Learning to Game
Judd:
I was IMing with Thor about different generations of gamers and how they learned to game and it made me think about how I learned to play RPG's. This isn't one experience of play, as much as a kind of pattern of play during my first years of gaming.
I was the youngest in an older group. Nowadays, two years doesn't seem like such a big deal but in junior high, a 6th grader playing with 8th graders was sort of a big deal. And then when I was 13 and the oldest player in the group was 21, it was a huge deal.
We started off with Marvel Super-Heroes and then into AD&D 1st edition, into some Champions and into AD&D 2nd edition when it came out.
I don't think I ever read a game book from beginning to end. I learned to play by watching my fellow players very carefully. I learned which dice to use and when, when it was my turn to go and all that noise. Our group was big and noisy and I think, as the youngest in the group, a scrawny kid with big ears who stuttered, I really felt that my character I had to be doing something cool in order to get time at the table. That kind of attention seeking is probably what led to me being so pro-active in the years since.
Thinking about it, both me and Jason, the other youngster of the group, went on to game together for years and were always known as movers and shakers, people whose characters were constantly in motion and I wonder if we could attribute that to being so young in a group filled with older, loud, New Jersey teenagers.
Because there was a line, a kind of balance. There was good pro-activity and then there was what Dragon Magazine called Chaotic Everywhere, when players stomped all over each other's scenes and that was definitely seen as bad but the lines were kind of tenuous and hard to figure out.
I didn't learn the rules by rote and kind of looked down on those who did. Rules mastery just wasn't as important as story, was our party-line and we stuck to it. We threw out rules we didn't like, we role-played and didn't roll-play and all that noise.
I guess what I'm getting at is that for me, I learned gaming from my peers and not from the books. It was like telephone. For years I identified as someone who just didn't pick up rules well and wasn't a rules-person. Only recently did I figure out that I need to read a game text, play it - knowing that we'll make some mistakes, and go back and re-read it.
Comments on this thread are fine, as well as your experience with how you learned to game back in the day.
Robert Bohl:
Quote from: Paka on February 26, 2008, 07:56:01 AM
I didn't learn the rules by rote and kind of looked down on those who did.
You looked down on me, you fucker?!
My history: When I was about 10 or younger, friends of the family used to play D&D. A dad and his teenage daughter and some of their friends. They wouldn't let me play and I resented them for that (though I'd probably do the same thing myself).
At some point after that I got the D&D Basic Set, then Intermediate, Expert, and whatever the top level one was. Most of the time I played these by myself. I distinctly remember riding in the car home from my grandma's house and playing through a Basic D&D module with my Elf. It was a big deal when my grandmother and mom together got me the PHB and DMG and dice. It wasn't until around 1984 before I played with anyone else, and not until 1985 when I started to do regular games.
I was a rules monkey. I loved to know them or at least to know where to find them by heart. I totally had this arrogant "I'm a good gamer" thing going where I valued story over fighting. I still have that, to a degree, I just don't usually think I'm better. It's more often that I don't care about the things that many other gamers do.
Valamir:
I learned to play by designing.
My first RPG experience was...2nd grade (however old that is) in our school's Gifted program...which is what they used to do with bright ADD kids before they realized drugging them into submission was cheaper. Anyway, "Free Creative Time" was set aside which could be used for anything as long as it was social and creative. One day some of my classmates used the Free Creative time to play D&D.
I'd never played, they'd been playing for awhile. They're characters were already 3-5 level...I started out as a 1st level M-U.
Here's the neat twist. The GM had totally forgotten his books and his dice. Oh No! How are we going to play? Well...without missing a beat, he just started playing. The whole session was totally old school railroaded illusionism...freeform-style. We ended up being all captured by a high level evil Druid (?!) and out of boredom the other players killed me and did horrible things to my corpse...I was HOOKED!
Not having any money to buy this game, I went home and reengineered it. Typing out a bunch of pages on onion skin paper on my mom's old manual typewritter. I used dice, because they'd said you were supposed to normally, and I used stats that kinda resembled what was written on my character sheet. And I made up stats for monsters I kinda remembered from our game. I wound up with 4 monsters...Orcs, Skeletons, Green Dragons, and White Dragons (yeah, it was a wierd game).
Then I merged that with our lunch period practice of Mazes. During home room we'd each draw a killer, near impossible maze on notebook paper (speed draw cuz homeroom wasn't that long) and during lunch we'd pass them around and race to see who get get through it first.
So I took those mazes, added rooms (cuz in the game we played the stuff we fought was always in a room) and drew a little picture of one my 4 monsters. Then you had to get through the maze and if you reached a room with a monster you had to fight it using dice before you could keep going.
Then we played the hell out of that, and I had to keep changing the rules around because they didn't work. And then we'd add different stuff like weapons...yeah weapons..and wouldn't it be neat if each weapon was an advantage against a certain monster. But then you'd always carry around all the weapons...so wouldn't it be neat if there was a limit on the weapons you could carry so you'd have to choose. But the the GM would just put the other monsters in the maze so you'd be hosed...so wouldn't it be neat if the monsters were random. And so on and so on and so on.
That's how I learned to roleplay.
Judd:
Ralph,
I think we might've discussed this before but your story reminds me of when I worked at an elementary school after-school program and a group of boys would get together and with a Monster Manual being passed between them play D&D. It was pretty clear that one of them had seen their older brother play and was kind of imitating that but what they do was really neat.
Boy #1: You see *flips pages of Monster Manual* 500 Githyanki!
Boy #2: I send out my blahblah Pokemon to destroy them and take out my zord.
Neat stuff.
buzz:
Quote from: Paka on February 26, 2008, 07:56:01 AM
I don't think I ever read a game book from beginning to end.
I'm pretty sure that I did, but I don't really remember processing what I was reading until maybe college or later. I can think of plenty of RPGs from those days that I pick up today and say, "*That's* how it was supposed to work?"* Somehow this didn't prevent me from playing, though.
Most of my proto-gaming was with peers; no more than a year of age difference at most. I can definitely see that we sort of taught each other how to play; each of us understood different bits, and we slowly forged it all together.
Also, for decades I don't think I grokked the idea of reading a game, making some PCs, and then setting up a one-shot to "test" it with your friends. I'd read a game, assume it was awesome, talk it up to my friends... and then do noting when they actually asked to try it. "Uh, I don't have anything prepared." I'd literally bring piles of games over to friends' houses and just kinda stare at them.
* That's probably why I've been so impressed by recent games with explicit procedures of play in the text. They actually tell you what to do!
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