History of a Gamer
I was relaxing in my little walled courtyard, reading Hotel Berlin 1943 and partaking in this year’s harvest of Sam Adams Oktoberfest, when my phone began to frantically inform me of an astonishing turn of events. People were tweeting on Twitter. Tweets! Twitter! On! Utterly baffled by this bizarre news (who would ever use Twitter to tweet), I dutifully opened the app. Among the hundreds of wonderful tweets in my feed, I found a simple question that caught my attention.
"How did you get started in role-playing games?”
I was about to fire off a short reply when I realized that this was something I could blog about instead.
What follows, then, is a tedious brief scene of young Pyramus, and his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.
No. Wait. That’s a different story by a far better writer. Let's try again.
What follows, then, is wonderfully brilliant monologue of my life-long love of games, much dice-rolling goodness. Someone had to write it. That someone might as well be me. Some of the details are a bit murky. The hazy filter of time is a fickle background task. And I'm sure the timeline will not be precise. I tend to think in terms of life phases rather than daily, monthly, or even yearly progression. (Thank you Google for untangling that mess.) But I’ll try my best. So, please indulge this shadow in this bit of narcissism.
There was one gleaming ray of salvation when it came to getting my gaming fix. The Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game. It was a wickedly fun logic puzzle that is a little hard to explain. Luckily, the YouTubes can demonstrate for me.
There was also a steady supply of fantasy movies to enjoy, such as The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Krull, Ladyhawke, Conan, Willow, Legend, Fire and Ice, Highlander, and more. These I either caught in the theater when I could or rented from Blockbuster Video.
This is where I was introduced to Steve Jackson Games (via Car Wars, The Card Game) and the baffling news that there were game companies out there other than Milton Bradley, including Avalon Hill, Games Workshop, West End Games, and FASA. These companies were putting out amazing tabletop games and role-playing games.
To say I occupied my free time with games during high school would be a gross understatement. It is mostly what my friends and I did when we hung out. And we hung out a lot. More than one weekend saw 24-hour game sessions roll by without a second thought. Sure, we did other things. But a bulk of the activity was gaming or related to gaming.
We also tried our hands at several tabletop games, among them Aliens (again, based on the movie), Axis and Allies, Batlletech (and later Aerotech), Battle Masters, Blood Bowl, Dark World, Hacker, Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Heroquest (and Advanced Heroquest), and Warhammer 40K. Car Wars and a game I remember being called Wrastling (though I can't find it on the InterWebs) were always handy fallbacks. Ultimately, though, we were an RPG group.
As a side note, it was around this time I started playing Civilization, which I enjoy to this day. I played on a friend’s computer because I didn’t have one. I also slowly continued to pick up various Dungeons and Dragons books in the hopes that someday someone would be willing to play. These I usually got at used book stores or on clearance for very cheap. In fact, it's how I've acquired most of my games. (I recently picked up a sealed copy of Pandemic for a dollar at a garage sale.)
Running in the background of all of this was a building addiction to anime that was as influential on my creativity as gaming.
This was also about the time I took my first crack at making my own RPG. It was based on the Bubblegum Crisis anime series. I seriously don't remember much about it other than really geeking out over the notion of every character building their own battle suits.
I also put together a tabletop fantasy clone of Civilization with races such as elves, insect people, dwarves, lizard people, and more. Several friends and I played it over the course of several months and the general consensus was that it was pretty entertaining. Even so, the amount of gaming I engaged in during college was a shadow of what I had done before that.
Slowly, my gaming fixes fell to computer games instead. I continued to play Civilization. I also discovered Daggerfall, Doom, Half-Life, Quake, Redguard, and X-Com. At some point I experimented with making death-match levels for Half-Life using QRAD.
It was during my college years that a localized flood paid me an unwanted visit. I remember the rain came down so heavily that I couldn’t see more than fifteen feet or so in front of me. The water piled up against the downstairs bedroom windows until the back door gave way. An interior wall nearly collapsed on me. The water heater broke free, leaving a cloud of natural gas to fill the house. It was crazy. I lost all of my tabletop RPG books (including everything that had been published for both Shadowrun and Vampire up until that point) in that flood. My board games didn’t fare well either. Even my Atari 2600 and the 300+ cartridges that I had gathered for ridiculously low prices at garage sales and flea markets were gone. My vampire novel and my comic book were also destroyed.
It was in my later years of college when I started work on a second RPG game. This one was a mix of magic and giant robots set in an alien world embroiled in a civil war. I still have the original hard copy along with a bunch of concept art. I think the anime influence is pretty clear.
