WEP '12, Day 20 - Memoirs of a Gamer II: High School

High school brought with it a number of new opportunities in gaming.  I attended Loyola Academy, another Catholic school.  It was also an all boys school at the time.  My brother Matt would be a member of the last all male graduating class a few years later, but in my time there wasn't even a hint that all girls Marilac was going to close and get merged with Loyola.  Regardless of what that did to my chances to socialize with and date members of the opposite gender, the all boys nature of Loyola did allow for new horizons in gaming.

For one thing there was an officially sanctioned gaming club at Loyola.  I can't recall the actual name of the club, but it was pretty clever.  Strategic Simulations Association or some such.  In theory it was about honing our minds through tactical conflicts.  In practice, it was about letting the teacher in charge play his collection of  boardgames.

But you know what?  That was fine with me.

I got to play Cosmic Encounters, Succession Wars, Talisman, Fortress America, Shogun, Dungeonquest, and Axis & Allies.  Lots of Axis & Allies, which was our game of choice for most of a year.  Old favorites that I'd played in my younger days like Battletech and The Star Trek Combat Simulator got some love too, but mostly it was the big board games of the day that prevailed after school.

But that didn't mean I stopped roleplaying.  Quite the contrary, between friends I made in band and people from the club at school, my gaming circle grew into something pretty impressive.  We played a slew of the games of that era, albeit rarely for very long each.  There was a one shot Cyberpunk game, the time we used the Marvel Superheroes rules to do a big Aliens vs Predator game decades before the movie for it.  And then we topped it by throwing a bunch of superheroes into the fight, beating the Stormwatch vs Aliens comic by a few years too.  Vampire: The Masquerade came out and we used the rules to go on bloody rampages through Chicago, though Steve was still around at that point and actually ran a Vampire game that was as close as I ever got to playing it correctly.  There was the Mechwarrior game where we got stuck with a gamemaster controlled character who was better at everything than all of us and rode a better giant robot too, which was suck that turned into awesome when we found a loophole in the charging rules and managed to totally upstage him.  Another time we were playing D&D and the game sucked so bad that we started setting up and playing a board game in the middle of the game.

That last one was a pretty mean thing to do, and not what I'd do now...but we were high schoolers and cruelty came as easy as breathing back then.

Two major developments occurred in this era.  The first was that I reconnected with Jamie when he pulled my phone number out of somewhere and gave me a call.  It turned out that the D&D game he was playing in needed more players and he remembered that I played.  So after years of no contact, I ended up in the basement of someone I'd never met before on the word of a guy I hadn't seen in ages.  That's gamers for you.  The funny thing was, Jamie himself dropped out of the game pretty soon thereafter, and I never saw him again.  I stayed with the game.  It was my first long term campaign as a player.  People kept joining and leaving the game, but there was always a core group.  There was me, Matt (not my brother, a different one), and Caleb as the players with Joel as the DM.  I've given Joel a lot of shit over the years for being an asshole DM.  And, to be fair, much of it was deserved.  But it was in learning to overcome the ruthless crap and abuse that Joel threw our way that caused me to grow as a gamer.  Many of the power gaming skills that I use even today came from trying to survive Joel's game, so for that I am grateful.  Plus, you never forget your first real campaign, and Joel's was my first.

So thanks, Joel.

The second development was that I met Luke and Drew.  At the time, they were just other members of the Loyola gamer gang.  It wasn't until we all got to the University of Illinois together that we became a unit.  But the UIUC gang started at Loyola.  Now, granted, since by sheer happenstance Luke was the closest member of the gang to where I lived, he became my closest gaming friend.  Especially after Ryan transferred out of Loyola after Freshman year and Steve graduated a year ahead of me.  Luke was the only player to regularly play with me and my brothers in my home game.  The three of them formed the "Corsairian Empire" after conquering an evil town in the Forgotten Realms and rather than leave, they took over and started empire building.  It was a fun game, and some of my better gaming stories come from it.

So after four years of craziness, it was time to head to college, which is where we'll pick the tale up next.

Write Everyday Project #14, Gaming the Cold War

It's tough to find time for this on the weekends, but I suppose that is the point nevertheless.  Don't find time, make it.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the Cold War.  It came up in a Facebook conversation a while back, and then on Friday I ended up picking up a few appropriate board or card games at the Games Plus Auction.  To be precise, I got Junta, a game about seizing power in a banana republic, Cold War, one about the politics of the Cold War where you're using spies and diplomacy to try and sway other nations, and 1965's Nuclear War card game.

It's this last one that we played last night, and the one that got me thinking more about how certain our doom seemed only twenty three years ago and how few people choose to think about it now.

Or that, release of tensions or not, we still have the capability to blow ourselves clear off the planet.

Nuclear War itself is not a very satisfying game.  It's too abstract to be a good simulation, and too random (cards v dice again) to be at all strategic  There are the occasional funny moments (goddamn UN!) but mostly it's about picking your cards and getting lucky.  It's also a game that encourages you to dogpile a single target, so there's a certain amount of diplomacy involved in trying to get your opponents to curbstomp someone else.  But mostly, it's about the cards.

(I also found a Chick Tract in the Nuclear War box.  I couldn't find a link to the one I've got, but here's one to the famous anti-Dungeons and Dragons one.  Clearly, I've been playing in the wrong gaming groups!)

I do wish I hadn't gotten priced out of World at War: Eisenbach Gap, because I'd love to try and fight World War III someday.  Of course, my primary old school wargame opponents live in other states these days and with two cats, a four year old, and a toddler there's no way to leave games up at my brother's place...and he can't game anywhere else.  So owning a good WW3 game would only be an exercise in frustration since I'd never be able to play it, but still, it would have been nice.

I suppose I'll have to dig up Red Storm Rising and catch up with Alekseyev and friends again to get my Cold War fix instead.

Write Everyday Project #9, Dice vs Cards

Well, we missed the once a day deadline, since it's been 26 hours since my last post, but I'm willing to let technicalities swing the other way here too.  Since I haven't gone to bed yet, it's still "Saturday" regardless of what the clock says.  And hey, it still IS Saturday in Alaska and points west.

Besides, it's not as if there's money riding on this.

Today, I played Android, a board game about a sci-fi murder mystery, with my brother and a friend.  And I've come to the conclusion that if you want to reduce randomness in your game, moving away from dice to a card based system doesn't really do it.  That way increases randomness, not decreases it.

I suppose it doesn't have to, but the last two board games with card based resolution mechanics I've played, tonight's Android, and the new edition of Horus Heresy that I got last month, both have much wider event swings than their dice based counterparts like Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium.  In the card based games, inevitably some cards are better than others, and the appearance or lack there of of the best cards can swing the game in a way that one die roll rarely can in traditional games.  I've seen it happen, mind you, but it's a lot rarer to see a single die roll sway a game the way one card can, especially if it's one of the same few cards every time.

It comes downs to imbalance and variety of outcome.  In the case of the former, unless everyone has identical cards, things are going to be skewed one way or the other as one side will have greater utility of their cards than the other side  In the latter, dice have a limited range and you can predict the range of likely outcomes and use that to guess what might happen.  If nothing else you'll have an idea for what's possible.   When some cards are great and others so a lot more, you have a harder time defining how your games plays. When the outcome of any pull of a card gives you a one in fifty chance of happening, those are pretty good odds if you're going to draw half or more of the cards in any one game.