How'd we get here?

I touched on this in the last post, but I thought I'd layout my basic history with RPG gaming.

I live in Chicago now, but I grew up in West Texas. As a kid, I'd only ever heard of Dungeons & Dragons vaguely, much less any other role-playing games. I think the one time I ever really heard anyone say anything about it was my very religious and conservative grandmother calling it Satanic after it was mentioned in a movie or something. I probably saw it in movies occasionally, but I didn't have the context to know what I was seeing–I imagine I thought it was a board game. I certainly played a lot of role-playing based video games--I clocked more hours on Knights of the Old Republic than I could ever attempt to estimate.

I didn't play an RPG until I was in college--My wife and I (we marry young in Texas) were living in married-housing, which was basically just apartments, and our neighbors were Very Into Fantasy. I was never a big fantasy kid growing up--I cared a lot more about space ships and blaster rifles than dragons and broadswords. But my neighbor, who I'll refer to as Derek, lived for it. If it had orcs or elves, this dude was in.

Derek was a player in a weekly 3.5e game--did I want to play?

I had no idea what I was doing. The style of game these guys played was what I'd later find out is referred to as munchkin style. Derek, while a pleasant enough guy away from the table, was probably the worst about it; he seemed obsessed with having the Most Badass Character Ever--and he accomplished it by manipulating and abusing every rule/splatbook he could find. I can see the appeal to this kind of game; it's a system with numbers and logic and a lot of nerdy folks (myself excluded) like working in a system to achieve a goal. It's a game inside the game. Or a game encompassing the game? Semantics--the point is, Derek was one munchkiny, rules-lawyering son-of-a-bitch.

Basically every session would devolve, some quicker into others, into rule debates and arguments. The DM, as I best recollect, really couldn't keep up with Derek's rules knowledge/recall, and Derek knew it. But the DM was also, and I'm really sympathetic to this, very aware that he was getting steamrolled and so he tried to combat it by making Derek prove that the books really said the obscure thing he was trying to do.

As a guy who didn't even own a book, this was all CRAZY overwhelming. I'd just step out and have a cigarette or two while they hashed it out. I could usually tell it was time to go back inside because the yelling would subside.

As terrible of a picture as I'm probably painting, I still enjoyed the game a lot of the times. I saw something in this weird game where we sat around and talked and rolled dice instead of holding controllers and staring at a screen. There was so much possibility here.

I don't remember how that game ended--for one reason or another, we all went our separate ways.

About 4 years later, I ran a short-lived Pathfinder game. If I'd done more than an ounce of research, I'd have found out that Pathfinder is a pretty crunchy system--because it's basically 3.5e and 3.5 was also crunchy--and that was something I distinctly disliked. I'd read the book multiple times and I was running one of Paizo's adventure paths, but I was still stuck doing a ton of book searching in the middle of the games, slowing things to a grind.

My players were wonderfully patient, but it wasn't as satisfying of a game as it should have been. I don't really remember how that game ended either--I suspect that scheduling difficulties caused us to lose momentum and eventually quit. A tale as old as time.

It was D&D 5e that brought me back. A friend asked me if I'd ever played D&D because she and her boyfriend were trying to get a game going and I jumped at the opportunity.

The game was fun--it was run by a DM who'd had the childhood I wished I'd had--he could rattle off the stats for anything, had played in all of these different settings, and just generally had a great command of the game. I guess that's what really kicked my interest into high gear--seeing someone who really loved this thing in a way that I could relate to.

Since then, I've spent a LOT of money on books, run some D&D 5e, Dungeon Crawl Classics, The Black Hack 2e, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and have a huge list of other stuff I want to run someday.

I really love this hobby--I haven't been lucky enough to be in it for the past 40 years like some grognards out there, but I'm excited to continue learning and writing and playing games.