Then, I got married and had a daughter. The free time that was left to me went to console games in part because everyone in the family could play them. Puzzle Fighter and various flavors of SSX were favorites. (Though I did sink some of that time into RPG games like Legend of Legaia and Wild Arms.)
I also started reading more. (According to Goodreads, I’ve dined on a total of 740 books over the years.) The meager remnants of my former RPG collection were stored away in a box. There wasn’t even much tabletop gaming going on other than the mainstream standards.
Then, Heroscape came along.
Here was a game that I could get my wife to play. More importantly, my daughter was just getting old enough to make some sense of it though she tended to put the miniatures and terrain to uses other than the mass combat they were designed for. One of my favorite moments is when she used a pair of miniatures she called the "devil women" to act out a scene where they chatted while taking their "death dogs" for a stroll through the wasteland.
Good times. Good times.
I even managed to rope in a couple of coworkers to play Heroscape (and later Star Trek Catan). This probably wasn't as difficult as I might remember it being. My newest batch of friends did enjoy board games in general so they were at least open to trying something "a little unusual." After what was essentially a 10-year hiatus away from the kind of tabletop gaming I had grown up with, Heroscape was the catalyst that encouraged me to seek out more folks who enjoyed the hobby.
And then, just a couple of years ago, a grand miracle occurred. My daughter asked me about Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, she wanted to give it a try.
That’s right. My teenage daughter wanted to play D&D. After 30 some odd years of waiting, someone finally wanted to play D&D with me! All it took was a long-term, cooperative experiment to fabricate such a person from scratch! Who knew? I, of course, went a little overboard. 5e had been out for a couple years by then and so I bought everything that I could. I even bought more dice. From a purely rational standpoint, this was a ridiculous thing for someone who had been buying dice for 30 years to do but as everyone knows, rationality and dice collections do not co-occur in the same time-space reality. More dice, damnit! More dice!
Even better, a friend of mine and his daughter were also interested in playing, so I started up my first D&D campaign. (I had run numerous campaigns in other game systems before. This was my first in Dungeons and Dragons though.) The best part was that I was able to incorporate all of the random bits I had collected over the years and use them. The results were pretty darn entertaining, if I do say so myself.
I also got back into painting miniatures (something I had done in my younger years as well). Here are some examples.
The campaign was in full swing when I discovered a new local meetup geared toward gamers: D&D and RPGs. Here, I played in a handful of one-shot games hosted at A-1 comics and other local game stores. I got to meet even more people. Through social media, I found hundreds of more folks to interact with. It was amazing! I found out about live-play streams, including Critical Role and The Adventure Zone. And then there's Neverwinter Online where my primary toon is a halfling warlock named Miri.
At some point, Wizards of the Coast announced the DMs Guild and I, of course, had to get involved in that right away. That creative impulse would not relent. Since then, I’ve published a handful of supplements, including Epic Gnomish Inventing which was inspired by the gnomes of Dragonlance. I also started this blog, where I'm publishing content and ideas for possible future releases. My obsession with gnomes should now be evident to everyone.
Even more amazing, Time2Tabletop invited me to participate in a live-play D&D stream on Twitch where I played a gnome gunslinger named Theophraxis. Here's a pic of my dude, created by the talented Caterina.
That live-play stream has since ended. As I am writing this post, however, I’m gearing up to join another one. It should be super entertaining. I'll post the details here and on my other social media as the premiere draws closer.
So. Yeah. After something like a 30-year wait, I’m finally playing a bit of and immersed in Dungeons and Dragons. And it’s oh so good.
Gaming is not about the games.
Gaming is about having a good time with the folks you care about. It's about making and being with friends. It's about family. It's about sharing moments and creating new ones with those around you.
In short, gaming is about the people. RPGs are about people cooperating to achieve a goal.
Look, believe it or not, I'm a fairly introverted guy, despite what my interview on the Off The Dice podcast might imply. So, games were always that social lubricant, that excuse, that small talk, that made it so much easier for me to get my dose of social interaction. It's still that way. That is why I was so stupendously excited when my daughter wanted to play D&D; it was an opportunity to bond with her over something that is, quite frankly, a very important element in my life.
Doesn't everyone want that?
So, yeah.
There you have it.
The life history of one life-long gamer. I hope you enjoyed it, or at least can relate to it.
Cheers!
"How did you get started in role-playing games?”
I was about to fire off a short reply when I realized that this was something I could blog about instead.
What follows, then, is a tedious brief scene of young Pyramus, and his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.
No. Wait. That’s a different story by a far better writer. Let's try again.
