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theronSo, by the late spring of '78, I was already semi-playing an RPG. We weren't up to the characterization point yet, but we had our Wizards and Warriors and we were running them through deadly mazes made up entirely of rooms that corresponded to the dimensions of the Melee and Wizard maps. They had names, and they improved over time. It was a start.
One morning at church, right before the end of the school year, I was telling a friend about this when another kid from our youth group popped in with, "Have you ever heard of a game called D&D?" He then began to explain it to us, a little bit at a time. As he'd played Melee, he was able to use it as a comparison.
It sounded completely and utterly awesome. I also realized I HAD heard of it once before, when some guy showed up one time a Wargame Club with some odd, poorly printed books, talking about a game that didn't use a board or counters. At the time, it sounded weird and looked distinctly unprofessional.
But this, the way Paul (the kid at church described it) seemed pretty cool. I decided it was definitely worth looking up.
There were just two problems with this plan. First, at that time, I only knew of one store in San Antonio that carried wargames. It was an old-school hobby shop that mainly focused on model trains. Wargames were a sideline, and they only carried Avalon Hill and SPI.
The second problem was that I STILL didn't have the right game in mind. For some reason, I thought D&D was produced by SPI, as I'd never actually heard of TSR (and had no idea there were other game publishers out there). Also, my income at the time was entirely based on lawn mowing for a single customer, so I didn't have a lot of ready cash floating around to track it down.
I DID mention it to some like-minded friends, however, and when school started again, one of them brought a copy of the Holmes Rules Basic set with him. Within a few days, I'd managed to borrow it and talk my mom into taking me to her office, where I photocopied the entire book (those old 70s greasy heat transfer photocopies) and stuck it in a folder. Yes, my first act as a RPGer was copyright infringement. I'd like to think my later purchases made up for that transgression in some small way. I also found out where he'd bought it, begged my folks into driving me, and picked up my first set of polyhedral dice (some of which are in my userpic). I also picked up a copy of Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, based on the reasoning that we already had monster stats from the Basic Rules, but we didn't have any for gods. Also GD&H had stats for Conan!
The following Friday, after school, John, our friend Rob, and I sat down on the patio outside the school cafeteria and played our first game. I ran two characters: Feahor the Fearless, named after my mightiest Melee warrior, and the less imaginatively named Theron the Thief. My memories of the game are hazy at best. I know Theron died like a punk when he missed a poison needle trap. I think we fought some skeletons and rescued someone from goblins. What I do know is that I was hooked from that day on.
As it turned out, our discovery of D&D coincided more or less with the world's. Suddenly, half the guys in the Wargame Club were playing it. I found out about game stores that had dedicated game rooms. There was actually a minor civil war in the club between the newly spawned roleplayers and the wargamers that mirrored the conflicts in the hobby at large (though with cooler heads prevailing). We discovered there was an ADVANCED D&D rule set. Or, more properly, there would be. Eventually. The Monster Manual had been out for a while, and the PHB was brand new, but the Dungeon Master's Guide was still almost a year off. Yes, Gentle Reader, back in the old days, it took two or three years for the core books to come out and we had to suck it up. Because there weren't any alternatives.
My interest gravitated immediately to D&D full-time. It wasn't just the way it engaged my imagination. Because it lacked a board or bulky components, it was something I could have handy all the time. If I got bored in class, I could surreptitiously make up a dungeon. I spent all of my study hall periods making up characters and reading rules.
Is it any wonder my grades took a nosedive?
After the first six weeks of dire underperformance, my dad took my games away. Or so he thought. He didn't understand that D&D didn't exist in those boxes marked Panzer Leader or Tactics II, so he didn't know to take up my folders of notes, which looked suspiciously like schoolwork. And being rather addicted at that point, far be it from me to tell him.
Of course, somewhere in there, he caught on. That's the problem with having a teacher for a parent. They tend to compare notes. And thus, my dice and notes were confiscated. With prejudice.
To his credit, he didn't throw my stuff away, but I didn't get my stuff back until the grades improved significantly. I learned to moderate my interests (slightly), and he was mollified. Life went on.
I still played wargames once in a while. RPGs and Wargames to me were just two sides of the same hobby, even then. I remember getting a copy of Chainmail and creating vast armies out of pieces of manila file folder, cut to size and folded over (Yes, basically the same thing as Steve Jackson Games' Cardboard Heroes, without the artwork) and playing out sieges and battles. I spent countless hours playing Wooden Ships and Iron Men (one of the best naval games ever) and Squad Leader, and discovered sports games like Statis-Pro Baseball, and Speed Circuit. I even invented roleplaying rules for the latter, though they pretty well sucked.
Somewhere along the line, I discovered Traveller (sheer awesome!), and Tunnels & Trolls (neat, but too loosey-goosey with the rules), and Chivalry & Sorcery (too hard!), and a host of lesser games. I still have my copy of Metamorphosis Alpha, and En Garde!, and wish I still had a copy of Professional Wrestling, a goofy little small press game that used the combat system from En Garde! to handle the squared circle.
