, Escahalt was a practitioner of fin amour, courtly love, and was having a passionate, although never carnal, affair with the local baroness, the wife of my liege-lord. The character proved oddly appropriate to type in that he seemed to roll very high when he was upholding his lady's honour and very poorly at other times. Yep, by dice rolls, poor Escahalt was ultimately bi-polar. But I loved him dearly.
The thing here is that I was able to play in a great variety of games without necessarily having to run anything. Oh, but run games I did, including one of my greatest successes ... but that is for another entry.
So, on to Santa Barbara and my re-introduction to gaming...
As I said, my undergrad years were pretty well the nadir of me and gaming. For four years I had only slightly more individual sessions all total. Santa Barbara reversed that trend with a vengeance, and I am happy for that, not only for the games themselves, but also for the friends I found along the dice-strewn way.
I was in graduate school and, to be blunt, I was ill-prepared. PSC had been fun, but it really was a mediocre school; as such, when I arrived at UCSB, I had no idea at all what I had gotten myself involved in. Let us just say that I was not fully grad school material and leave it at that. But, as one of my contemporaries put it, "We are going to grad school to get teaching positions; Angus is here to make better games." Heck, if that is all I got out of the situation, I would be happy, but I got so much more. :-)
Now in my past I had fiddled around a bit with a grand variety of games; sure, I told you the "high points" in previous entries, but be assured that for every game I mentioned, there were at least three times that many that I sampled in one way or another, including some attempts at homebrews. I mean, I didn't touch on Chivalry & Sorcery, Tunnels & Trolls, Paranoia, Champions (later Heroes), Call of Cthulhu, Morrow Project, Metamorphosis: Alpha, and all the rest. The reasons I bring this up now is because I quickly found myself throw into the middle of a vast array of styles and types of games, many of them running simultaneously.
In this entry, I will tell you of the games I was in, as opposed to the ones I attempted to run...
Golden Heroes was the first one I was in, almost by accident. I received a rather vague invitation to a superhero game and decided to take it up (much to my girlfriend's chagrin). While I had looked at several superhero games in the past, and had played in Champions a fair amount thanks to part of the Santa Rosa crowd, comic book heroes and I were only on a vague hand-shake arrangement. I had never read them extensively (though I was soon to become a Neil Gaiman fanatic with the advent of Sandman), hod only watched some of the old campy Batman tv show, and was generally "illiterate" on the topic. Once you got beyond biggies like Superman, Batman, the X-Men (in a very general sense), the Hulk, and others of this range, I knew from nothing. So, here it was, my first game in Santa Barbara and I was rolling up a superhero and trying my best to keep my head above water. I loved the game, but my character was an utter Sad Sack ... you rolled randomly for powers, the GM had amended the charts without necessarily fully fleshing out the powers, and thus Synapse was born ... the would-be superhero with no discernible powers. Despite the fact that he was an utter flub, I rather enjoyed playing him simply for the notion of being the low-guy trying to make good. And at least I had great fun making fun of some of the Washington Powers That Be a la the late 1980s. And the cries of "Sanctuary!" and "Let my people go!" from a drunken Philippino Man-Bat on the Washington Mall was worth the price of admission all by itself! And I seriously doubt that Geraldo Rivera ever really did recover from his encounters with Captain Proton...
More successful as a character was my Star Trek entry, an andorian science officer aboard the-little-starship-that-could. I found that this was a "type" of character that I broadly enjoyed playing -- I was an outsider (most of the crew was human), but determined to be an insider, thus I took many human attitudes and tropes at face value and tried to prove that I was taking them seriously, even when I misunderstood or misapplied them. Sadly, like most of my times with Star Trek related games, the campaign didn't last anywhere near as long as I would have wanted it to.
Rather more successful for character development was the on-again/off-again Cyberpunk game and my odd character Ky O.T. Rampant, a netrunner and singer for the infamous band Dead Doonesbury. Coupled with RLF-X on his riflesyzer, the two of us cut a very strange path through the highways and byways of Night City. The Totentanz will never be the same after RLF's death and resurrection (thank you, Nurse Magruder! We owe you another beer malted!) and the infamous battle cry of "The mouse goes down!!" probably still puts fear into the hearts of some Disney executives... And how many games are you able to play in where you have a bunch of non-military/non-gun types given C4, having never heard of it before, and using half a pound to blow off the door of a safe haven ... and then try to serve a warrant for arrest on a Cthulhu-esque deity ... and live to tell the tale. After that Wendy and her mechanical Tinks were cake...
But strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, for me the best characters I ran were a viking would-be blacksmith and a Mallorian knight. The viking game was interesting in that it was fairly realistic (our treasures were things like bundles of sheep hides) and the dynamic of the group was amazing, but my poor little semi-viking was a hard luck case, through no fault of his own -- I just seemed to have some of the worst dice-luck in the world in that game. Yet somehow this made the character very endearing to me, even when dealing with his father's drunken ramblings about how good it was going to be to have sonny-boy pass along into the Saxon lands, where he would never bother an anvil-wight again. And Sir Escahalt, in a game of Pendragon, still sits close to my heart. One of the trinity of brothers, any of whom would have been great heroes if they hadn't had the poor timing to be born during the reign of King Arthur, thus rather eclipsing their efforts, Escahalt gave me a chance to actually act through the tales I loved so well. A bit of Chretien de Troyes, a bit of Sir Thomas Mallory, and a dash of the modern world, Escahalt was a practitioner of fin amour, courtly love, and was having a passionate, although never carnal, affair with the local baroness, the wife of my liege-lord. The character proved oddly appropriate to type in that he seemed to roll very high when he was upholding his lady's honour and very poorly at other times. Yep, by dice rolls, poor Escahalt was ultimately bi-polar. But I loved him dearly.
The thing here is that I was able to play in a great variety of games without necessarily having to run anything. Oh, but run games I did, including one of my greatest successes ... but that is for another entry.