With the chaos of the weekend resolved, we return to our look at my history as a gamer.
In the fall of 1991, I started my freshman year at the University of Illinois. This was a traumatic break from my gaming groups, since none of my close gamer friends who were in my class or older had ended up at U of I, and of course I was leaving my brothers behind as well. While I did make some new acquaintances in my roommates and among the crowd of students who gathered to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes in the dorm's lounge, none of them were gamers.
Fate intervened in my favor, however. I had chosen to take archery as a physical education course, and by sheer happenstance I had a D&D themed button that I'd picked up at GenCon attached to my backpack's shoulder strap. The people next to me, a couple by the name of Rob and Lucinda, noticed it and asked if I played. We struck up a conversation, and after a couple of weeks of talking in class, they invited me to a D&D game they were playing. Rob, you see, was getting some spending money working at a local McDonalds, and a regular customer came in one night wearing a D&D t-shirt, and they'd struck up a conversation. That customer, Randy, ended up inviting Rob to the D&D game he was a player in that they played at W.I.L.L. the University of Illinois radio station.
It was there, past the deserted classrooms of Lincoln Hall, up in the W.I.L.L. control room that my new gaming group assembled. Here you found Randy. He was the overnight engineer at W.I.L.L. and it was his job to make sure the satellite feed was working and to put on the tapes of the local commercials between shows. But since each show was fully broadcast by the satellite, there was only five minutes or so of actual W.I.L.L. commercial time each hour, generally at the end of the hour that made announcements about other W.I.L.L. shows and introduced the next one coming up. So, while you needed to have an engineer on site to make sure that you had someone there to fix things in an emergency, that guy really only had about a half hour of work getting set up at the start of his shift, then another half hour at the end of it, and about five minutes every other hour. So in all that empty time, we gamed.
There were five of us to start with. Myself, Randy, Rob, and Lucinda were the players. Paul was the DM. We met every Friday night at 10:30 pm when Randy completed his set-up and played for hours. Sometimes we'd even go until the end of Randy's shift at 6 am, and I'd stick around long enough to watch the W.I.L.L. morning crew start their show. That mostly came later, though. In those early days we usually "only" played until 3 or 4am.
Ah, the vitality of youth, where have you gone?
It was quite a break from my earlier patterns of gaming. In high school, I played with a lot of different groups whenever we could find the time. Maybe I'd get in three hours of gaming at the club after school Wednesday afternoon, then a couple hours at a friend's place Thursday night. Then four or five hours over the weekend with Joel's game, and another handful of hours with my brothers on Sunday. Or maybe there was a marching band thing that weekend, or debate club, or chess club, or computer club, or my part-time job at Brown's Chicken and there'd be no games at all for a couple of weeks.
At U of I, it was different. I played every Friday night without fail, and usually with the same people. What was more, it was also the first time I played a character that I hadn't created for a long period of time. I was stepping into the shows of a departed player who I never met and taking over his character, Sergio the Blade, a half-elf Fighter/Cleric of Sif, the Norse Goddess of Excellence in Battle (who was played by Jamie Alexander in Thor). For all that Sergio wasn't "my" character, I still had fun playing him, even if he was often overshadowed by the more powerful and flamboyant characters in the game (as Clerics often are). And I had, of course, played in plenty of convention games where you get a pre-made character and play it as written.
Indeed, back then you got one page of stats and another page full of your character's history, motivations, and what he or she felt about the other characters you were playing with. Tournament games were decided by who the players and the DM voted had played the character the best, and it was the best role-players were the ones who got to advance and see how the rest of the story played out. One of my proudest moments as a gamer was winning a tournament round of Marvel Super-Heroes at Winter Fantasy when I was 14 and getting to play in the second round and seeing the end of the story. These days, tournaments aren't about the quality of your character depiction, but on your optimization and power gaming skills. Granted, I have those too, but it still feels like a lot's been lost over the years.
So we gamed quite happily for a semester, and then winter break happened. Heading back home for a month, I reconnected with a lot of the old crew. Caleb was MIA, so I recruited Luke to take his place at Joel's table and we played two or three sessions before I headed back to Champaign. And back to disaster.
You see, during winter break Rob and Lucinda had split up as a couple. But neither was willing to give the game up to the other, so both kept showing up and playing, despite the fact that they couldn't stand to be in the same room as one another. That made for some pretty uncomfortable games, as you can imagine. It was the first time I'd seen a gaming group crippled by affairs of the heart, but it would not be the last.
Eventually, Lucinda upped the ante and brought her new boyfriend into the game, and after one session of PDAs to the face, Rob quit showing up. And a session after that, so did Lucinda and the boyfriend, which led me to the unfortunate deduction that Lucinda had stuck around the game only to hurt Rob, and now that he was gone, she was happy to give it up. Looking back on it, that may have been unfair to Lucinda, but at the time that's how I read it.
So that summer I was back in Chicago. My regular gaming crew back at school was down to three members. What was there to do?
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