All in all, it was a great time to be a gamer.
One morning at church, right before the end of the school year, I was telling a friend about this when another kid from our youth group popped in with, "Have you ever heard of a game called D&D?" He then began to explain it to us, a little bit at a time. As he'd played Melee, he was able to use it as a comparison.
It sounded completely and utterly awesome. I also realized I HAD heard of it once before, when some guy showed up one time a Wargame Club with some odd, poorly printed books, talking about a game that didn't use a board or counters. At the time, it sounded weird and looked distinctly unprofessional.
But this, the way Paul (the kid at church described it) seemed pretty cool. I decided it was definitely worth looking up.
There were just two problems with this plan. First, at that time, I only knew of one store in San Antonio that carried wargames. It was an old-school hobby shop that mainly focused on model trains. Wargames were a sideline, and they only carried Avalon Hill and SPI.
The second problem was that I STILL didn't have the right game in mind. For some reason, I thought D&D was produced by SPI, as I'd never actually heard of TSR (and had no idea there were other game publishers out there). Also, my income at the time was entirely based on lawn mowing for a single customer, so I didn't have a lot of ready cash floating around to track it down.
I DID mention it to some like-minded friends, however, and when school started again, one of them brought a copy of the Holmes Rules Basic set with him. Within a few days, I'd managed to borrow it and talk my mom into taking me to her office, where I photocopied the entire book (those old 70s greasy heat transfer photocopies) and stuck it in a folder. Yes, my first act as a RPGer was copyright infringement. I'd like to think my later purchases made up for that transgression in some small way. I also found out where he'd bought it, begged my folks into driving me, and picked up my first set of polyhedral dice (some of which are in my userpic). I also picked up a copy of Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, based on the reasoning that we already had monster stats from the Basic Rules, but we didn't have any for gods. Also GD&H had stats for Conan!
The following Friday, after school, John, our friend Rob, and I sat down on the patio outside the school cafeteria and played our first game. I ran two characters: Feahor the Fearless, named after my mightiest Melee warrior, and the less imaginatively named Theron the Thief. My memories of the game are hazy at best. I know Theron died like a punk when he missed a poison needle trap. I think we fought some skeletons and rescued someone from goblins. What I do know is that I was hooked from that day on.
As it turned out, our discovery of D&D coincided more or less with the world's. Suddenly, half the guys in the Wargame Club were playing it. I found out about game stores that had dedicated game rooms. There was actually a minor civil war in the club between the newly spawned roleplayers and the wargamers that mirrored the conflicts in the hobby at large (though with cooler heads prevailing). We discovered there was an ADVANCED D&D rule set. Or, more properly, there would be. Eventually. The Monster Manual had been out for a while, and the PHB was brand new, but the Dungeon Master's Guide was still almost a year off. Yes, Gentle Reader, back in the old days, it took two or three years for the core books to come out and we had to suck it up. Because there weren't any alternatives.
My interest gravitated immediately to D&D full-time. It wasn't just the way it engaged my imagination. Because it lacked a board or bulky components, it was something I could have handy all the time. If I got bored in class, I could surreptitiously make up a dungeon. I spent all of my study hall periods making up characters and reading rules.
Is it any wonder my grades took a nosedive?
After the first six weeks of dire underperformance, my dad took my games away. Or so he thought. He didn't understand that D&D didn't exist in those boxes marked Panzer Leader or Tactics II, so he didn't know to take up my folders of notes, which looked suspiciously like schoolwork. And being rather addicted at that point, far be it from me to tell him.
Of course, somewhere in there, he caught on. That's the problem with having a teacher for a parent. They tend to compare notes. And thus, my dice and notes were confiscated. With prejudice.
To his credit, he didn't throw my stuff away, but I didn't get my stuff back until the grades improved significantly. I learned to moderate my interests (slightly), and he was mollified. Life went on.
I still played wargames once in a while. RPGs and Wargames to me were just two sides of the same hobby, even then. I remember getting a copy of Chainmail and creating vast armies out of pieces of manila file folder, cut to size and folded over (Yes, basically the same thing as Steve Jackson Games' Cardboard Heroes, without the artwork) and playing out sieges and battles. I spent countless hours playing Wooden Ships and Iron Men (one of the best naval games ever) and Squad Leader, and discovered sports games like Statis-Pro Baseball, and Speed Circuit. I even invented roleplaying rules for the latter, though they pretty well sucked.
Somewhere along the line, I discovered Traveller (sheer awesome!), and Tunnels & Trolls (neat, but too loosey-goosey with the rules), and Chivalry & Sorcery (too hard!), and a host of lesser games. I still have my copy of Metamorphosis Alpha, and En Garde!, and wish I still had a copy of Professional Wrestling, a goofy little small press game that used the combat system from En Garde! to handle the squared circle.
All in all, it was a great time to be a gamer.