My career, or rather hobby, in gaming started in the late 70s when a fellow classmate, and good friend, asked me if I wanted to come to his house after school because his brother and he were looking at this new game called Dungeons & Dragons. That was fifth grade. Three decades later, and I am still enjoying the hobby although my time is vastly reduced thanks to that thing they tell us about as children, but we seem to disbelieve, called responsibility.
Over the last three decades I have played far too many systems to keep track of. The majority of the diversity came in my late teens/early 20s and then again over the last decade. I have many fond memories of the majority of those systems because I tend to be far more interested in the experience and the story, than in how I can best min/max my character in every combat situation. However, I really enjoy character growth and improvement as well, and find a great deal of satisfaction in watching my characters grow in capability and in personality.
That enjoyment of character growth is one of the biggest factors for my system preferences. The other is character creation. This brings me to the first growth I experienced with RPGs. In eighth grade, one of my school mates showed me this new RPG called Champions. It allowed one to create exactly the character that one wanted without being restricted to a class or level, but most marvelous was the fact it was a superhero that one would create. I was excited to give it a try, and I am glad I did.
Champions/Hero System is still my preferred RPG system to this day. It isn’t perfect, but it does what I want an RPG to do for me. Fortunately, I have always been open minded and tried many different systems over the years, sometimes putting aside Hero for some other system that did a better job for a given genre. This meant that I played almost every system that came out in the 80s and early 90s.
During the 90s, I took a break from gaming as my life had become filled with a new family and thus, those responsibilities I mentioned. Then in the late 90s some of my co-workers mentioned wanting to play D&D, and because my responsibilities had lessened a bit, I said that I would join them. This restarted my love of gaming, and I soon found myself buying new books and getting back into the culture. I immediately returned to the Hero system to see where it had gone, and purchased some of the books that I missed. In one of these books I noticed that the character write-ups were out-of-date, and so I checked to see who the publisher was. Much to my surprise, the publisher’s address was in the same town that I lived in. I was able to contact him and discovered that he lived down the street from me! We soon struck up a friendship and started gaming together and he eventually asked me if I would like to help him with his business. I said yes. This was the start of my editing and writing career, or rather hobby.
In school I had always displayed an aptitude for writing, I owe RPGs for some of that, and even won a couple writing awards. So when I was asked if I wanted to edit a new book that the publisher was working on, I was happy to jump on the opportunity and stretch those particular muscles again. Shortly after this, I also had the opportunity to co-author a book for a different publisher, as well as do some play-testing and minor contributions for a couple others.
Since that time the publishers put their businesses on hiatus as they too had to deal with those evil responsibilities. That granted me a little more free time to pursue other things. Eventually I found myself gaming with the fine gentlemen that founded The Dice of Life, and for some reason they asked me if I wanted to come onboard as an editor and potential author. Here I am taking on responsibilities again.
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