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A history of my experiences with RP gaming. This is a work in progress.
I'd say my journey down RPG hell started in 1975 when my friend Khy Daniel found this rules booklet called Chainmail by Gary Gygax. We had been reading H.G. Wells' Little Wars, fooling around with Napoleonic minatures, but quickly became bored. Chainmail sounded right up our alley because it had miniature warfare rules for dragons, trolls, orcs, and the like. Of course, on the inside of the back cover were tantalizing advertisements for this thing called a "Role Playing Game" named Dungeons & Dragons.
The local pusher, er, salesman at R&R Hobbies showed up a variety of other RPG games coming out, which lead to purchases of Dungeons & Dragons (original rules), Greyhawk, Tunnels and Trolls and anything else by Flying Buffalo, Metamorphosis Alpha, and other RPG variants too numerous to mention. We finally settled on D&D because it seemed the most robust and TSR was publishing content as fast as we could use it.
My classic D&D moment: Designing a massive 40 level dungeon and then proceeding to kill all 10 of my friends in the first 15 minutes.
The bad side of D&D: Like milk leads to heroin, D&D leads to the SCA.
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Name: Flubbit
Class: Mage
Level: 75
Alignment: Neutral
Game: Dungeons & Dragons
Publisher: TSR
Played: 1975-1981
My favorite character was Flubbit the wizard. At this point in my life I was rather weak on naming my characters. To wit, I stole Flubbit's name from a spell example in the Greyhawk manual.
In my mind I pictured Flubbit looking much like Gandalf, except much shorter and with gravy stains all over his robe. To get an idea of what his personality was like; in another universe, he probably would have worked at Unseen University.
He tooled around in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord for a while, but really got his mojo working when my best friend Stephan Sharp created this incredibly detailed Greek mythology based dungeon. It took eight of us four long weekends to get through the entire thing and caused fist fights, back-stabbing, and incontinence. Our characters got into trouble, too.
However content rich D&D was, there was much about the rules that really irked me. There was an overall sense of arbitrariness that even Advanced Dungeons & Dragons couldn't solve. One day my pusher suggested this new game called Traveller...
For an RPG, Traveller was hella-slick. The rules felt very solid. The way technology was handled felt very comfortable to me. Many sci-fi based RPGs were actually fantasy RPGs with the word "tech" substituted "magic." Traveller had a completely logical and well thought out rules for dealing with technology. Best of all, Traveller was not level based, but skill based. Instead of being driven to acquire experience, in Traveller you wanted power, money, gadgets, and glory.
The good side of Traveller: The game only used six-sided dice.
As much as I dearly loved Traveller, playing the game became a burden. My friends had noticed that I had a unique talent for "making shit up." When I was asked to referee (host) a game I'd come up with the craziest, yet plausible, plot devices right off the top of my head. During game play I'd push my friends' characters to the limit. Sometimes I'd manage to kill one or two of them. While nobody enjoyed getting their character waxed, everyone agreed I was fair and, above all, entertaining. As the years passed I was the only one willing to run "the campaign." All in all, I think I spent more time being a referee than a player.
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Name: Martain Chandler
Class: Navy Intelligence / Business Magnet
Level: Rich
Alignment: Amoral
Game: Traveller
Publisher: GDW
Played: 1977-1990
SSI, Kinunur Adventure, Marc Miller
Here is a picture of some of the numerous SSI crew.
Name: poena.dare
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Name: poena.dare CTF |
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Name: Poena Dare Here is a picture of my wife, the necromancer Silith. |
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Name: Poena Dare
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Name: poena dare
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The worst part about MMORPGs is burnout. No matter how good the game is the experience grind will eventually get to you. When you reach that point the only thing to do is cancel your account and take a break. During this period you are uniquely vulnerable to the siren's lure of other MMORPGs. "Easy leveling," "great quest rewards," and "kick ass graphics" they seductively whisper to you. By 2005, I had become immune to such come-hithers; but my son had not.
Joshua told me that he wanted to play Disney's Toontown and tried to explain it to me. There was something about pies and ice cream cones and cogs. It all sounded rather surreal. When he told me that you couldn't communicate directly with other players, I knew I had to check it out.
I was greatly impressed with Toontown once I played it. It is everything a parent could want for his child's MMORPG.
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Name: Good ol' Scooter Wrinkleseed
Class: Toon
Level: 114
Alignment: Silly
Game: Toontown
Publisher: Disney
Played: 2005
Even using the sharpened mind of a 45 year old man, I was unable to produce truly offensive character names. The "best" I could come up with were Little Dinky Snorkelstink, Prof. Peanut Pickleflapper, Super Curly Biggensnooker, and Super Biscuit Poppennugget.
* Shakes fist at Disney's severed head. *
Contact: - (c)opyleft 1995-2009 Matthew Lewis Carroll Smith - Creative Commons Licensed
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