With the recent announcement of the fifth edition of D&D (or "D&D Next" as they prefer to call it) gamers have started to get nostalgic. Far be it for me to buck that trend. What follows, therefore, will be an examination of my career as a tabletop gamer. Be warned, however, that I'm peering through the haze of nearly thirty years here. I can't speak for the absolute accuracy of what I'm writing here, only that it is the best that I can remember.
My first RPG, like that of most gamers, was Dungeons & Dragons. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was in the vicinity of Dungeons & Dragons, as the game we played wasn't really D&D as most people play it now, or even played it then. It was 1982, and I was nine years old. The three of us, Jamie, Brett, and myself were all kids in the same grade school. Brett lived at the end of the same block that I did, while Jamie lived a few blocks away, but well within biking distance. Jamie had this shiny red box containing the Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set. Since it was Jamie's game, he was the Dungeon Master while Brett and I were the players. I rolled up a thief, Brett made a Magic-User. The enitirity of my very first role-playing game session is transcribed below, as best I can remember it:
Jamie: You're in a hallway. There's an ogre there. He swings at Jon. Does a 17 hit your Armor Class?
Me: Umm....yes.
Jamie: He does 8 points of damage.
Me: I only have 3 hit points!
Jamie: Well, you're dead then.
Honestly, it's a miracle that I stayed with it over the years.
Despite the inauspicious beginning, I did keep at it. Things got harder, though. Jamie moved away, and Brett wasn't really into D&D. What was worse was the fact that my mom got a job teaching at the brand new Creative Children's Academy, and as such I got to attend for free. No one at CCA was interested in gaming, though, and I was too busy memorizing poetry and going over the details of World War II battles to do much of it myself. However, by the next year my mom had quit CCA and gotten a job with the local newspaper, and I found myself enrolled in QUEST, the gifted program at St. Raymond's, a Catholic school.
That's where I met a couple of collaborators. Ryan happened to be right in front of me in line on my first day of school. This was less of a coincidence as it might seem since we had to line up by last name and his was right before mine alphabetically. What was a coincidence was the fact that we were both new at St. Raymond's, and were both in QUEST. For whatever weird reason, as then as now I wasn't really the most extroverted of people outside of certain situations where I was comfortable, I introduced myself to Ryan in line and we became friends.
That was, as it turned out, a damn fine call.
Ryan and I were pretty much inseparable for the next five years or so, and a lot of my early gaming experiences were with him. Together we explored Traveller, Battletech, Twilight: 2000, The Star Trek Combat Simulator, and Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game. You may notice that there's a pretty heavy science fiction element to all that. That's because Ryan was a big science fiction guy. He read Dune and loved it and introduced me to Cyberpunk (the '80s literary movement...I'm the one who introduced him to the RPG, but that came later). In fact, I think I've still got what's left of the paperback copy of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology that he gave me in a box in the garage. Today he makes his living writing about space exploration in Washington DC. I guess some things to come should have been pretty obvious, even back then.
But unlike Ryan's, my tastes were broader than just science fiction. I read comic books and liked superheroes. I also read some of the classic works of fantasy. I can still remember reading the coverless and tattered copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that had been my mother's before she gave them to me. To scratch the fantasy itch, I needed another collaborator, and that was Steve. I looked up to Steve, both because he was physically taller than me, but also because he was a sixth grader when I was a mere fifth grader. Looking back at it, it's amazing that one year of age was such a big deal back then, but it was.
Steve was the guy who introduced me to things like Middle-Earth Roleplaying, Runequest, and a lot of the other fantasy games and concepts of the era. He told me the time and channel that I could watch Doctor Who on, and even had a copy of the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game. He was the cool guy who always seemed to have the answers, but for all that, we didn't actually play many games. We talked about games, talked about fantasy stuff in general, watched movies and TV shows, but somehow never got around to playing very much. That would change in high school, but in grade school and junior high? Not so much.
So while I was in awe of Steve's mostly unused collection of fantasy games, if I was going to actually play them, I would have to do it myself. Fortunately, my parents had been kind enough to provide me with a couple of younger brothers, Anthony and Matthew. So I drafted them as my players and started working out how to gamemaster. My first gaming product wasn't even a full RPG, it was Man to Man, an expanded melee combat system for GURPS. And I didn't buy it, I traded for it. One of my fellow QUESTers, Jenny (who goes by Tina now), arranged a swap of my lunch for this other kid's copy of Man to Man that he didn't want. That was great, but the more important piece of information that I got from the kid, Nathan was his name I think, was where he'd gotten it. It turned out that he'd been in a local game store called Games Plus.
Not too long afterwards, I was in the store myself. I managed to get my mom to buy me a copy of the Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game, which I took home to play with my brothers. As one might expect, it wasn't a very deep gaming experience. Mostly, I picked out supervillains that we'd read about and my brothers would beat them up. Not much to it, but it was still pretty fun. It was my first gamemastering experience. Eventually, I got my hands on the three books you needed to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (or First Edition as we refer to it now, despite it being the third version of the game), the Player's Handbook, Dungeonmaster's Guide, and the Monster Manual. What's more, I also got a number of the classic modules, and soon Ant and Matt were running their characters, a magic-user and a paladin respectively, through The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, the Slavers series, Against the Giants, and eventually even The Tomb of Horrors.
Then I went to high school, and everything changed again. Come back tomorrow to find out how.
No comments:
Post a Comment