My Life with RPG's! (long post)

[Dirk Ackermann]

To Miskatonic: you understand it fully right. Yes it was more a player vs player thing! Which eventually get out of hand with stories and more "in-play discussions", that means roleplay.

To David Bapst: I remember that there were mostly cliche-like chars, that we had witnessed in movies. I do not know what you are trying to ask with this "my guy"?
The fight mechanic was from my WWI "Tanks" game. We had only D6 and with it you had to roll within a range. The better the fighter, the higher the range. We had some martial-arts backround - mostly boxing, wrestling and judo - and we did understand that you had to aim for the target. If somebody   was hit a roll was made to check how severe the wound was; every point of this roll was subtracted from your range and if it was a vital area bonus points were given. As you can imagine one bad hit and you did not had any range left over! But one thing that never occured was the death of one PC! We had a gentleman agreement that he would survive somehow. But it played sometimes to a better storie result. We had only this fighting stat, later armor counted against the second roll and if we were not sure who had the first hit we rolled, with the higher one was the faster one. We had no idea of boni or mali and no, we had no social stats, attributes or the like. That was played.
You described it really good with your imagination of our between sessions, it happened just like that and we discussed in different stances -out and in time.

To Sean: What do you mean exactly with "low points-of-contact system"? How can we establish a low barrier to get imaginary elements into play?
I will post experiences and our playgroup, but it will take a while. Thanks Sean

To Paganini: Thank you. Never thought of beauty in my first post ... !
Pureness. Do you imagine how it felt, back in your childhood, to see, feel, hear or experience a thing that captured your whole senses and did not let you go for a while and you were astonished all the time? This is what I mean with "pure". I know that this is a rare thing, maybe too idealistic. But RPG's are games. As such they should have these moments. And every system and every group should go for this.
Unbelievable? The ramifications of GNS are going straight in this way, if I understand them correctly. Thats why my experiments try to sort out any given hinderances.
Maybe it is just a thing of time: the more you play the more accustomed you get and the less excitement you will have. But why play then over and over and over? Because it "only" makes fun? Yes. But remember your first roleplaying sessions and you will see how much of your initial fever is left. Maybe it is just as it is and perhaps I am only too pathetic. Our group have had various signs of this tiredness, not only me. So we are doing something wrong. Thats why I ask for your help.
Again, thank you Paganini.

To John Kim: FR are the Forgotten Realms. We are not that satisfied with this world but it was our first real campaign and thats why our love to it.

To Miskatonic: Where exactly are you from and why did you left?

Thank you all,
Dirk

[David Bapst]

Thanks for the response, Dirk...

To David Bapst: I remember that there were mostly cliche-like chars, that we had witnessed in movies. I do not know what you are trying to ask with this "my guy"?

Sorry, never mind. I had meant that each player had one character they controlled/played in the game ("their guy/girl"). You kind of just answered that. Were only these singular characters played, or did someone ever say "Well, I guess I'll play the enemy general's cowardly sidekick" and do that for a little bit?

The fight mechanic was from my WWI "Tanks" game. We had only D6 and with it you had to roll within a range. The better the fighter, the higher the range. We had some martial-arts backround - mostly boxing, wrestling and judo - and we did understand that you had to aim for the target. If somebody   was hit a roll was made to check how severe the wound was; every point of this roll was subtracted from your range and if it was a vital area bonus points were given. As you can imagine one bad hit and you did not had any range left over! But one thing that never occured was the death of one PC! We had a gentleman agreement that he would survive somehow. But it played sometimes to a better storie result. We had only this fighting stat, later armor counted against the second roll and if we were not sure who had the first hit we rolled, with the higher one was the faster one. We had no idea of boni or mali and no, we had no social stats, attributes or the like. That was played.
You described it really good with your imagination of our between sessions, it happened just like that and we discussed in different stances -out and in time.

Huh. No death. Interesting. Did a session ever go by without any combat/battles? Or would the players have not seen the sense in playing if that did not happen?

Was there a difference in fighting ability between characters (all at the same level)? If so, were those with less fighting aptitude compensated in some way, or was that considered alright?

Hmm. I suppose you wouldn't remember any specific instances of play or examples of characters that you or the other players had back in the eighties? If you can't remember, no worries, but more specific details would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave

[Frank T]

Hi Dirk,

on this "pureness" issue: I think what you mean is fascination, mainly. It might be what some people call "immersion", though I'm not sure any more if that's something different than simply fascination. I have often wondered: if I'm so much more aware of so many things today than I was then, if I'm a "better" roleplayer in so many ways, then why the hell doesn't the game captivate me as much as it used to?

I think the solution is not to go back there. You cannot go back there, because you know the things you know and they won't be new and fascinating any more. My solution is to go ever forward. To seek out new games, new styles, new players, new inspiration. So I would guess your D&D attempt is doomed, because it will serve only to demonstrate how everything has changed.

- Frank

P.S.: If you feel a need to phrase some of your thoughts in German because it's too hard in English, you are very welcome do so at GroFaFo. Or send me a PM in German and I will help you translate.

[Rob Carriere]

Pureness. Do you imagine how it felt, back in your childhood, to see, feel, hear or experience a thing that captured your whole senses and did not let you go for a while and you were astonished all the time? This is what I mean with "pure". I know that this is a rare thing, maybe too idealistic.

This sounds very much like the thing that SF people call "sense of wonder", the wonderful feeling that your mind is being stretched. If that is what it is, it has nothing to do with stance/immersion and everything with freshness of subject. As Frank T said, don't go back. Find a new subject, or a different way of looking at an old subject. Take your FR and change the history until the Seven Sisters and Elminster are the bad guys, then go back and play and see what it's like.

