Monday Musings - Role-playing games

 

I started role-playing in college.  My friend Eric didn't care for D&D but loved GURPS, so he'd been running games for friends  before I got to college (he was a year ahead of me).  He invited me and two other friends to play - Jay was an RPG old hand, but Allison and I were newbies.  We each created a character based on ourselves with bits added.  Allison realized quickly that it wasn't for her and bowed out.  But me, I was hooked!

Through college we had a fantasy game where I played a magic user (and was then forbidden to do so because I death touched everyone from the end of my quarterstaff) and a Supers game that took place at our college with the serial numbers filed off.  I enjoyed the Supers game more, I think, because that was the character based on me, adding psyonic powers.  And it was so much fun to play off of my other friends.

After college, I was in a gaming lull for awhile.  My step-mom had definite negative feelings about D&D and even mentioning it around her was a bad idea.  At one point, I bought a copy of the GURPS players handbook and hid it away.  Not that it mattered much because I didn't really have anyone to play with anyway.  But owning the books made me feel better and gave me a chance to play with different characters.

Upon my move to NYC, I found some people that I was able to game with occasionally. It was my first introduction to D&D and it wasn't nearly as scary or boring as I'd been afraid it would be.  Rather than going magic user, this is where I found my love for playing rogues.  Gaming was still sparse but at least it happened more regularly than in the previous 5 years.

Of course, when I met my (now) husband, the fact that I was a gamer girl was a big draw.  He'd been playing D&D since he was 10 years old and here was someone that he could share that passion with.  We played occasionally when I was in NY and he was in Philly, but once I moved to Philly with him that's when our real gaming love took off.  We had a few friends in the area from the message board we'd met on.  A couple had RPG experience, the other was a complete newbie.  (He wanted to roll dice on an electronic device!  The horror!)  We started regular campaigns and for those three years, we met every Tuesday night, either in a local bar or in our apartment.  It was as much BS session as it was gaming and some of my fondest memories came from those days.

The move to Nashville meant that we were once again groupless.  I think it took about a year for us to find a group that we could game with.  It had been a bit rough because by then, Teddy was born.  But the group we started playing was hosted by a couple that had three kids, one of whom was Tedd's age.  We had a lot of fun with that group, playing a lot of different games over the couple of years before that couple moved.  By then, though, we found our other gaming half.*

I'd met Becca during a Mom's Club get together and noticed that she had a D&D book.  We started talking, then traded numbers, and before long she and her husband met with Rich and I to play a couple times a month.  It helped that our kids - first Tedd and her daughter, then along came her son, then Pete - were close to the same age.  We expanded for D&D to a few indy titles (Burning Wheel, primarily), and then into board games.  Over the past 13 years, we moved apartments, they moved houses (closer to us) and they had two more kids.  Our families became chosen family.  Whenever a new game idea came into someone's head, or a new board game was purchased, we talked about getting together and trying things out.  Some of our RPs lasted, some ended up being one shots, but they were all fun.

As our kids got older, they became curious about D&D and wanted to play some with us.  Rich and I ran the boys through a couple of scenarios as they grew and, by the time Tedd was in 6th grade, he was wanting a bigger group.  So Rich started DMing Tedd, Pete, Becca's daughter and a pair of brothers that my boys were friends with.  When Tedd moved from Apollo Middle to MLK Magnet, it gave them a chance to get together.  We tried for once a month, comnined it with sleepovers and had a lot of fun.

Things slowed down all the way around when COVID hit.  By then we had the kids group and our adults group, who had grown by one more thanks to my librarian friend wanting to get back into things.  The adults group had been bouncing back and forth between a few scenarios, and the lack of gaming killed me.  It was about a year before we were able to start getting the group back together.  We pretty much started over, partly for personal reasons and partly because it felt right to get into new characters.  Gaming was now at our house (which helped me keep things a little cleaner).

Yesterday, we played our second session of the D&D module "Out of the Abyss".  Becca, Chris (my librarian), the older two kids (Tedd and Becca's daughter) and I played while Rich ran it.  And it felt so good to get back into charcter.  Tedd learned not to get too attached to NPCs, and I learned that playing a Wild Mage can be fun but it's gonna take awhile to get my brain out of Rouge thought.  I'm again looking forward to playing and wishing that we could get together every weekend to play.  But teenagers, COVID, and real lives don't let it be that often.  But I also know that it won't be too long before I get to game again.

* Also in this time, I was playing games online, both play-by-email and play-by-post. It was through those that I was introduced to the world of Amber and the freeform world of Tazlure, where I got my first taste of being in charge.  I'll probably write more about that later.