Jon, my former virtual landlord (and still host for my original blog archives), sent along a link to this article. Knowing Jon’s distaste for such things, he must have been grimacing when he clicked Send:
I was initiated into the mysteries of gaming via a grade school classmate’s copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. A mysterious artifact, this red box contained a set of waxy, dull-edged dice and a couple of thin rulebooks. Designed to be played on its own or as an introduction to the complexities of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the Basic Set-or “Red Box” as it came to be known by gamers-became the key to an entire universe of adventure and magic. Little did I know at the time this would be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with gaming and fantasy in general.
With the news that D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast intends to release a new edition of the introductory rule set-in a red box no less-I thought it might be fun to ask a few writers about their own early experiences with the world’s best known fantasy role-playing game.
My first experience with the game was in high school, where a classmate found out that I was into wargames and wanted to “help me” by diverting me away from such evil warmongering stuff. His gaming methadone involved mass slaughter of beings and beasts in a “dungeon” he’d created. About a dozen of us were introduced to the game in the same session . . . let’s just say that it didn’t go terribly well. With no experienced players in the pack, we specialized in aggravating the Dungeon Master (the person running the game for us). After about an hour, the DM was deliberately killing us off as fast as he could.
I played several other role playing game systems after that, but never found one I was comfortable with. I ended up “rolling my own” by basing it on Metagaming’s Melee and Wizard games (both designs originally by the great Steve Jackson) for the combat and magic systems. I found this worked best for my occasional RPG sessions, as I hate-with-a-passion being in games with rules lawyers (the archetypical one has memorized all the rulebooks, tables, supplements, and so on). If I don’t explain why something is happening, they have to concentrate on what to do about it instead of getting into heated arguments about die roll modifiers and such.
In the early 1980’s, I ended up working at Mr. Gameway’s Ark in Toronto (which appears to be Google-proof . . . or doesn’t have more than occasional mentions in mailing list conversations), which was the largest independent game store in town. I got to read the rules of dozens of RPG systems, but perhaps I was spoiled for choice . . . I never did end up playing any.
