Back in the day

[contracycle]

Well, back in the day, my mother brought me to see the Old Country (UK)when I was 11 whereupon I promptly broke my arm falling off a bicycle.  Red box D&D was bought for me as something to do, and my first dungeon map was sketched while the arm holding the caryon was still in plaster cast.  A while after that a friend nagged me to run it, which I did, and it sort of took off amongst our group of friends as a group activity.

All our early play was dungeon crawling and much fun was had by all.  It was pure gamist play I think... development of a true Sim aesthetic took a while but IMO emerged more or less naturally.  I cannot distinguish this "natural" developement from the stuff we were reading then - Greyhawk had a lot of sim sentiment frex, weather patterns and whatnot.  This appealed to us without IMO being too prescriptive, subjectively.  I'm not sure we ever went through a period of narrativism which has since been supressed, although it may depend on understandings of the term narrativism.  But I don't think so.

[Laurel]

Back in the day, one of my aunts (against my parent's wishes) gave me the D&D box set for Christmas in '78 or '79 and I excitedly poured over it and began collecting AD&D material on my own.  Not having many friends, I mostly drew maps and created characters rather than playing.  But from time to time I was able to run a game.  

Come high school, I found my first group of "gamers" and began actually playing games (as opposed to just reading and designing settings) more often.  It wasn't until I got to college though (1989) that I found really talented and obsessive gamers and had a concrete circle of friends that gamed constantly.  Shadowrun was the game of choice until 1991 when I happened to visit some friends who'd just gotten back to Olympia from a party in Seattle where Vampire pre-edition was being introduced around.  Suddenly everything was VtM this and WoD that, slowed down only a little when the alpha edition of MtG came out and we played that seriously for a year or so.  

And that marked the next ten years of my gaming life, until I read Little Fears and found the Forge the rest is recent history.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm not a big fan of nostalgia (and that's being politic about it). Sure it may feel good to fondly look back, but I find that mostly it's about a false sense of regret. That change is bad, and things are now worse somehow than they were before. Which simply isn't true.

Ever read the INWO "Every Year is Worse" card?

Play hard and have fun now.

Mike

[Eric J.]

A good portion of my life has been gaming.  [Looks down: 1 year {Yells!}... mabee not that much.]  I remember my first day.  My mom was going to Barns and Noble (a book store).  I had been hearing about Pen(cil) and paper RPGs and liked the concept.  What she brought back was strange.  It was an introduction to "the" Star Wars RPG (I found out latter that it was D20).  It came with pre-packaged characters, a simplistic rulebook and pre-made adventures (which it also called "missions").  We finished the adventure and my friend GMed our first "mission".  We were robbing a trade federation bank (on Naboo) and , with my +10 cloak of protection, I defeated all of the battle droids and the Destroyer (the damned thing couldn't even hit me!).  My brother tried to dissable the trap door, but at that moment Anthony put a die on the board.  The die claimed omnipotence and it talked to us for a while.  It wasn't long before I convinced the die that it didn't make "a damned bit of sense".  It left with the words "behold the power of the mighty Jiggy Wiggy!".  Mabee now you will understand the nature of my RPG development.

I think that now is a sad day in P&P RPG history.  This guy at my high shool asks me "What are you doing after school?"  I reply, "I might be bringing a bunch of friends over to play the D&D."

Him:"What?"

Me:"They're coming over to play Dungeons and Dragons, an RPG."

Him:"What, D&D is an RPG?"

Me:"Yes, of course."

Him:"Oh.  See, I thought that like Resident Evil was an RPG."

Me:{Looks around the art room for some sort of razor blade to punish ignorance.}

I think that the industry is dying and that a new generation will degrade to playing NWN, and the everincreasingly clique MMORPGS.

Now the ironic thing is that RIGHT NOW, as I type this post, I'm listining to the main theme of Chrono Trigger, as my friends play Dead or Alive 2 at Scratchware's house...

[Zak Arntson]

Wow. I can't even remember the first time I roleplayed. Sometime around 1984.

- My initial gaming was very much the GM-runs-the-show variety. One GM with an adventure, all the Players were in pawn mode (complete with GM vetoing actions, "Your PC wouldn't really do that!").

Early on, though, I found that improvisation was a great thing. One of my favorite early gaming experiences was me as DM with brother as player. I improv'd the whole setting a la Sorcerer & Sword (though with the AD&D 2nd ed. rules). Play revolved around Exploration of Situation (PC was new to town, from a faraway country, and trying to survive) and some proto-Relationship Maps (instead of precanned adventures, the PC grew increasingly tangled in with several NPCs, all of which had some connection, though not blood/family)

[Victor Gijsbers]

Well Pyron, not all is lost. First of all, I have seen that many people who liked computer RPGs were intrigued by pen&paper RPGs and started playing them. I don't think the amount of pen&paper-players has decreased as CRPGs have increased in popularity. Secondly, not all CRPGs are a waste of time. I spent some of the best gaming-hours of my life with the brilliant "Planescape: Torment".