Oh, and I agree on the beauty of that first post. Strongly.
SR
--

[Dirk Ackermann]

To Frank T and Rob Carriere: Two people at the same time tell me one ting. And it seems very logical and appealing to me. I will give your solutions a try.

To David Bapst: Of course we did play the NSC's all together, but the one or the other realised that some kind of characters suited them better than others!
The "sessions" were packed with battles but not so the "in betweens". There were no differences in the fighting abilities, although sometimes we argued and ruled that, lets say a quicker one would more often have the first strike and a stronger one would ignore armor etc. There was no compensating, it was alright: we knew the better one will more often win. Maybe we compensated that with the number of fights.
I remember special occurences; for instance the "quest" of a PC to get a dinosaur like mount ( we had figurines and a lot of animals and prehistoric ones, which fitted to the size of the knights ), but nothing more.

I will discuss it with the only one of the original playgroup that I am able to speak to. He will add something more, I presume. ( we were 4 )

Thanks

Dirk

[drozdal]

Do somebody know something about RPG's in the former Soviet-controlled countries, til the 1990's?

Hey Dirk

I'm nowhere near being authority on east european RPG's, but I know some things that might interest You. I was born in Poland, couple years ago moved to US. I still keep hand on the pulse of polish RPG scene, and I know what's going on on the market in my country.
Me and my friends began playing somewhere around '89 - '90 (bur i know about people who started in '85), first on xeroxed AD&D (we considered ourselves lucky, because as You probably know, that getting stuff from western countries was next to impossible behind steel curtain), and badly translated "club version" of Warhamemr Fantasy Roleplay. Later couple of guys from Warsaw wrote first polish RPG, called Kryszlaly Czasu "Jewels of Time" (distributed in first polish RPG e-zine "Necronomicon" written for AMIGA) . Today I would say that it was yet another "Fantasy Heartbreaker", but back in the days, that was our bible (think MERP combined with GURPS and some AD&D on top of it). 1992 brought first issue of polish RPG magazine Magia i Miecz (Sword and Sorcery) and roleplaying games, really emerged from underground. That's about it for RPG in Poland circa 1990, if You want to know more let me know. Also some interesing informations about east-european games might be found on John Kim's site

Other countries: Hungary has their version of AD&D or DSA called "Magus". Czech guys have their "Draci Doupe" (czech take on DnD released in 1990).

[David Bapst]

To David Bapst: Of course we did play the NSC's all together, but the one or the other realised that some kind of characters suited them better than others!
The "sessions" were packed with battles but not so the "in betweens". There were no differences in the fighting abilities, although sometimes we argued and ruled that, lets say a quicker one would more often have the first strike and a stronger one would ignore armor etc. There was no compensating, it was alright: we knew the better one will more often win. Maybe we compensated that with the number of fights.
I remember special occurences; for instance the "quest" of a PC to get a dinosaur like mount ( we had figurines and a lot of animals and prehistoric ones, which fitted to the size of the knights ), but nothing more.

Hmm. Did that quest involve combat to get the mount?

I will discuss it with the only one of the original playgroup that I am able to speak to. He will add something more, I presume. ( we were 4 )

Uh... Let me make certain there is no mistranslation: You were four years old? Wouldn't you have been twelve years old in 1988?

Or... oh, wait, do you mean there were four people in your group?

Thanks and a little confused,
Dave[/quote]

[Bryan_T]

OYO;

I agree about the beauty of that first post.  The emotion behind it came through very, very clearly.  

Your quest for "purity" strongly affected me.  I went through something of the same with my original gaming group, however in our case we just stopped playing eventually.  For years I didn't actually get to play, but just recently I've been involved in some play by email (actually, play by Yahoo group) games of HeroQuest.

To my incredible joy, I discovered that the games can be just as engaging now as they were when I was 11 years old, in fact better in some ways, because the people I'm playing with are more skilled.  I don't think that the perfect, totally pure, role playing experience is possible, just like any other ideal, perfect, condition is not possible.  But it is possible to get pretty close.

Some modern role playing games have rules that are very good for dealing with relationships and personality, and there are quite a few newer rule sets where the rules are much less restrictive than with D&D.  That is, you are much more free to do what you want, to tell dramatic stories like in a book or film, without the rules getting in the way so much.

I'd really suggest you trying playing one of these games.  It may not give you what you want, but it might get you closer.  After having tried it, and finding out what you liked and didn't like, and compared it to your other systems, you might have a much better idea of what to do next.  It is a bit like triangulating, looking at a distant mountain from two different points and noting the direction to it, and by figuring out where those lines cross knowing its location and distance.  When dealing with emotions and ideas this is not as accurate as lines on a map, but the general idea works--when you can look at something from two very different points of view, you can tell a lot more about it.

Regards;

--Bryan

[Dirk Ackermann]

Thank you all for your positive comments!

I really did not expect this kind of helping.

Thank you again.

It will take a while to answer the questions left ...

Dirk

[olleolleolle]

There are Russian websites on role-playing. You just need to know Russian to read them.

I work a bit with the PHP-based blog/CMS Drupal, and it turns out that Alex, one of its community pillars in Russia, runs two Russian role-playing websites:

[*]Roleplay.ru, a community/blogspace
[*]tarrasque.net, a forum[/list:u]
Both in Russian, though. Anyone fluent?

I'm in the process of talking Alex into an interview. Failing that, I hope to goad him into showing me the right people for an interview, to shed light on the early Russian RPG history. We want to know about the local, DIY games, the conventions... the works, really.