Mark Causey over on Runic Empyrean is doing an interesting thing, reconstructing his Gaming History with insights as to what stayed with him from his earliest gaming experiences. Mine is about a thousand times more verbose and long as hell. Sorry about that.

Genesis

My first gaming product — not counting legos — was the esteemed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, working off of the abyssmal Paladium house system. Tangentially, I’m constantly surprised by how many gamers I’ve met for whom this was their gateway product. In any case, my friend Robert bought the book not for the game rules but for the wealth of illustrations inside, because at the time he and I spent inordinate amounts of time drawing the Ninja Turtles ourselves. It took us over a month to say, “Hey wait a minute, this book is, like, a game that you can play.” And thus was an obsession born.

Despite being built off of the class-based and joylessly uncustomizable Palladium system, mutant animals had a pool of “Bio-Energy” points that you could spend on cool stuff. That was wicked fun, and I no doubt made about five times more characters than I ever actually played. Sadly, I cannot remember the first game we played or the first character that we made, but one of my first and most cherished characters was a mutant porcupine because Spine Armor was seriously and disastrously overpowered and broken. In a world where the biggest sword did 3d6 damage, my porcupine’s body block did 4d6. His name was, cleverly, Spike. On the other hand, which animal you were was determined by rolling percentile dice and comparing to a big chart. Base attributes, too, were randomly generated by rolling 3d6 seven times. Our house rule was that you had to roll your attributes, animal, and background with dice… but there was nothing stopping you from rolling and rolling and rolling until you got what you wanted. I also remember turning the dice to the result I wanted while Robert’s back was turned; I’m positive he did the same to me on more than one occasion, as well. Amusingly, I found my old copy of TMNT&OS recently, and at the top of those four pages of percentile charts was one little solitary line that we must have overlooked: “Players can choose one of the following or roll percentile dice…” Of course, at thirteen, rolling on tables was fun, and besides, the tables were much larger than that one little line, so obviously they must have been more important, right?

The combat system was baroque; the skills were bland; the experience system was a source of never-ending exploitation for us, and the characters never really did advance as fast as we wanted them to. There was this big long list of “Things that get XP” that ranged from ‘using a skill - 25xp’ to ’self-sacrifice to rescue a large number of people - 1000xp’. One of the starter adventures in the book presented a hostage situation, and so of course that qualified for the jackpot thousand XP, and we ran every new character through that adventure first, until we knew it like the backs of our hands. I could probably still run it from memory. On the other hand, one of my favorite old broken memories of that game was when Robert insisted that he bring in his Kangaroo from the post-apocalyptic Australian sourcebook to the modern-day setting that we were playing in. Because we were in seventh grade and he whined, he was allowed and we were annoyed at him. After the big badguys were dealt with, he also insisted on rolling his Land Navigation skill to get that coveted 25xp. He failed the roll — and so I, as the almighty GM, ruled that the kangaroo was lost getting back to Australia and he could never play that character again.

Robert was into comic books, and also picked up Palladium’s Heroes Unlimited which was for superheroes and used the same system. There was no BIO-E to spend, however, just long lists of powers and abilities from which you were allowed to pick once or twice. Outside of the superspy organization rules (more point-buy building), the game never really got off the ground.

What I Took Away From Palladium: Spending points to build a character (rather than select one item from a list) is fun and allows for all sorts of customization and tinkering. More abstractly, no premise is too silly to create enjoyable play — Teenage Fucking Ninja Turtles!

Exodus

And then one day we went to the comic store that was our supplier, money in our hands for some new Palladium book (although not the Fantasy books, because they had demons in them, and we were good Christian boys), but lo and behold — there were no Palladium books to be had. None that we didn’t already have, at least. And so somebody went and bought the GURPS Basic Set. As I recall, we mocked him, whoever it was that bought it, for wasting his money. About two weeks later we were playing.

Because point-buy builds, man! Everything was available and bought with points! Then we found GURPS Supers and Oh-Em-Gee there was even more shit to buy with points! And then we got GURPS Vehicles and Jesus Christ, you could build vehicles and superships and shit, too! If you got GURPS Space you could build planets and solar systems! Amusingly, GURPS Space also had rules for building civilizations and cultures, but I never really got into that — mostly because I don’t think I understood what they were talking about. What’s the difference between someplace being an Oligarchy and another one being a Dictatorship? Either they’re the bad guys or they’re not, and they either have the McGuffin or not, and what matters is what keen spaceships and superpowers and stuff they had to defend it. Every single game was Go Fetch the McGuffin. Every game.

We played GURPS Fantasy (I can still draw most of the Yrth map) a lot. Later, we “branched out” and played in fantasy settings of our own creation. We played GURPS Space a little — the combat rules were just too deadly and it was just too easy to die. We played GURPS Time Travel (and the adventure where you go back to the Titanic to rescue some people while the team from your rival future timeline tries to rescue other people is still one of the best published adventures I have ever seen). We played lots of GURPS Supers. There was always some monolithic metaplot built into the campaigns by the GMs, and the entire world was in dire jeopardy and only the PCs could save it. Most commonly, however, we would get about thirty percent of the way towards saving the world, and then lose interest in favor of something else — cause there was just way too many neat options available. Somehow, it never occured to us to write up short-run campaigns. Without ever having read The Lord of the Rings, we wanted to create these big epics with twenty-point plot arcs and take our characters from 100 points to… some indeterminate number that no doubt represented total badassery.

