Focus is Lacking in This One...
I have been gaming since I was around twelve. I received the infamous "Red Box" D&D boxed set as a birthday gift from a good friend and I was immediately taken into the fold. Being moderately intelligent (my wife is smiling right now) and having a brain composed of about 97% creative brain matter, I loved the idea of halflings, dwarves, and monsters.
Somewhere along the line I switched to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition and realized that gaming could go really far with all the creative juices it spurred in me. Around this time I also realized I wanted to be a writer, and I started writing, a life-long passion of mine, though one I rarely seem to be able to stick to for any length of time.
Being that I was the most creative in my small crew of friends who wanted to try their hand at D&D, I was selected as the DM, a moment in time that has probably affected my life forever. Since then, I have DMed nearly every game I was a part of, a few games here and there I have played, but for the most part, I am always the DM.
Shortly after my love of comics, specifically the X-Men, crossed over to gaming and my friends Fred and Dave and I started a long running Marvel Supers (as we called it) campaign. We combined events from the comics (as we all read them) and my own crazy ideas. I remember one of the best ones was when I had one of Dave's characters called Ghost (he looked an aweful lot like Moon Knight) turn out to be a trapped-on-Earth angel and really mess with his head. Especially since he started his hero career by accidentally killing a bad guy! I think it was in this stage when I started thinking more deeply about RPGs and the story angle than simply rolling dice, blowing crap up, and getting treasure. Surely a defining moment in my gaming history.
Around this time we dabbled with a host of other systems, from Call of Cthulhu (which none of us really liked, but were intrigued by), Traveller 2300 (LOL wow, making characters was fun!), to Car Wars, Star Frontiers (those freaking blobs were the bomb!), Rifts (ugh), Ghostbusters (cool)....wow, I have probably forgotten some. This was also about the time that I started down the path of eventual disgust with D&D.I remember sitting in Dave's kitchen (we often hung there because his parents both worked, he was much more well off than me, and he had a kick ass TV with surround sound), and he showed me a book he had just bought. Unearthed Arcana, the doom of all things D&D to me.
Dave introduced me to something that would change forever how I looked at gaming. This book had all sorts of new rules, classes, spells, magic items, etc. I am sure it was marketing genius and added to TSR's profits, but man I hated this book with all my might. Dave of course, being a player, loved them and wanted to use everything, including that blasted Cavalier class which completely unbalanced the game and threw him into min/max mode. He was actually a pretty good player, and this just pushed him too easily to the wrong end. No longer did it matter that he could role-play, it was all about being big, powerful and kicking ass. I think this is what got him into Rifts actually, which I totally hated, a power-gamer orgasm.
We also explored a game called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, a game that is probably more responsible for the kind of GM I am today than any other system, sort of embarrassing to say that really, such a silly game. While the game was decent, and we played the hell out of it (who doesn't want to be a kung-fu turtle??), it was my frustration with the system that led me to goad another friend, Brett, into working with me on our own game system. Nothing has been the same since. I realized that I did not need to be a college trained nerd to write a game, that there were many other ways to resolve actions besides those I had seen in books, and I could make the game I wanted to play. It was a slow, spinning spiral of doom for me. I have never been satisfied with any game system since this fateful time in my life. We made a rather complex game that allowed you to play all sorts of creatures (I was reading Rocket Raccoon) and combined kung-fu, lasers, and whatever we thought would be cool to throw in.
Soon there after, I finished high school and headed off to college, discovered girls, beer, and real life (read: money trouble and having to get up for work everyday) and soon drifted out of gaming for years. In 1994 I joined the Army, married, soon had a kid and well, gaming was over. :-)
Around 1999, I got sent to Korea and had a really slow dial-up connection, I am talking like 16kbps slow. It was painful, but it allowed me to surf the web and do emails and I soon discovered mIRC and was running a D&D game again. By this time I had made some really good friends (Merc & Riabn, where are you??????) and we had a great time playing, some of the best of all my life.
But then came the hammer. The players wanted D&D 3e. I sucked it up and ran some games, but honestly, I never liked it enough to learn the rules, and players were notorious for pointing out to me when I did something against the rules. :-) At this time, I also discovered The Window, a new game in the vein of what would become the genre of Story Games or Freeform games (as they were called then). However, I could never interest anyone in attempting this new game.
When I got back to the States, I became extremely busy due to the position I got in the Army, and gaming stopped completely. In the corner of my eye, though, I kept an eye on it.
Around 2004, I returned to Korea, and since I was not a party animal and drinking out in town every night (yes, that is what soldiers do in Korea: drink, party, and chase young korean women), I had time in the evenings to start looking at RPGs again. I started with The Window and again found that no one would even attempt it, close minded lot that the D&D players of the world were at that time; it was 3e or nothing! A few friends and I got together and played a few games, but nothing substantial happened besides me reworking and releasing my fantasy game world Sylnae to sylnae.net.
I came back to the states right after Fantasy Grounds had been released, and this was the push us older gamers had been waiting for. A friend showed me the program, and I bought it immediately. Soon, I befriended two new people, Devin and Pat, and we ended up taking over a pro-FG website and creating FourUglyMonsters.com, a site aimed at helping push this online revolution forward by presenting free or low cost materials for use in the FG program to facilitate better gaming. This went fairly well for a while until my big mouth got me in trouble with a guy who makes stuff for FG (and btw is a total asshole). My actions helped tear the group apart. Oopsie!
Anyway, around that time, I came across this new Virtual Table called MapTool, and I befriended the man behind the code. I have since provided some of the artwork used in the program, and many of my ideas have secretly been included in the system due to my bribing Trevor with donuts and soda. Suck it!
Since discovering MT, I have found a few game systems that I have really enjoyed playing, including Savage Worlds and Risus. I have found a home with more rules-light and freeform game systems because, well, because I have a life outside of gaming and cannot commit to hours and hours of prep time for a weekly game. Both are light in rules and easy to GM, letting me enjoy the game and get back to the reason I started playing RPGs: fun with friends.
I started a blog last year when I found out I would be heading to Iraq for a deployment. At first it was solely about the Army and Iraq, but over time, RPGs started popping up on there more and more, and eventually started to take over the blog. Others seemed to notice as I have now been asked to co-author or guest post on three blogs in addition to my own. I guess others either find my thoughts interesting, or my silliness entertaining.
snik out!