I think the problem is more what I claimed in my last post: our generation has to unlearn the assumptions of CRPGs (like: lots of combat, characters becoming stronger and stronger, quest-based play) if we don't want to become stukc in just one kind of roleplaying.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

I'd be a lot happier with this thread if people focused on the topic, which is to see whether long-term experience with RPG culture or publishing standards has a negative impact on enjoying play. Or, to say it differently, to see whether we all did actually know how to role-play (in whatever GNS mode) at the outset, then were trained out of that knowledge.

It's not a thread about reminiscing, gee, back in the day, I discovered role-playing, and the lemonade tasted like cold sunshine, and the summer air was full of the trees' first wave of pollen.

Best,
Ron

[Gordon C. Landis]

I knew I should have worked harder on the thread title . . .

Thread drift happens, and I guess that's OK, but - What Ron Said.  This is Actual Play, and what seems interesting to me is what we can learn from our early Actual Play experiences, and use today.

And if we've reached the end of insights there, it's OK for the thread to end.

Gordon

[Uncle Dark]

(Ed. Note: This post does contain topical material.  Bear with me.)

I got my first RPG, blue-box D&D, in 1981 or '82.  My mom had been intrigued by the idea of the game, and bought it for herself, but I hijacked it and ran.

I had no idea at all how the game worked.  I thought that one's character's level was equal to the number of dungeon levels cleared, +1.  So it made sense that the game only covered 3 character levels, and the module included (B1: In Search of the Unknown) included only two levels.  By the time you cleared the dungeon, you were third level...

After a while, I found that other lonely geeks at my high school (hey, what do you want?  I'm talking about rural Iowa here...) played, and they understood the game better than I did.  So we got together on irregular occasions and played.  By this time, I'd branched out into Gamma World and Top Secret (1st ed of both), and a friend had MERP.  We understood the game mechanics better, but it was all just some version of a dungeon crawl.  Hell, we pronounced "tome" as "tomb."

Thing was, we were making up stories about our characters.  Sometimes complex, occasionally good, but stories none the less.  And this is where I get to the topic:  The stories about the character were all backstory.  We wrote hack fiction about what happened to our characters in between dungeon crawls.  The thought that our actual play could generate stories about our characters, rather than just be extended fight scenes in our private fictions, never occured to us.

Or, rather, I thought it would be nice, but I had no idea how to do it.  It wasn't until the last year of high school and the first year of college that I actually began playing games where the whole of my character's story was encompased within actually played sessions (do I get extra topic points by using the forum name in past tense?).

Part of this was due to the frequency with which we played.  Once a month or so, we'd crawl a dungeon.  The rest of the time, we wrote vignettes about our characters, or at least daydreamed them.  Regular, weekly campaign play was something like the strange monsters medieval explorers would describe to a fanciful public.  They were strange beasts we could not quite imagine, yet which people we never really met assured us existed, somewhere out there.

When we played, we took turns running each other through modules.  We had some vague idea that all these modules (and, hence, our characters) existed in the same world.  We assumed it was the World of Greyhawk, since that was the campaign setting my friend Andy owned.

Then came 1988, the University of Iowa, AD&D 2nd ed, Champions, Call of Cthulhu, and Paranoia.  I can't point to the magical moment "my guy's story" changed from the time between runs to the events during runs.  I suspect that it was the effect of playing with older gamers, who had started in the middle seventies, and who had always played campaign-style.

I was GMing most, if not all, the time, so "my guy" was the whole damn world.  The stories of the world and the people in it had become "my guy's story," and telling that story was the point of GMing for me.  This is when I became a world-building junkie.  It was also when I lost something in my imagination as a gamer, something that only came back to me when I was knocking around GO a few years back and started reading about GNS.

What I'd lost was a sense of the free-wheeling fun of the old days.  My game worlds had to be bounded and known, and I felt that I was failing as a GM if I had to make stuff up on the spot, or if I did not maintain a firm directoral hold on the themes and content of my game worlds.  I became a parody of a Sim GM.

I got better, of course.  Counting it all up, I'm looking back at 20 years or so of gaming experience, which divides neatly into 6 or 7 year periods.

The First Age of Lon's Gaming Life was a frustrated, lonely age.  I understood the games well enough to get that there was vast potential there.  I just didn't understand them well enough to unlock that potential.  What I did like, and occasionally miss, was the shared-world aspect of it all.  There was an implicit assumption that, since we were all playing AD&D, all our characters were in the same world, and when we switched GMs (but not systems), we stayed in that same world.  No a priori world, no ideas of what "belongs" and what doesn't.  Just imagination and a world flexible enough to stretch and include it all.

The Second Age was more prolific.  I understood the games much better, and I knew how to build worlds.  It was a trade-off, though.  My worlds were mine and had no room for other people's ideas of what could be found there.

