Good day, this is my first blog post on Gaming so let me start telling you a bit about me.
Yes - I'm a gaming nerd. I got into gaming waaaaay back in 7th grade in the year of our lord 1978. A friend was already a gamer and introduced a group of five of us to a dungeon crawl that he had designed himself. We spent about an hour generating our characters, which was pretty fun and then we started the game - which stopped about 10 minutes later with, "I don't get it. How does this work." The DM was still pretty new to RPGs himself (as RPGs were still relatively new on the scene back then and there was no internet to help it go viral) and he wasn't equipped with much in the way of maps or miniatures. It was all in our heads but our 7th grade minds weren't quite getting it. It took a bit, but we finally managed to get through the first session and despite the temper tantrum one of the guys threw when he discovered his character dying didn't mean he could just start over. Here we'd spent an hour creating these characters and within 45 minutes of beginning the game, the brute 1st level fighter gets a beatdown from some orcs. He ended up ripping up his character sheet (a piece of spiral notebook paper back then - KICKIN' IT OLD SCHOOL!! YEEEAH-BOYEEE!) and storming out vowing never to return. Pretty sure it went something like, "This is stupid!! Why can't I just start over!?!? I quit! This is a stupid game and you're stupid!" We finished and it was pretty fun once we got the hang of it and what 7th grader didn't love the idea of walking through the world of Tolkien. Of course, it lead to the addiction/affliction which is know as GAMING.
Since those inglorious beginnings, I've played more than my share of role playing games:
Aftermath - post apocalyptic
Alternity - Sci-Fi space
Boot Hill - Wild wild west shoot 'em up
Bushido - Samurai slash 'em up
Call of Cthulu - world based on the works of H.P. Lovercraft
Champions - Super Heroes
Cyberpunk - futuristic world based on the sci-fi genre
Elric - based on the world of Michael Moorcock
Fading Suns - Sci-Fi - all the starts in universe appears to be fading and the underlying tone is how prepared are you for the end of EVERYTHING!
Gamma World - post nuclear holocaust world - mutations are common 'DUDE! You have wings!!"
GURPS - Steve Jackson Games - Generic Universal Role-Playing System - any world, any time, any where
Judge Dredd - Yes there was an RPG before the bad Stallone movie based on the same comic book series
Legionairre - stand alone RPG based on the Renegade Legion universe (miniatures sci-fi wargaming)
Lord of the Rings RPG/Middle Earth Role Playing - based on Tolkien's world
The Morrow Project - Govt. program puts you in cryogenic stasis so you can be part of the team to be woken up years after the coming apocalypse so you can start re-building society - problem, the computer that was supposed to wake up the team malfunctioned and left you in stasis for a lot longer than it was supposed to. Now that you're awake, you're finding a world that has already started to recover and my not be nearly as accepting of your efforts to "rebuild."
Paranoia - The computer runs Alpha Complex and provides happiness. Happiness is mandatory. Stay alert. Trust no one. Keep your sidearm handy. Commie-mutant-traitors are everywhere.
Pendragon - role-playing in the world of the Arthurian legends
Recon - shoot 'em up role-playing in Vietnam
Space Opera - Sci-Fi roleplaying - to be fair, I never got to play this - it took us almost three hours just to create characters. We never got back together to actually play the game.
Star Trek Roleplaying - fun enough, just make sure when you play, the GM isn't a hardcore Trekkie/Trekker
Talislanta - fantasy roleplaying with about 8 gazillion different combinations of races and character classes
Vampire: The Masquerade - the "Twilight" fan base would love this one.
There were four main titles that I played the most of during my time in the gaming world. Those were the following:
Traveller - Sci-Fi roleplaying - several versions of the game came out over the years - good stuff all the way.
Twilight 2000 - GDW game that came out during the 80's set in a world at the beginning of the 21st century just as world has been sliding into WWIII with a lot of conventional exchanges and some limited strategic nuclear exchanges. While the full out nuclear holocaust never happened, the world as we know it has pretty much collapsed. At the beginning of the game, you are p,000art of an allied unit that is in eastern Europe and have been informed that "you're on your own - good luck." This game lost a lot of it's followers with the end of the cold war and even more after "2000" passed and there was no WWIII.
Shadowrun - Set in a world 50 years from now that is a cross between the cyberpunk universe and a fantasy world where elves, dwarves, ogres and trolls walk among us and we all carry cred-stick, cyber- enhanced vision/reflexes/computer skills, magic wands, magic is real and Native Americans have taken back a HUGE chunk of North America using it.
AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) - of course, this is the powerhouse of them all. AD&D, originally from TSR best known of the RPGs out there.
Some of the miniature wargames I played were Warhammer 40,000 , Battletech, Renegade Legion and Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator
So you can see, I've played a few games in my time. I was also the vice-president of Darkmoore for three years while it was the largest gaming club in the Southwest. I've been to gaming conventions, played in and won tournaments. In other words, I was pretty heavily involved in the world of gaming. What I really loved in RPGs is the social inter-action between the player-characters. I've never been big on power gaming or rules-lawyering - it's more about character and story development. I haven't been involved in RPGs in about 12 years, so for the newer stuff, I'm not quite as up to date on, but who knows what could happen if I get into this in depth?
That ought to do it for a first blog post. I'll get into more detail with subsequent entries, going into detail on a lot of the games including different worlds for some of the games and later versions. We'll also discuss the different types of gamers, game masters, tournaments, etc..
For now, may the sun bring light into your life and your heart.
Peace,
Don
