My Introduction to Role-playing...

So you've decided you'd like to be involved in an RPG of some kind?

Great, your around at a wonderful time when there's hundreds to choose from and a myriad of resources at your disposal...some of us were unfortunately far less fortunate...but we got by, lol.

My introduction to RPG's (of sorts) was via Fighting Fantasy's range of game-books...

There were more than those three...these were just the first ones...

For those of you who are unaware, these were a series of books where at the end of each part of the story you would be given a choice (go left or right down the t-junction, stab the orc or try to sneak past, open the box or don't and so on...) and each choice would give you a different page number or paragraph number to turn to and then the story would continue based on that decision. You also had some basic stats to roll for (Skill, Stamina and Luck) which you would have to roll against at various points. If you failed (more often than not by dying hideously...) you started the book at the beginning and tried again making different decisions...of course if you were of the masochistic persuasion you could make the same choices again and die in the same hideous manner...

 As an added bonus the art was by Russ Nicholson...

This was somewhat of a revelation for me as a child and the idea that (as the books byline stated...) that I was the hero was certainly very appealing to a nine year old boy and I used to eagerly await the next book in the series...obviously the wait seemed like forever at that age but to be fair they were probably releasing one every few months, lol. I had managed to introduce several of my friends to the concept but it was still very much an individual activity until several years later when the people at Fighting Fantasy released a book showing you how to play more traditional RPG's with a number of people playing various heroes and another being (effectively) the book...or GM as we learned they were called...

These were my first introduction to the world of RPG's...well...except for 'Out of the Pit' which was more of a bestiary...

Of course 'Dungeons and Dragons' and the like had already been around for a few years but to be honest none of us had heard of it....

The system was basically the same as the original gamebooks and there were no classes or careers to choose from. Basically you were a bunch of fighters and despite there being some gamebooks containing rules for wizards they weren't adapted for the RPG...well...not in the first book at least. Anyway,  I managed to rope my few interested friends into playing the first adventure from the book...Unfortunately every-one else wanted to be the ones running around the dungeon hitting things with swords so I got stuck with the GM job as it was my idea. To be honest we felt a bit silly at first but it rapidly became a strange kind of fun...so much so in fact that we rapidly exhausted the two prepared scenarios from the book and I was forced to try my hand at writing a scenario myself. It didn't end particularly well as despite my attempts at pushing the adventurers down the path I intended they kept wanting to investigate areas I hadn't written, ignoring the old man with the beard who had the key they needed and becoming strangely obsessed with the potential location of gold pieces...

It was only later in my journey as a role-player playing DandD that I learned that the real point of an adventure was to kill things, steal their stuff and acquire better weapons...to use in to kill bigger things, steal their stuff and acquire better weapons...and so on...

It's lucky that the system didn't have anything approaching experience points or they'd most likely have got sidetracked by that as well. The next book (The Riddling Reaver) had a pretty crappy magic system which was basically the one from the gamebook 'Citadel of Chaos' which worked fine in a stand alone system but failed a bit in an actual RPG environment. Basically you picked a number of spells (based on a 'Magic' stat) and only had access to that many till the end of the adventure meaning you could pick three fire spells, two stamina spells and four creature copy spells (so they were more like equipment options than actual magic) but had to hope there was no need for a luck spell, lol. This worked fine in a gamebook where trial and error was an entirely viable path to success but less so in a free-form environment...

I also discovered that I can only do one voice (my own) so everything we encountered had a lisp and was only differentiated by being louder or quieter than the person they encountered a moment ago...unless you count the odd racial stereotype for which I make no apologies as a) I was ten years old and b) this was the eighties where every-one on TV who wasn't a white man was a stereotype of some kind...no seriously...look at a British sit-com from the eighties and see what I had as reference material, lol.

We blundered on in this rather limited way until about 1989 when the 'Dungeoneer' book appeared and gave us 'Advanced Fighting Fantasy'...

 This system has recently been updated and re-published but I'll be talking about the original version...because I'm old...

Though probably not 'advanced' to the Dungeons and Dragons players reading this it was for us a significant improvement. It had a much better magic system (you could actually learn spells...), there were different Skills and a system for advancing your character through earned experience points as well as a few more refinements. Even after all these years I'd still put 'Blacksand' up there as one of the best source-books for any system I've ever played...which was pleasantly useful for those occasions that I got stuck with the GMing job...

...about GMing...

There are many areas in life where people excel due to natural talent. Some people make great leaders, brilliant chefs, have a natural flair for art, etc. Certain abilities obviously lend themselves to the role of being a GM and I have quite a few of them but I don't possess one of the quite important ones. Don't get me wrong...I can write a good story, adapt when players wonder off the path, do a good line in hand-outs, have the kind of memory that annoyingly knows every stat and bit of background from my chosen system and am not unlike-able in an odd sort of way but I don't have what I suppose you could call 'a flair for the dramatic'. I can write it...I just don't 'act' it particularly excitingly, lol. I therefore tend to limit myself to one-offs or small campaigns when the regular GM feels like a session or two off where I can play to my strengths before any-one notices my many weaknesses...put it this way...there's a lot more combat than chatting...

