Learning to Game
Michael S. Miller:
Cool thread, Judd. I wrote this up on my LJ a couple years ago. Here's the applicable snippet:
Quote
1982 I'm in 2nd grade. Sometime in the spring, my second cousin on my mom's side, Billy (who I'd never met before and never seen since) comes to stay at my grandmother's house for the weekend. He's brought his D&D stuff with him (don't ask me what edition, I never got to look at the books). He steers me through rolling up a gnome named Figtoe. He runs me through a dungeon he'd run his friends through.
Aside: At one point in describing the dungeon, he tells me that I see a door that's ajar. Remember, I'm in 2nd grade and had never heard that before, so I think he says, "The door is a jar" and I picture this giant glass pickle jar filling the hallway. I figure the only way through is to open the lid, so I say "I open it." He says: "But it's already ajar!" I say: "I know, that's why I open it." Abbott & Costello, eat your heart out!
1983-1987 I've got another cousin (first cousin, actually, on my dad's side) who plays D&D: Jason Roberts. He's 4 years older than me, so I, of course, think everything he does is the definition of cool. So I make sure I have my rumpled gnomish character sheet whenever I get to see him at Thanksgiving & Easter. He runs AD&D 1st edition and, although I get to see the books, I don't actually get to read them or understand how they work. He runs Queen of the Demonweb Pits or dungeons off-the-cuff, and I roll what he wants me to roll, and I have no real idea what I'm doing, but I'm having a great time.
Something else RP-wise goes on at this time. Since I enjoy the games that Jason runs for me so much, but I don't know the rules at all, and I have a good memory, I start redrawing the dungeon maps after the holiday, and then running my friends through them at lunchtime. We're all geeks of varying degrees, and middle school is tough on geeks (actually, middle school is tough on everybody), so it's something that keeps us together. When I run out of the dungeons that Jason made, I switch to running Star Wars stuff. We're totally free-forming, and coming up with geeky lightsabers in all kinds of colors. I even tried to design my own Star Wars role-playing game at this point. The thing was, I think, 7 maps with obstacles on them. One was about recovering a crashed starfighter on a forest planet, and the map had where the crashed ship was, where the stormtroopers were, where the forest monsters were, and like that. Looking back, I guess the map served as a mnemonic device for Bangs.
It's really interesting to see, similar to Ralph, how designing a game to capture the experience of a game I'd played by did not own also played such a big part in my early game education. Perhaps if we make clear, easier-to-learn games, we'll create fewer game designers in the next generation?
It also just occured to me that my early gaming was very intermitant. I've rarely had a regular group and today do much of my gaming at conventions. Still reenacting 25-year-old patterns, I suppose...
Kevin Smit:
I learned to play when I was... oh, 8-9? Most of my early RP contacts I met through my older sister. A friend of my sister's got me started on the old Star Wars d6 system. I loved it at once and have been RPing since. Not Star Wars, mind you, but other games.
My experience learning was also a bit different because I learned to play 1 on 1. It was just me and my friend, no group. Of course, being so young I wasn't really aware of what quality role playing was all about, but my friend seemed to enjoy running me through stories, so I guess I did ok.
Later I played a few games with my sister's college friends using The Window, and absolutely loved the light rules approach. While in college myself I found Fading Suns, which can be played with a Nar focus quite convincingly.
Nowadays I seem to be the eternal GM, although I also act as a designer in my free time.
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