What follows, then, is wonderfully brilliant monologue of my life-long love of games, much dice-rolling goodness. Someone had to write it. That someone might as well be me. Some of the details are a bit murky. The hazy filter of time is a fickle background task. And I'm sure the timeline will not be precise. I tend to think in terms of life phases rather than daily, monthly, or even yearly progression. (Thank you Google for untangling that mess.) But I’ll try my best. So, please indulge this shadow in this bit of narcissism.
There I was, in the 80s
Picture, if you will, the1980s. Newspeak hadn’t quite caught on. Marty McFly was still blissfully ignorant of the flux capacitor. "Weird Al" Yankovic came only in a 2D format. But, the Dungeons & Dragons Set 1 Basic Rules was on store shelves and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon was being broadcast directly into my eye holes.
---
To be honest, I don’t know which I became aware of first: the game or the cartoon. It was most likely the cartoon as I consumed a steady stream of them every Saturday morning. (Oh Beetlejuice and Alf Tales, where have you gone?) At about the same time, though, a neighbor introduced me to the game. He was desperate to find someone who would play. I was captivated by the art (I still am) My first character was an Elf. (Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling were all classes back in the day. Go figure.) We played a few times. It was fun, but I don’t think either one of us really understood the rules. Also, one DM and one player do not an RPG session make.
I did borrow the books to read up on the rules but I was too enthralled by the art. I ended up trying to draw the pictures instead.
I did borrow the books to read up on the rules but I was too enthralled by the art. I ended up trying to draw the pictures instead.
I don’t remember when I got my own copy of the red box set. It was definitely a little while later. By that time, however, we had moved and I didn’t know anyone who was willing to play. I was an introvert, you see. The stigma attached to Dungeons & Dragons didn't make that task any easier. (It was only for the really, really, really nerdy kids, a brand that doomed one to social excommunication in those days.) It was also the time of the D&D scare. The few kids I did find who were willing to give it a try weren't even allowed to play. So I contented myself with reruns of the cartoon while the box collected dust.
There was one gleaming ray of salvation when it came to getting my gaming fix. The Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game. It was a wickedly fun logic puzzle that is a little hard to explain. Luckily, the YouTubes can demonstrate for me.
There were also the Dungeons & Dragons toys. This collection of poseable action figures introduced me to characters the likes of Strongheart, Warduke, Ringlerun, Kelek, Melf, and Zarak. The collection also included a host of rubbery-plastic figures in fixed poses. (Some, such as the grell, had movable limbs with embedded wires giving them a bit of flexibility.)
There was also a steady supply of fantasy movies to enjoy, such as The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Krull, Ladyhawke, Conan, Willow, Legend, Fire and Ice, Highlander, and more. These I either caught in the theater when I could or rented from Blockbuster Video.
There were a few years there where I forgot all about role-playing games and busied myself with other interests. GI Joe, Transformers, Star Wars, Robotech, Voltron, and others kept my television time and imaginative play active if not a bit geeky. And there were other kids into the same thing. The Atari 2600, with games like Adventure and Dragonfire, filled in the gaps.
While I didn’t have a computer, my schools did. I spent a lot of time in their labs writing stories, designing fonts, and teaching myself rudimentary programming. (I took great delight in writing looping code on display computers in stores and watching the sales staff trying to undo my evil work.) And, of course, there were regular board games, especially Scrabble and Monopoly, that I could get my family to play.
Role-playing games, however, were not on the menu.
While I didn’t have a computer, my schools did. I spent a lot of time in their labs writing stories, designing fonts, and teaching myself rudimentary programming. (I took great delight in writing looping code on display computers in stores and watching the sales staff trying to undo my evil work.) And, of course, there were regular board games, especially Scrabble and Monopoly, that I could get my family to play.
Role-playing games, however, were not on the menu.
Gamers, Assemble
I didn’t really have what one might call a gamer group until late in junior high or early high school. When I wasn’t toiling away at my great American fantasy novel during lunch hour (a masterful work written on loose-leaf notebook paper that I still have) I hung out with a group of kids who played games in the lunchroom. We sort of stood out.
This is where I was introduced to Steve Jackson Games (via Car Wars, The Card Game) and the baffling news that there were game companies out there other than Milton Bradley, including Avalon Hill, Games Workshop, West End Games, and FASA. These companies were putting out amazing tabletop games and role-playing games.
To say I occupied my free time with games during high school would be a gross understatement. It is mostly what my friends and I did when we hung out. And we hung out a lot. More than one weekend saw 24-hour game sessions roll by without a second thought. Sure, we did other things. But a bulk of the activity was gaming or related to gaming.