Anyway...

Though my start wasn't particularly auspicious those books introduced me to several important RPG concepts such as character sheets, equipment options, stat checks, as well as making me paranoid about opening any kind of box, drinking anything from a coloured bottle and not being in any way surprised when there's a little old man running a shop or library in the middle of a dungeon...

I then discovered girls and beer (amongst other things...)...both of which sidetracked me for a while...I'd also left school and despite claiming I'd 'keep in touch' with my school friends (the ones I RPG'd with at least) I didn't. Some time later while having a chat with a gentleman I happened to be sharing a table with in a student drinking establishment I mentioned RPG's as an extension of a conversation we were having about movies. He introduced me to Vampire the Masquerade and a girl called Trixie...only one of which resulted in what you might call a long term relationship...I also had to get used to the term 'Storyteller' rather than GM. Vampire the Masquerade (VtM from now on) was an entirely different experience for a number of reasons...

I wanted to be a Lasombra but was told that I had to be one of the Camarilla clans even though we were starting our campaign before the Camarilla technically existed as he had a century spanning campaign in mind...I therefore randomly picked Gangrel instead...

The system was far more rules intensive than I'd experienced (admittedly that experience was somewhat limited) and the overall feel was a lot darker and more 'adult' I suppose. It also introduced me to a new concept in character design that had both positives and negatives...allow me to explain...

In Fighting Fantasy gamebooks there's usually three stats which are generated by rolling a D6 or 2D6 and adding it to a default value. So you end up with a Skill and Luck stat ranging from 7-12 and a Stamina stat (basically the amount of damage you can take) ranging from 13-24. You'll be amazed how many people claim to have ended up with a stat line of 12/24/12 when you don't watch them roll the dice. VtM on the other hand had a system of character design whereby you had a number of points to spend on the stats you chose and which of those groups of stats got the most points allocated to it. There was also a system where you could take certain 'Flaws' in order to gain extra points to spend.

It was at this point the concept of 'min/maxing' was introduced to me...

 I only had enough points left to make one leg charismatic...

Coming from a fairly simple system and where background stories were pretty much which town your fighter came from it seemed logical to me to take basic stats and skills that complimented each other and a few useless flaws so I had more points to spend on decent combat abilities and I ended up with a Gangrel who even werewolves feared to irritate and was rather pleased with myself. I don't do this now of course (well not that often) but back then it was pretty much what I thought role-playing was as there were very few social encounters in the Fighting Fantasy world that couldn't be avoided if you had a big enough sword and a skill of 12...I was also introduced to the concept of a GM...sorry...Storyteller who was more than capable of punishing min/maxers or those with a one dimensional character...

As you can see there are slightly more things to worry about in the system on the right...

So after discovering that being able to chat coherently was occasionally useful in a game system where most inter vampire interactions were political as well as being taught in a variety of ways that the need to climb, swim, or in fact use any of the other twenty 'Abilities' that I thought I wouldn't be needing come up every session...whereas there would be no combat whatsoever three sessions out of four...and so on...in short my lack of character development was used to punish me on a regular basis. Strangely though instead of putting me off this in fact taught me how to role-play and I ended up using the same character on and off for a decade...

Due to the fact that my character had a very limited range of effective Attributes, useful Abilities and Disciplines I was forced to (as a character) spend a lot of time bullshitting my way through situations and (much to the irritation of my fellow Kindred) getting us involved in jobs where I got to claw things to death rather than have a three hour chat because quite frankly my character got bored in meetings. This pleased our Storyteller as we were almost perpetually making enemies or getting into trouble...okay...I was making enemies and getting into trouble...and those characters with more than one point in Charisma or Manipulation were trying to get us out of it. This of course wouldn't have worked without our rather talented Storyteller though and I'd have to say that from this point on I had a preference for balanced characters rather than one-dimensional ones...

I was also introduced to another new concept a this point...female role-players...This was a bit of a shock for me as I was under the impression that girls didn't role-play...outside of the occasional adolescent fantasy of mine that is, lol.

Well...they obviously do because two of them were...it's just that it was new to me, lol. Of course it hadn't occurred to me that the reason I never did any RPG sessions with ladies was most likely because I'd never actually invited any to a game session for a number of reasons though the main one is that none of the girls I know had ever expressed any interest in the genre and I mistakenly took this as meaning that girls didn't. One of the two ladies also further confused the issue for me by playing a male character as (and I believe I'm quoting directly) "I'm not playing the vampire equivalent of some enormous breasted, sex elf, with a chain-mail bra and uncomfortable pants that the rest of you twats keep wanting to either rescue or bang..."

I'm not sure what her issue was though as female fantasy archetypes like that were obviously very rare...my picture folder of them (for example) has barely a thousand pictures in it...

