I have been playing with the idea of starting up a gaming blog for a long long time now. The issue being is that there are so many great ones out there and I am not sure what I can add to the conversation. Not only are there so many choices out there but preferences on game type and style are as varied as well...something that has a lot of variables. So basically we begin to create niches within niches. Is there an audience? I don't know, but I guess I'll find out.
So who am I? I got involved in table top gaming at a very young age. My cousin introduced me to Magic the Gathering in 1994, I was 8 years old. He kind of taught me how to play and it was only after I helped him dig a pit for his fort. A fort that I was never allowed to enter, but I was let in to a completely new world that would change life.
About a year after being introduced to Magic a small card shop opened up across the the parking lot from my mom's work. I would get picked up by her after school and then go and hang out at the salon she worked at for an hour or two before we went home. The card shop, which was actually just a glass case with singles and a small book shelf with boosters on it, was inside of a large barn structure that housed a trio of netted batting cages. It's kind of a surreal memory, barely looking over the edge of the glass case shuffling through long boxes of cards. The smell of cardboard and the damp concrete of the floor mixing. The gruff long haired man behind the counter blankly watching the practitioners, asking questions between the music of the bat connecting with the ball.
Back in those days card shops were pretty common, more so than now. I lived across the street from one as a child and my dad would take me to visit at least three other in town. These card shops specialized in sports cards, a market that was booming at the time, a market that eventually popped. The first full fledged game store I went to, the barn housed counter, so aptly named The Batcave was a strange amalgamation of the soon to be extinct card shops. They were selling Magic the Gathering and offered the chance to actually hit some balls rather than looking at them on cardboard.
Eventually there was an addition added to the side of the batting cage and the display case extended in to a full fledged game shop. It happened very quickly, I don't know the history of how it happened but the man that sold me the ten cent pieces of card board was gone. Two new, more professional, men took over his mantle as card board slinger. I spent many years at that shop, spending my mom and dad's money on Magic, Pokemon and Star Wars. It was during this period that I met a girl in Spanish class, I was enamored by her. She liked Dragon Ball Z and Werewolf the Apocalypse, I knew the first thing but not the second. Shyly talking to her I found out it was a role playing game, a game like Dungeons and Dragons.
My connections with D&D were very strange and sporadic before this. My first real exposure to it was through a show that aired on Sci-fi (pre syfy age) called Dream Makers or Makers of Dreams or something a long those lines. It was an hour history of TSR and the people that created their products. It had people, that I now read about in role playing history books, talking about their contributions and the plans for the future. I honestly don't remember much about the show aside from a shot of the TSR business front and Gary Gygax. (I watched it again on youtube a couple years ago and I still don't remember a lot about it.) Mr. Gygax was an amazing sales person. After the show I was extremely amped to try this game out. (Oddly enough Gygax was long gone from TSR by the time this show aired. Do I remember him being in it when he actually wasn't? No idea...) It wasn't until many years later when I met the werewolf girl in middle school that I got the chance to roll some dice.
One of my best friends at the time concocted a plan to get the girl to come and hang out with us so I could attempt to charm her (I didn't). He asked her, a school chum and myself to come over and play his D&D starter set. I stayed the night at his house the night before and could barely sleep. I was so excited to both play D&D and to hang out with the girl of my 12 year old dreams. I got up early, while my friend was still asleep and thumbed through his starter box. I read each character's description and studied their small blue plastic representations. I finally settled on the half-elf ranger, who I was informed years later was Tanis from the Dragonlance stories. Finally the afternoon sun shown through the bedroom window, everyone had their character sheets in front of them and my friend sat behind his screen. We got our quest and were sent to an abandoned mansion on a hill top. We explored several rooms, killed a couple kobolds and found a secret passage. I was finally trying D&D and...I hated it. Eventually my friend who was running the game realized we were all bored and so the Teletubies show up and attack us. We quit right then and there.
About a month later (or was it before D&D? I forget, 99% sure it was after) the girl invited us all to her house to try Werewolf the Apocolypse. D&D didn't work out but maybe another game would capture my imagination. We sat around her room for hours making characters and then...we played for 15 minutes. She apologized and said she had only played online and that it was weird in person or something along those lines.
I went back to playing card games exclusively for awhile. I tried out D&D a couple of times, still disliking it as much as I did the first time. Then a cardboard strandee showed up at the local game store. I had begun hanging out at a closer game store, becoming a regular and later in my teenage years an employee. I asked the manager what the strandee was for, it depicted a man clad in armor wielding a sword and shield (one I own now!). There were several pamphlets for the new product. The manager informed me that a new edition of D&D was coming out and they were pushing it pretty hard. The pamphlets were conversion rules for earlier editions in to the third (in reality probably closer to the fifth) iteration of the game. I shrugged it off and moved on.
The books eventually came out and I mostly ignored the release. Then that all changed. My friend talked me in to playing a beginners session with this middle aged couple that were regulars at the shop. They wanted to introduce new players to the game and were running a mid level adventure. The adventure was one that they had ran many time before in different editions of the game and new players found satisfying. This was 15 years or so ago and I don't remember the adventure all that well. I know I played a dwarven fighter who had a magical ring of the ram. I also remember that I was the only player who survived the final encounter with a dragon. A DRAGON! A DRAGON LIKE SMAUG! I transformed from a awkward pre-teen to the hero of the table. This is was Gygax was (probably) talking about on TV and this is what I was craving.
From batting cages, to girls, to Teletubies, cardboard men and dragons I found myself participating in a hobby that would change my life. So what makes me an authority on table top gaming? Nothing really, i'm a gamer like everyone else that's a gamer. I just hope my stories and tips are entertaining and useful to others. I mainly want to use this as a non-linear diary of sorts, publicly posting stories as I remember them.
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