My History with Gaming

My History with Gaming

I first encountered D&D in late 74, in the LA area. Up to then, the most involved game i knew was Risk. But i had already developed some ideas for two different complex games, one of which involved a fantasy setting. But when i found D&D i gave up on them. Silly me, i still didn't know how big the gaming universe was or i might have taken them to Flying Buffalo.

I was a voracious reader of scifi, fantasy, and history and i took to D&D immediately. Of course it was mostly dungeon crawls and very little story depth back then but stories emerged anyway. And characterization, too. 6 months later i started gming.

I've seen people call themselves "oldschool gamers" for not switching from AD&D 3.5 to AD&D 4.0. That seems weird to me since i never switched to AD&D 1. I mean i played it, i just never ran it. Instead, like most gms of that time, i made my own house rules. House rules were the norm at that time, every pick up game involved explanations and negotiations. My world was fronted by a place called The Dispatcher's Office, which had a lot of lockers for characters to put their Rings of Ultimate Destruction, and Belts of Super Duper Strength, and other things i deemed unacceptable.

There were three different focuses for gaming. 1) The UCLA Computer Club, whose kill happy gms taught me to be devious and adaptable. 2) the Valley, full of people competing for the title of most outrageous creativity. 3) LASFS (Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society), home of the first frp fanzine, Alarums & Excursions, where they expected sophisticated world building and literary knowledge.

Eventually, my house rules evolved into a separate game. I moved to Orange County, and went to UCI majoring in Computer Science. I did some BBS gaming after that. In fact i actually managed to run a game that lasted a year and only lost 2 players, but most attempts failed miserably.

Then i moved to Tucson, to take care of some family property. The rent was right, you see, or i would never have considered it. As a true child of southern California, i found Tucson not only too hot, but too cold as well. And the cacti are just the beginning of a long list of actively hostile plants. I wouldn't have minded bringing back the sky, but the rest of the environment can stay there. Anyway, i formed a group there. I had a lot of good games, but nearly all of them were mine. I was the only one willing to gm consistantly, so although i have played a lot of differrent games, most of them were for just one or two sessions. I tried some gaming over Fidonet but it didn't do much better than the games on single bbses.

In 2000 i came back to my hometown, Santa Maria, at the northern end of southern California. Gaming is very sporadic here. Most gamers have moved on from frps to cards or computer games. I hate that there are computer games that use the term "roleplaying" when what they mean is that they have a large number of finite choices available.

And as for the people who do still play frps, most prefer to play something they've heard of. Homebrew means exploring the gm's head and that's too much of a challenge. Personally, i relish it, but i guess that's just me. When i do get players, i eventually lose them to real life. I've also tried gaming on dedicated online forums but i lost interest when i kept having players disappear before i could even get to the first plot twist.

As a player, i am in one game as a player that only gets 2 hours for each session because of the way people's schedules work, and another that gets 4 hours, except the gm just let us know his own schedule is about to change and he doesn't know what will be going on in 2 weeks.

More later.