VtM has an overall dark tone and I found that the role-playing process was (for want of a better descriptive term) 'heavier' than I was used to and our Storyteller wasn't shy about covering adult themes so the overall experience was significantly different for me and though 'enjoyable' isn't the best way of expressing some of the sex and violence that occurred it did make for some interesting adventures. We did play on and off with the same characters for a decade so it was obviously an experience that we felt like repeating, lol.

During that time we dipped into other game systems but I never really liked Dungeons and Dragons that much as I found the system was somewhat unwieldy and unnecessarily rules heavy and effectively I found that I didn't really enjoy playing a 'murder hobo'*. I also briefly introduced them all to the above discussed Fighting Fantasy system and confused them all by having absolutely no politics to worry about whatsoever and being able to kill things without asking permission from some ass-hole first, lol. I suppose I should qualify my earlier statement about 'Murder hobos' by saying that it's okay for a quick break but not something I want to do with any regularity.

*A term I believe that originated from Von to describe that whole 'kill the wizard/dragon/goblin and steal their stuff then move onto the next wizard/dragon/goblin' concept...

White Wolf (the makers of VtM) eventually decided to actually reach the 'end of the world' that the background material kept mentioning and in 2004 (ish) reset the world and relaunched the World of Darkness (the core book) and changed Masquerade to Requiem. We gave it a brief go but by this point I think we were all a little bit sick of Vampires though many people just ignored the book featuring the vampire apocalypse and kept playing the 'old' world of darkness rather than the 'new'...and still do...

I then had a significant break from role-playing games as real life got in the way...I'll skim over this mostly regrettable portion of my life as It's not really relevant to the article but I developed a dependency on several not very legal chemical substances and one legal one...and then met a wonderful lady who persuaded me that at the very least giving up the illegal ones might be a good idea. It then became quite important that I had something to occupy myself so I started playing with toy soldiers...

Some time afterwards the gentlemen at Fantasy Flight Games came up with a new RPG system set in the same toy soldier world of 40K (Deathwatch was new, Dark Heresy was already about) and after some local discussion we decided to give Deathwatch a go...

The core system had some issues in a number of areas though the primary one was weapon balance. Bolter weapons were WAY overpowered to the point that our Devastator Marines default Heavy Bolter could pretty much kill anything and standard Boltguns were also balanced poorly...they overcame this with an 'optional' update later which every GM promptly made compulsory much to the annoyance of the Marine players who now had to actually think about weapon choices, lol. Anyway...after we got into it the system was enjoyable but that had a lot to do with decent GMing and a general fun atmosphere due to the people involved rather than the system itself in my opinion. It's a decent enough system...it just needs an experienced person at the head of the table (imo) given the somewhat one dimensional nature of the average Space Marine. You really end up role-playing your Chapter rather than an individual though this was somewhat overcome if you used the later rules that allowed you to create custom Chapters...

This occupied most of our Saturdays for a significant period of time until we did a mission where we had to destroy a Bloodthirster (One of the most powerful creatures in both the 40K universe and the RPG system) and we basically exterminated it and a horde of other daemons with-out even breaking a sweat and decided that perhaps retirement might be in order. We then moved onto Dark Heresy which had exactly the opposite problem in that a group of starting characters would have trouble taking out an ill equipped mugger...

We only outnumber the unarmed creature two to one...fetch the others...

Our Dark Heresy Group had a blog that detailed most of their exploits that can be found here. The missions are down the right hand side (earliest at the bottom) and the various character profiles are on the left. Unfortunately we had some issues when we hit the top end of Rank 8 as characters and were required to use the Ascension book (which expands the system into more advanced careers) but our general opinion of it was that it seemed like they'd only really thought about Rank 9 as after that character development was random at best...This was somewhat unfortunate as I had about twenty mission pre-written...it was the first time I'd ever planned ahead...

The plan was to switch to another of Fantasy Flight Games's RPG systems (Black Crusade) which centred on the 'evil' forces of the Warhammer 40K universe but my new work schedule made it difficult to commit at that particular time and by the point at which I was free they had advanced a bit too far with the campaign to join in...not that I was asked, lol.

There was then another gap...nothing illegal caused this one though, lol.

I had at this point abandoned 40K because the power creep was ridiculous, the latest rule-set was so full of holes it could be broken by any-one with basic reading skills and every new codex seemed to go down the 'stuff that was good last time and you already own the models for now sucks but this really expensive new model kit is fucking awesome...' path. I therefore moved onto Malifaux and Warmachine...mainly Malifaux...and at some point during that time the following happened...

So an RPG set in the world of Malifaux piqued the interest of many people locally and many of us pledged to it. This rather usefully meant that we were sure there would be a fair sized group of locals with the resources and the inclination to play...in theory at least.

I won't cover recent ground with our adventures through the breach as they can be found in several recent blog posts that cover both the basics of character creation and our first few adventures but for those of you too lazy to search for them they can be found here, here and here while the character creation article is located here.

I've also been invited to my first taste of an Iron Kingdoms RPG but that's yet to begin...

So that's three decades of role-playing condensed into a rambling blog post that most of you probably didn't reach the bottom of and that ironically I spent more time writing than anything I've written before...

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.