RPGs

One of my stranger quirks is that no old hobby of mine ever really dies. It just becomes quiescent and waits, like Cthulhu, for the stars to come back into the correct alignment so it can awaken and do I don't know what all.

A week or so ago I was looking around on old backups of my computer files, looking for an essay I'd written on one subject or another (look long enough and you'll find that I've written something on just about everything, just not particularly well). I never did find the essay and instead found a strange opus I'd written that was partly a history of wargaming, partly a review of a lot of wargames, and partly a strange rumination on the subject of RPGs - Role Playing Games.

And reading it rekinkled my interest in the old RPGs I used to play, and soon I found myself out in the garage grubbing around in plastic storage bins looking for my old RPGs.

And I found them too. Or most of them, anyway.

I enjoyed playing a number of different RPGs, but in general I tended to concentrate on four of them.

The first was, of course, Dungeons and Dragons, which I started playing in 1975 long before it was the least bit cool. Over the years I accumulated quite a lot of D&D stuff, but I ended up losing it all in what amounts to a custody dispute. I was involved with a girl who was herself a fairly intense D&D geek, and when we broke up, she somehow ended up with possession of the vast majority of my D&D stuff, including my Chainmail rules, my Arduin Grimoire, and my orginal "tan booklet" D&D rules. But ah, there's always that memory of her and the AD&D Monster Manual...

Then there was Traveler, which is sort of a science-fiction equivalent of D&D, though it drives both sets of players nuts when I say that. I had great difficulty convincing any of my rowdy D&D posse to play Traveler. Okay, I never convinced any of my rowdy D&D posse to play Traveler. But oh my did I ever love tinkering with that game. If I had an hour to kill, I'd go ahead and design a few planets on my ever-multiplying subsector maps, and I spent about a year trying to design a workable starship combat system. It ended up looking a bit like Delta Vee, which was unfortunate, but at least it didn't end up looking a bit like High Guard, which would have been tragic. Since there is something fundamentally pathetic about playing a role-playing game solitaire, I tended to do a lot of design work rather than actually play. I still have all my old Traveler stuff, including Mega-Traveler (blech) and Traveler: The New Era (double blech).

I was a big fan of Dragonquest, though again I tended to do more design and character generation work than actual playing. (Actually, after the D&D scene largely folded, most of my role-playing gaming was when my brother and I played dozens of fights in Melee just because it was such a great game.) But I always liked the structure and feeling of Dragonquest, and since I didn't lose my DQ components in a custody fight, I have hopes of someday being able to actually play it.

And perhaps my favorite was Boot Hill, which is a role-playing game in the Old West. The game focuses almost exclusively on the mechanics of shootouts, akin to but somewhat less complicated than Gunslinger, and most of the real role-playing stuff had to be added by the players. Or player, in my case. The only time I ever got anyone interested in playing Boot Hill was one summer when we decided to have a big battle in the town on the reverse side of the map. The big battle started, I emerged from a doorway and started to cross the street, I took a lead pill in the hat from a rifleman on a rooftop, and that was that. Damn.

A partial list of RPGs in my possession includes Tunnels & Trolls, The Morrow Project, Twilight 2000, ShadowRun, The Klingons, Traveler, Dragonquest, Boot Hill and Gunslinger. And over the years, I've owned but somehow lost Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, Arduin, The Fantasy Trip, Car Wars (not technically an RPG, but close), Gladiator, 2300 AD, and Traveler-GURPS. I'm not sure if my point is that I'm a geek or not.