We never really focused on any one game. Rather, someone would pick up a rule book from the local game store (a place we referred to as Ty's was our fixer in those days) and pester the hell out of everyone to give it a try. The sales pitches might go on for months. Many games failed to pass this first hurdle. Those poor systems never saw the light of day again. I still have a copy of the 1986 Ghostbusters RPG that I’ve never played.
Every so often I would casually suggest D&D. The response was clear and definitive. “Hell no.” It seemed that even among nerds like us, D&D was too nerdy.
If the group consented to try a new game, it went through a breaking-in period. This process was always the same. The purchaser was the game master. The rest of us were his guinea pigs. (I say “his” because there were no girls in our group. The girls we knew either were not interested in playing games or were older and did not want to "hang out" with high school boys.) The game master went over the rules and setting while the players all made characters. This always felt a little like an infomercial. We’d try a few mock combat scenarios and experiment with a few skill tests to get a feeling for the rules. Then, we’d dive into a one-shot. This was the first, and sometimes only, time a game was played. In this way, we cycled through dozens of RPGs, including Aliens (based on the movie), Amber, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Cyberspace, Dr. Who, Deadlands, Dracula (also based on the movie), Hunter Planet, GURPS, Mechwarrior, Shadowrun, Star Trek, Vampire, Warhammer, and others. Shadowrun (where I played a Japanese, elf detective) and Vampire (where I played a Gangrel author) saw the most play.
Running in the background of all of this was a building addiction to anime that was as influential on my creativity as gaming.
The College Years
When I went off to college at University of Kansas, I lost contact with my friends. I did manage to connect with new folks (Gatekeeper Hobbies was a wonderful hub) and continued playing Vampire, Werewolf, The Hunters Hunted, and Star Wars. But as school rolled on and my anime addiction continued to grow, the tabletop RPGs started to slip away. I was focused on art and writing. I was trying to start up a comic book and I was working on a vampire novel.This was also about the time I took my first crack at making my own RPG. It was based on the Bubblegum Crisis anime series. I seriously don't remember much about it other than really geeking out over the notion of every character building their own battle suits.
I also put together a tabletop fantasy clone of Civilization with races such as elves, insect people, dwarves, lizard people, and more. Several friends and I played it over the course of several months and the general consensus was that it was pretty entertaining. Even so, the amount of gaming I engaged in during college was a shadow of what I had done before that.
Slowly, my gaming fixes fell to computer games instead. I continued to play Civilization. I also discovered Daggerfall, Doom, Half-Life, Quake, Redguard, and X-Com. At some point I experimented with making death-match levels for Half-Life using QRAD.
It was during my college years that a localized flood paid me an unwanted visit. I remember the rain came down so heavily that I couldn’t see more than fifteen feet or so in front of me. The water piled up against the downstairs bedroom windows until the back door gave way. An interior wall nearly collapsed on me. The water heater broke free, leaving a cloud of natural gas to fill the house. It was crazy. I lost all of my tabletop RPG books (including everything that had been published for both Shadowrun and Vampire up until that point) in that flood. My board games didn’t fare well either. Even my Atari 2600 and the 300+ cartridges that I had gathered for ridiculously low prices at garage sales and flea markets were gone. My vampire novel and my comic book were also destroyed.
It was in my later years of college when I started work on a second RPG game. This one was a mix of magic and giant robots set in an alien world embroiled in a civil war. I still have the original hard copy along with a bunch of concept art. I think the anime influence is pretty clear.
Post College and Now
After college, I settled into a general routine that excluded RPGs and tabletop games altogether. Even though I graduated with a double major in Anthropology and Linguistics, I ended up working as a technical writer in Sacramento, California. It’s a funny story, which I wrote up once in an article I called “How I Became a Techie Writer.” Actually, I was doing a lot of writing by this point. I was managing a Website I called Hokum Home that talked about technical writing and fiction writing. I published a few short stories in Planet Magazine, Bewildering Stories (which are still online), and other markets.Then, I got married and had a daughter. The free time that was left to me went to console games in part because everyone in the family could play them. Puzzle Fighter and various flavors of SSX were favorites. (Though I did sink some of that time into RPG games like Legend of Legaia and Wild Arms.)
I also started reading more. (According to Goodreads, I’ve dined on a total of 740 books over the years.) The meager remnants of my former RPG collection were stored away in a box. There wasn’t even much tabletop gaming going on other than the mainstream standards.
Then, Heroscape came along.
