Evolution of a Gamer: 30 years and still kickin open doors

The 24th of November will be my 30th anniversary playing role-playing games. Thirty years of highs, lows, and doldrums. Thirty years of managing to progress into being able to unashamedly experience the full range of emotions within the human condition. Thirty years of friends and fun and pain and a just a little regret. Thirty years of staying up nights trying to understand a characters motivations because before I could answer the questions, they were not fully formed in my head. Thirty years.

How did it all start?

I was 11 and summer vacations had moved into staying at home basically on my own. Both parents had to work, and my older sister had just graduated from high school. It was my first independent summer, and guys I knew from school said, 'Come over, we are going play Dungeons and Dragons." So, I rode my bike over every day and we played in Capt. Crunch's(known later as Hash Under Glass: Jerry B. I am looking at you!) dining room table, killing monsters, fighting giant rats with a 10' pole and basically really not fully understanding what we were doing. The only thing I can fully remember from that time was having fun, and my fighter (named quite appropriately: Brandon hehehe) died by falling in a pit with spikes. I can't even recall if we rolled dice for his damage or not. It didn't matter, I was hooked and my gaming experience would continue like this for about 1 more year.

My first vivid gaming memory, like I can taste it even now, was in November '79. Mulhead's brother brought home the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master Guide. There were only 3 of us then, in Mulhead's basement and we tore through the book, tried the best we could to use everything in it and played 'Hall of the Fire Giant King'. To this day, I can just about draw the entire module from memory including encounters. It is so indelibly burned on my brain. We spent literally days and nights playing straight through and ended up exhausted and victorious on the other side. Mulhead would fall away from RPG's after this, not really his thing, but SheepALittle and I would continue on trying various games that we could play one on one until we found other gaming groups.

I like to call the next bit my crawl period. I would find groups but they would only play a while, and then dissolve as people finished playing with their shiny new RPG toy today and discarded it the next. During this time, I got the pleasure of encountering characters such as My Lady Syphilis of Cellophane and learned to play in I-only-need-to-run-faster-than-you campaigns. Everything was a dungeon craw usually with no rhyme or reason. We killed everything, took their shit and didn't regret one minute of it, constantly looking for the next pile of heavily guarded treasure. This took up most of my early 80's gaming life, interspersed with jaunts into Diplomacy marathons and 3rd Reich tournaments. I used to spend just about every penny I had on gaming stuff, that I mostly didn't use, but the material I found there kept my imagination sparked and my interest deeply rooted.

Then I met K2. It was a chance meeting really, a friend of a friend said he knew the awesome dungeon master and asked if I was interested in meeting him. We hit it off and that led to some of the best gaming days in my life. I was in late high school, getting ready to head to college, and so time seemed to be mine. There was a core of 7 or 8 of us and we played at Wonder Couple's dining room table every night of the week from 4 or so until all hours. If I was not playing at K2's, I had games at Heimdell's, with 101 fully fleshed NPC days and started to somewhat understand the importance of relationships in RPGs. That there was something underlying all the hack, slash and stash going on. The good out of both groups ended up morphing into one at K2's. Some of us were working by then, so it would be an eight hour day at work or school, home to change clothes, stop and get Heimdell out of his sheet, head to K2's and play ADND until 3 or 4 in the morning. It was a time of quantity and we all gorged, puked and rallied.

When I think back on the years there, I can't understand how K2 did it. His stuff was not particularly in depth. Most adventures were within 3 days of town, that at first didn't have a name until his GF did a map of town and gave it name. That stuff wasn't important to K2, making the adventure interesting and challenging the characters were his forte. And he brought it, day after day, week after week, year after year and it never got boring. Sure there were times we would play something else for a short time (usually a few days), but then we would be back at. And with the same characters and I think our highest level character was a 14th level thief. I met a lot of friends who I consider still family today. Hair Club for Men (HCFM), and Heimdell to name a few.

