The Obligatory "My Life As a Gamer" Post

E. Gary Gygax, the man who launched a million nerds, died earlier this week, and so the world's blogs are filled with remembrances of everyone's mis-spent youth. And, since I missed posting anything at all yesterday, who am I to pass up an opportunity to indulge myself horribly?

My geek credentials are a bit worn and outdated, but I think still quite serviceable. For, you see, I was a co-founder of the D&D club of my junior high! This is way back in 1980 or 1981 -- I can't remember if it was 7th or 8th grade -- and the club limped along, having adventures at a half-an-hour a meeting, once a week, until the initial members moved on to high school and the whole thing died. I'm sure we also played at other times, but we were all about 12, so nobody could drive or stay out late. (We also played a bit of Gamma World in those days, and were generally in the thrall of anything and everything emanating from Lake Geneva.) I might have even DM'd a bit in those days, but I was mostly a player, albeit one who always bought the game and read all of the secret rules.

But I dropped AD&D as a system almost entirely on going to high school -- when I look at the TSR history timeline, I recognize owning just about everything published from 1977-1981, but anything from mid-1982 on is foreign to me. D&D was for kids -- now we were ready for some serious role-playing.

I'd fallen in with a group of gamers that played two very different campaigns. One, run by a guy named Harry Smith, was pure house rules, the most free-wheeling RPG I've ever heard of. Characters were a mish-mosh of every media and literary source the players could think of -- we could claim "media rights" to things if we were the first to think of them; I grabbed Doc Savage, among others -- and, as far as I could tell, there was no specific published rule system behind it all. (Though, of course, we did still have to roll dice a lot.) I think this campaign had a name, but I don't remember what that was anymore. It was a very weird, high-energy experience, and the characters were practically gods very quickly -- looking back, it might have been more an excuse to hang out together, swear too loudly for Harry's grandparents' liking, and drink cheap supermarket cola. It was always fun, but generally incoherent, and calling it a "campaign" is probably stretching the point.

The other DM was a little younger than the rest of us, and was intensely serious. I can't remember his name anymore, unfortunately, but he was more of the typical DM: obsessive, organized, secretive. He also liked to run what we thought of as certain-death campaigns; we spent a lot of time making up new characters, and then having all of them die. I think we started off with a brief, ill-fated Twilight 2000 adventure, in which we all died horribly in Poland. This adventure was also notable for the day when I tried to strangle the DM (whose name I still can't remember). It probably wasn't the first instance of that gamer cliche, but we were pretty early, and I feel good about my place in history.

But then the nameless DM dragged out another game system, and this one clicked. It was what we called "MERP" -- Middle-earth Role Playing. It was just as deadly as the previous campaign, but, being Tolkienesque, we accepted it. It was set, unlike vanilla MERP, during the era when "the Necromancer" was still active in Mirkwood...and one of our first adventures was trying to infiltrate his tower. We died a lot, but it was a great world, and a great system, so we had fun doing it. (MERP was the source of my single favorite RPG item, the Ram-Butt-Bash-Knock-Down-Slug-Attack-Table, which I always say in one breath.)

And then there was our friend who loved RuneQuest, but we mostly tried to ignore him.

I also spent a lot of money in both junior high and high school buying RPG materials that I never really did anything with. I bought Call of Cthulhu and some '30s pulp adventure RPG I can't remember the name of, various adventures for all sorts of things, and whatever I could get my hands on. But I just read them -- never even seriously tried to play any of that stuff.

And then I threw it all out, either sometime when I was in college or when I moved out to get married. After I graduated high school in 1986, I never gamed at all. And I don't really miss it -- I miss those people, but not the pretending-to-kill-monsters part. Gaming is a way of socializing; it's something to do while you're all around a table together. And I've found other ways to socialize since then -- not that I like doing it all that much to begin with.