Here was a game that I could get my wife to play. More importantly, my daughter was just getting old enough to make some sense of it though she tended to put the miniatures and terrain to uses other than the mass combat they were designed for. One of my favorite moments is when she used a pair of miniatures she called the "devil women" to act out a scene where they chatted while taking their "death dogs" for a stroll through the wasteland.
Good times. Good times.
I even managed to rope in a couple of coworkers to play Heroscape (and later Star Trek Catan). This probably wasn't as difficult as I might remember it being. My newest batch of friends did enjoy board games in general so they were at least open to trying something "a little unusual." After what was essentially a 10-year hiatus away from the kind of tabletop gaming I had grown up with, Heroscape was the catalyst that encouraged me to seek out more folks who enjoyed the hobby.
And then, just a couple of years ago, a grand miracle occurred. My daughter asked me about Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, she wanted to give it a try.
That’s right. My teenage daughter wanted to play D&D. After 30 some odd years of waiting, someone finally wanted to play D&D with me! All it took was a long-term, cooperative experiment to fabricate such a person from scratch! Who knew? I, of course, went a little overboard. 5e had been out for a couple years by then and so I bought everything that I could. I even bought more dice. From a purely rational standpoint, this was a ridiculous thing for someone who had been buying dice for 30 years to do but as everyone knows, rationality and dice collections do not co-occur in the same time-space reality. More dice, damnit! More dice!
Even better, a friend of mine and his daughter were also interested in playing, so I started up my first D&D campaign. (I had run numerous campaigns in other game systems before. This was my first in Dungeons and Dragons though.) The best part was that I was able to incorporate all of the random bits I had collected over the years and use them. The results were pretty darn entertaining, if I do say so myself.
I also got back into painting miniatures (something I had done in my younger years as well). Here are some examples.
The campaign was in full swing when I discovered a new local meetup geared toward gamers: D&D and RPGs. Here, I played in a handful of one-shot games hosted at A-1 comics and other local game stores. I got to meet even more people. Through social media, I found hundreds of more folks to interact with. It was amazing! I found out about live-play streams, including Critical Role and The Adventure Zone. And then there's Neverwinter Online where my primary toon is a halfling warlock named Miri.
At some point, Wizards of the Coast announced the DMs Guild and I, of course, had to get involved in that right away. That creative impulse would not relent. Since then, I’ve published a handful of supplements, including Epic Gnomish Inventing which was inspired by the gnomes of Dragonlance. I also started this blog, where I'm publishing content and ideas for possible future releases. My obsession with gnomes should now be evident to everyone.
Even more amazing, Time2Tabletop invited me to participate in a live-play D&D stream on Twitch where I played a gnome gunslinger named Theophraxis. Here's a pic of my dude, created by the talented Caterina.
That live-play stream has since ended. As I am writing this post, however, I’m gearing up to join another one. It should be super entertaining. I'll post the details here and on my other social media as the premiere draws closer.
So. Yeah. After something like a 30-year wait, I’m finally playing a bit of and immersed in Dungeons and Dragons. And it’s oh so good.
Why is all of this SOOOO important?
I have always played games. Even as a little kid, my family played board games. My friends in high school and college played both board games and computer games. My post-college friends also got together for game nights. When you've played so many RPGs and tabletop games throughout an entire lifetime, you come to realize one important detail that maybe you might have missed in your younger days.Gaming is not about the games.
Gaming is about having a good time with the folks you care about. It's about making and being with friends. It's about family. It's about sharing moments and creating new ones with those around you.
In short, gaming is about the people. RPGs are about people cooperating to achieve a goal.
Doesn't everyone want that?
So, yeah.
There you have it.
The life history of one life-long gamer. I hope you enjoyed it, or at least can relate to it.
Cheers!
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Stop by my YouTube channel "Ovens and Dragons" and partake in the exciting world of cooking for gamers.
Also, check out my DMsGuild offerings:
- Epic Gnomish Inventing
Rules supplement for creating gadgets. - Gnome Concept Packages 1
Collection of gnome-related backgrounds, feats, magic items, and more. - Great House Servants
Collection of backgrounds centered on the servants of a great house. - Mildew's Revenge
A first-level adventure. - Random Plot Generator
A tool for creating adventure prompts for one-shots and story arcs. - The WhatNot Shop’s Absurd Accoutrements
A collection of unusual magical items. - The WhatNot Shop's Bracing Beverages
A collection of strange potions. - The WhatNot Shop's Common Curiosities and Trivial Trinkets
A collection of common magic items and trinkets. - The WhatNot Shop's Dastardly Doodads and Orc Oddities
A collection of orc-themed common magic items and trinkets.
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