I have to say this: K2 taught me a lot. He formed a lot of the DMing habits I have today. I learned how to wing it from him and how to throw something together at the last minute that was both interesting and fun. He was the one that encouraged me to do DM, and I found that I was really pretty good at it. As for the others, I learned strategy and tactics from the ex-military types in our group. I learned how characters who knew their place in an adventure and when to act, could make it tough on a DM.

I wish I could remember what broke it up. In my memory, that time just seems to have faded away and been replaced by something else. I want to say that some of us grew tired of the same thing, and decided to go do our own thing. I can't remember the time, only that it was later in the 80's and must have been '87 because the transition seems tied to the Forgotten Realms (FR) setting. I can remember HCFM and myself seeing the FR boxed set and getting excited about a whole world in detail. Again, I don't remember how or why, but we started playing at my place with myself, HCFM, Heimdell, and PinkFloyd.

This became the awakening for me. Again, we played just about every night of the week, even if it was just for a few hours. When we weren't playing, we were discussing how and what our characters were doing. The DM (usually me) would even handle things for characters that people wanted to do. It was here that characters became really more than just numbers on paper, they became flesh and blood. The players wanted things for their characters outside the adventuring, dungeon delving and monster slaying. That stuff became a means to and end. They wanted a life, it just so happened that being an adventurer was the best kind of way to do that. The Realms became a magical place for us. The detail involved pushed us to provide the same kind of detail in our games and characters. It all became so very important. Relationships were built that transcended the group loyalties. In arguments, you knew who would polarize with who. It became ok to have conflict with your fellow players, to be petty and to argue, just like friends do. Characters got married, had families and died of old age. It had become something more than before, I knew what it meant to 'be in character', to make decisions based not on your own life or because of situation but because this is how the character would act. Knowing a character so well, it became second nature.

But I grew restless, not out of boredom or mediocrity but because I thought that I needed to find a wider group to play with. See what others were doing and see how it compared to what I had been doing. So, HCFM and myself found a notice at the university that said they were starting a RPG club and anyone was welcome. We went to the first meeting, and literally we found ourselves in a room with nearly 60 other gamers, all looking for groups. There I noticed one of the few girls, thought I knew her, but wasn't sure where from. The meeting broke up into groups, and we joined the only 1st edition group forming and she was in it!

I would go on to eventually marry that girl, but that is another story. We have found a large group (8-10 of us) and met new friends, that I wished I had managed to keep, but eventually in the long run we wandered away from one another. We ran in Greyhawk under the auspices of Jafar and in between the friday nights at game club, we all gamed together during the week. At times, our separate groups would merge for a while to play other games and then split up again. I learned how to run games with 8 players and on up even to as many as 16. I can remember one day looking around the extra tables we had set up at the house to accommodate us all. I was running Rifts and there were 16 players, and it became a lot to manage all of them, but I did it and we had a pretty good time to boot.

It would be here that I realized that the small FR group that had been playing at my kitchen table were moving way ahead of others playing the game. While the college years lasted, we played beside a group that won the GenCon Masters Tournament several years in a row and although our group had never gone to GenCon, we beat those guys in role-playing at local tournaments. I guess at some point we had reached some height that we were all unaware of. Meanwhile, I had written Conceptual Realities (A try at my own game) and started my own world: Soleas.

As I alluded to before during this time, Jhi and I acquired The House. The house became the focal point of our lives and seemingly of all of our friends lives. We gamed there just about every night. Even nights when it wasn't planned, we would just call everyone and to the man, they would drop whatever they were doing and come over. People stayed the night, slept drunk under tables and we stayed up all night just talking. And although gaming was still a big focus in my life, I just miss those nights. The nights where someone (I didn't know who nor cared) would show at my door, we would watch TV, talk gaming some but usually just bullshit about life or philosophy or try to solve the worlds problems until literally the sun came up. That time made me realize that I only had gamer friends. A very select few gamer friends, but gamers nonetheless.