The Third Age has been an attempt to synthesize what I liked about the previous two.  Kudos to Ron, whose work with Sorcerer gave me a language with which to describe what I was after.  This is especially true of Sorcerer and Sword, which spends a good amount of space discussing how to re-integrate the freewheeling build-it-as-you-go world with characters who have meaningful stories.

Lon

[Gordon C. Landis]

Lon,

Great stuff.  "Shared world" moves to "my creation" to improve the quality, but the joy of sharing - the communal, during-the-activity creation -  gets lost.  Where we are now is trying to have it both ways.  I think my experience maps to that pretty well.

Gordon

[Ian O'Rourke]

I think I've been incredibly lucky when it comes to gaming, in that I've always been involved in narrativist sessions, even if they were 'vanilla narrativist' (is that the term?) or a form of narrativist that did not necessarily push any boundaries (as an example, the games themselves were not narrativist, even if the sessions where).

This is not to say our games were great, as young males they did sink pretty low, but they were still narrativist, if juvenile, and certainly not rail roaded (I am thinking when I was 14-15). Even some of our early games (18 or so) were very much grounded in mature narrativism – we ran a good number of Star Trek seasons in which the narrativism was very much followed the TV shows flavour of narrativism.
   
So, looking back, even though the language was not present at the time, I've been very lucky.

I certainly have no history of being stuck frustrated in heavy simulationist of gamist sessions. Well, may be one session here and there, never to return. Nothing wrong with those styles of play, I just know it ain't me.

Now, to stop the 'golden days thinking', and get back to the question. Yes, I think that 'thinking' about role-playing too much can damage your enjoyment of the hobby. What do I mean? Well, thinking about it and analysing it does not make me cynical and jaded, which is a problem most people have. For me the problem was (and note I say was) that I raised my expectations so much I suffered from analysis paralysis - some I lost track of the 'just game' factor, stop trying to create perfection.

I'm over it now. I start a Star Wars campaign on the 11th July. Okay its D20, but I see that game as surprisingly narrativist in many ways, and it don't stop me being so. Also, Star Wars, all about rail-roading? Bollocks. I'm looking forward to it.


As for actual play? I have nothing but positive experiences from actual play (which links with the above). No actual play has made less enthusiastic for gaming. In fact it was the advice in three games that has influenced my gaming style/gming style the most:

Star Wars D6
Vampire
Sorcerer

Sorcerer the least because I've still yet to put 'all of its advice' into actual play. Notice all the above have influences my style of gming due to advice on how to actual play, rather than the system.

[quozl]

Here's a long convoluted story of how my first roleplaying showed me everythinhg I did NOT want to do when roleplaying....

I started when I was 8.  My cousin had come to stay for the summer and brought a Monster Manual and Top Secret.  The Monster Manual was the coolest thing I'd ever seen: all these cool monsters and they had statistics for comparing which is more powerful.  My cousin (who was 9) then pushed me to read the Top Secret rules so I could GM for him.  I did and it turned into this:  I ran it like a mystery that he was trying to figure out and he played it like trying to find all the cool stuff.  Neither of us had a good time and we stopped roleplaying.  

A few years later when I was 12, some friends and I started diceless roleplaying as a way to pass time.  We would drawa dungeon on graph paper, fill the rooms with monsters and treasures, and then let a player go through it.  What happened was that the player would kill monsters and accumulate treasures until it wasn't fun anymore because we got bored with it.  There was no story and the best parts of it would be figuring out the puzzles we devised for each other.

In high school, I tried again.  Some friends and I played some D&D and Star Frontiers and they ended up frustrating to me because while there was some story this time, the focus was still on killing things and getting treasure.  (I contributed to this since I found out a first level D&D character was so pitiful I decided to do all I could to get to a better level so I pursued experience points instead of the story I had planned for my character.)

Amazingly enough, I discovered story-oriented roleplaying in an rpg called Dragonraid.  My parents got it for me when they decided I wasn't going to give up roleplaying and were hoping me not to get involved with that devil's game: D&D.  While Dragonraid had a horrendous combat system and the adventures provided were the worst railroading I've ever seen, the whole game hinged on morality which provided some interesting scenarios and a great framework to make stories.  (If anything, the horrible combat system made us concentrate on stories more because we didn't want to run a combat with such a bad system!)  Finally, I got a taste of what I wanted in a roleplaying game.

I moved and made new friends and we got into Palladium games (TMNT and Heroes Unlimited).  I tried to run games with more moral conflict than physical but it seemed the players (who had played D&D before) were used to hack & slash games and had trouble adjusting their playing style.  They liked the new focus but fell into old habits.

I moved again and got to my twenties and ran some Deadlands for a group that hadn't played D&D but were White Wolf players.  We had a great roleplaying session which only a minimal focus on combat.  So, in conclusion, my experience tells me that people who played D&D as their primary rpg focus on hack & slash and those that played other games roleplay more like the style that I prefer.  Also, I feel that a system that supports that style is essential.

---Jon