This week we're going back to the beginning...how I got into this hobby in the first place.
Back around 1982 at the tender age of 10, I was the classic bookworm, painfully shy too. My best friend was quite the opposite in manner, very confident and outgoing. He'd found out that a boy in the grade above us, from Canada no less, was started a club at lunchtime to "run a game called Dungeons & Dragons". I had absolutely no idea what this meant, but decided to go out of curiosity.
It was the only session I attended, but I still remember it vividly. The game was a shared story, one in which we created the characters in the story, acted those roles and made decisions. It was a really odd concept at first that I struggled with. The game was played with dice that I didn't even know existed...I'd only ever seen ones with six sides before. I was playing a ranger and befriended a creature called a Centaur...had no idea what either of those things were. I was given a lot of guidance in the game and,as you can see, have strong recollections of it thirty years on. That was the last time I played a group game until five years later.
Over the next few years, the same friend who introduced me to D&D lent me a new book he'd bought. It was called "The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain", the first in a series of "Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks". It was heavily influenced (choosing my words carefully here) by "The Hobbit", but what made it different was that the reader made decisions at the end of each paragraph, which would decide the path of the story. It also used basic dice mechanics that I'd seen in D&D. This for me was amazing. I, the solitary bookworm, could play the games without having to find or join a group. I ended up playing through over forty books. Most were from that series ("Deathtrap Dungeon was probably the best) though there were other series too, such as "Lone Wolf".My personal favorite was "The Way Of The Tiger"..a Ninja book that influenced me to the extent that I joined a martial art club.
Roll forward to 1987, where I was in my teens and in high school. I'd managed to make a small group of friends who were also gamers. One of them ran Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, so now I got another shot at the game. He was a superb Gamesmaster...very patient, excellent at storycraft and knew the rules inside out. I bought the rulebooks myself, but lacked the patience or interest to fully grasp the rules of this system..more on that in future posts. I did enjoy the sessions, with little interest in being a GM myself.
As time passed, we discussed other games they'd played and ones that we were interested in trying. We were all big Star Trek fans, so I took the plunge and bought the official Star Trek RPG published by FASA. That was heavy reading, very detailed, but the character generation was incredible. Players decide what position they want to play and then have to build an entire history for that character. My players loved that aspect so much that we had several sessions creating different characters without ever playing the game...so it went nowhere quick.Still, it was my first experience as GM, primarily as no-one else would run it!
The next game that I had a shot at running was "Call of Cthulhu". I always loved horror, the game seemed like such a novelty too..I'd never even heard of H.P. Lovecraft let alone read any of his work, and I didn't know how to pronounce the name of the game. So I went ahead and ran the classic introductory scenario in the rulebook, "The Haunting". This was a very different experience for me...it was a bare-bones scenario with few rules in which I was encouraged to be manipulative,ruthless and play on the paranoia of the players. This I did very well indeed...one of the player characters fled the scene (the correct way to play this game,and totally acceptable)..the other player stormed out of the game session. He felt that the other player had betrayed him. Granted, we were teenagers then and not terribly mature, but I didn't realize until years later that such a reaction can be common amongst players, especially those used to D&D..a game based on camaradarie and teamwork. "Cthulhu" showed a world were the characters aren't heroes, they're regular people who will flee in the face of supernatural horror..else die or be driven insane by the experience. The fallout from that game pretty much ended my group games until the next decade...the subject for next week.
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