Friday, May 27, 2011

Description Of Roleplaying

In any case, the reason I decided to start this blog now was the most recent XKCD comic:

Sports

Hover your mouse pointer over the comic to see why I was so inspired.

New Gaming Blog

Not that the world needs another one, but this is my new blog dedicated to roleplaying and other games. Mostly roleplaying, actually, but I may discuss wargames, story games, board games, and even live action games or sports on occasion.

I've been gaming for a bunch of years now. I first played a roleplaying game (AD&D) in the summer of 1978, when friends invited me over to play "Dungeons and Dragons". I hadn't heard of it, but I had heard of "Dungeon Dice", which is what I thought they were talking about. Boy, was I surprised by how different it seemed from the advertising! I created a character (a magic-uer), which the mean and cruel DM set as a 1st level character. Then we played through "Tomb of Horrors". Yeah. The other characters had higher levels, of course, and everyone expected me to die.

When I was spending my starting money, I asked if I could hire anyone to help me out. The DM was caught off-guard by this, and quickly paged through the DMG. He let me hire as many mercenaries as I could afford, which turned out to be quite a few. Since the DM had very little experience with running those sorts of NPCs, apparently, I was able to send my troops to investigate all of the traps and such, and as a result I ended up being one of the few survivors of the session. Ever since then, I have been a devoted roleplaying gamer.

Shortly, I was discovering wargames, starting with a couple of Avalon Hill games, War at Sea and Magic Realm. At first, I didn't understand the latter, and it took many years before I would finally play an actual game of it. The former, on the other hand, started a love of military history that was only expanded by participating in medieval fantasy roleplaying games.

By Christmas, I had picked up a copy of the original boxed set of Traveller. That is still one of my very favorite games, and I've owned just about every version up to and including T4 and GURPS Traveller. The first published edition I didn't own was T20.

I've designed one game which has seen minor success in the local area, which we've called by a number of names. Some of them are "Trait System", "Bridge System", and "Two-Die System". I'm currently designing a game in the old-school style which is a sort of "alternate history": what if the original fantasy roleplaying game was based on a different set of wargames rules. I am starting with the 6th edition of the old WRG Ancients rules, which included both a fantasy section and rules for generals and champions in single combat. From there, I am making design decisions that expand those into a roleplaying game. It also lets me use one of the dice that you never see in games these days, the averaging die (a six-sided die labelled 2,3,3,4,4,5), which is used frequently in WRG Ancients.

I don't currently have a game to play in, but I hope to change that soon.

Anyway, I'll be posting off and on.