In the House, I grew into my own. Soleas became fully formed and the players brought it to life for me as much as I infused it with life for them. They contributed to it, lived in it, dirtied up the place and left it that way. To me, it still shines in my mind and although it rarely gets used today, I still pick up the binder and just marvel at what we accomplished. I would like to I accomplished there, but the good portion of it was just seeds, and that a groups energy turned into a living thing. Although we ended up moving on from the House and everyone seemed to follow us, we lost a few of the really important ones along the way to life. Marriage, children and responsibilities started rearing its ugly head and even Jhi and I would not be immune to it. We continued to play at the new place with the group, but as time went on it seemed to start slowing and then Jhi and I were presented with the opportunity to move from Ohio to Colorado. It was an off we couldn't refuse.

I had to say good-bye to that gaming life and our friends and truly at the time it didn't seem so bad, but as I type this I am looking through welled up tears. It was important to me. It seems silly but all those hours and energies put into something like a game, I wonder sometimes if on my death bed I will look back at it and wonder if it was all worth it, but I already know it was. I still want it back sometimes, but I realize that in a way it is just nostalgia. I simpler life and time where responsibilities and money didn't matter all that much. But what I really miss the friends from that time. I find it hard to let anyone close to me where friendship is concerned. i was told I am good at making acquaintances but friends almost never happen for me. I know I have mentioned those guys before but I can tell you that my heart truly enjoys hearing from Heimdell, PoB, Chaz and even the opportunity to see HCFM.

HCFM and I used to talk about some day having 'Osterman Weekend' games when we were older. Inviting our old gaming buddies to a cabin in the mountains for a long weekend to play again and try to recapture. I wonder if anyone would actually come if invited?

My new gaming life began in Colorado. Jhi and I talked about how to meet some gamer types, try to get a group started in CS and then we met some friends at a party. S, K, and Craing were mostly transplants and gamers. We started playing, eventually trying to add a few others that turned out to be a disaster with a notable exception in Beosig. We continued to play on a regular basis and had fun along the way. But I had lost something, that I could not find again. Gaming was just not the same, and I grew restless all the time. I was greatly unsatisfied. Not any of their fault, but my own lack of adaptation I think, but even though it is more recent, the memories still elude me. I tried going back to the basics and that helped for a while, I tried new games with the same result. Now I realize that those times were just different, but I couldn't accept that. I struggled, gaming became a chore and started slowly but surely losing its pleasure. In typing this, it seems odd that I cannot seem to pinpoint when groups broke up or how. I know that S&K moved away but it seems the rest of us continued playing in some fashion or another. And although we would move again, that group would make the trek to game on fridays or saturdays and a few new players would show up.

I dissatisfaction would not let me be. The struggle would become a burden I carried and take out to examine once in a while to try to figure out what I was so dissatisfied with. I would consider quitting and then not. I would try taking out the old stuff and turning it over to see if there was something in there that would spark me. The latest RPG stuff no longer interested me, even in a just-to-read fashion. I sold a good portion of my gaming stuff keeping mostly those things that reminded me of the old days. And this is how it went for several years. It seemed at times that I was playing just to be playing with not a single tingle to my reptilian pleasure center.

Now I find myself closing in on 30 years. My current group has changed face to one that is something I can work with. I hit "the groove" more often than not now, instead of a car with a bad piston. There is an exchange of energy and banter that makes the creativity increase. In the old days, it wasn't me dishing things out the players, but the exchange and back and forth that made it all exceptional. A collaboration, an almost montage of what everyone wanted out of the game, with each player seeking something different. That is happening again and although I don't live firmly in the games grasp anymore, there are times that I can't wait to look around the next corner. It is a small sparkle, some smoke and a bit of heat and just maybe it will ignite one more time into a passion before I go on the big adventure that everyone takes alone....