My brother got ahold of Shadowrun around this time, and while I never actually played it — its character generation was so arcane compared to GURPS as to appear downright stupid — it certainly affected our GURPS play. There was also, as I seem to recall, a Sega Genesis game that we concurrently obsessed over; I’m not sure which one came into our field of interest first. One of the last campaigns we played in the GURPS days was a very cyberpunkish fantasy (we called it manapunk) set in GURPS Tredroy. For a fleeting moment, I (being the GM) had a good go at incorporating mood and feel and a certain vibe to the otherwise vanilla-and-concrete flavor of GURPS.

What I Took Away from GURPS: Tools to build worlds are more useful than the worlds themselves. Rephrased, player creativity is more fun for players than the game designer’s creativity. GURPS’ distinction between the Power (fire damage at range) and the Special Effects (it’s a green fireball) has also stayed with me. And lastly, universal currency for character creation and advancement, a lesson I didn’t fully appreciate until later.

“Growing Up”

And then I went to college. A nice Christian college where I was somewhat concerned about openly looking for other gamers, lest I be labelled as a devil-worshipper, or worse, a weirdo. Besides, all the gamers that I did happen to find were all into D&D, which I knew was utter crap, having no character points to spend and using levels and classes and other forms of total bullshit. I actually might have drifted away from roleplaying games altogether if it was not for a very strange confluence of unrelated items: (a) I grew up thirty minutes away from Disneyland and my family had had annual passes for a couple years before college, (b) I met a girl who was all into this online roleplaying thing called MUSHing, and (c) there was this MUSH called Dark Metal, set in a post-apocalyptic future Los Angeles… complete with an abandoned Disneyland. Dark Metal was, strictly speaking, very near the lowest rung of slum you could get to in MUSH terms. It was also running a combination of Cyberpunk 2020 and… wait for it… World of Darkness. Yeah, there went my soul.

At first I was pretty much an asshole on these games. The players took everything so seriously that it was amusing to, for instance, create a pair of Malkavians with my friend Ben, name them Jesus and Nicholas, and then have a loud fight in the middle of the street outside a popular hangout (hint: Nicholas believed he was a Saint). My Cultist of Ecstacy “Austin” was also amusing, in a disrupt-everyone-else’s-fun sort of way. Eventually, though, we fell into the trap of trying to actually accomplish something on Dark Metal, and the steel jaws of the trap snapped shut. I bought the Mage book, and then… yeah, every other Mage book available, and eventually started in on Changeling, too. In any case, our quest to accomplish something, as the Mage book implies the game is all about, led us to run headlong into the double-thick brick wall of Game Staff and Game Rules. In a game about changing the world, Mage offers you no method for actually, you know, changing the world. And the staff of any MUSH is invested in the world they have created over literally years of play. Nothing that we could do in-character ever significantly changed anything — not even dropping a house-sized meteor on the bar that housed the Elysium.

When game staff got so damn tired of us agitators and actually banned me off of Dark Metal (a staffer’s PC happened to own that bar), I migrated to other MUSHes. This is actually a little tidbit of MUSHness that I didn’t go into in my prior article A Short History of MUSHdom — the migratory nature of MUSH players. A typical MUSH has a lifecycle of about three years, with a rise in population and activity, a crest, and then a crash. I cannot even remember the names of all the MUSHes that I played on through the five or six years that I MUSHed. Nearly all of them were World of Darkness games, and I played almost exclusively Mage, and when it became patently obvious that it was impossible to actually “change the world”, I moved onto Changeling. For years I was searching for the perfect game — a combination of which games were allowed (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, Changeling, and *shudder* Mummy, Demon, etc), which house rules were in use, what other players were participating, who was on game staff, what the game world was like, what kind of “plots” were in use, and the like. On more than one occasion I joined staff to try and turn an existing game into the perfect game, and on a few occasions I actually built and ran MUSHes from the ground up. Curiously, I never did find the perfect game.

What I did find were people: lots and lots of people. And while I am sort of jumping the gun on the “What I Took Away” part, over time I learned something: these people are insane. Red-eyed, slavering, canon-thumping, rules-mongering, social-game-dickering, rhetorically extravagant, bankrupt of anything resembling restraint, obsessive, petty, and abusive psychos. You would be too, in their place. Consider: there’s perhaps two hundred World of Darkness MUSH players, which is not that many. Most of the World of Darkness books present a setting which is at worst schizoid and at best it offers many options. Individual players pick and choose among the options for what they like the best, and to them this is what the game is “about”. Throw them all together with absolutely no reliable means of communicating or negotiating their expectations. Shake well… for three to ten years. To say that Agenda Clashes were common is like saying Africa has a little problem with AIDS. Taken individually or in small groups, most MUSHers were kind, considerate, well-meaning, and creative people. In fact, ‘cliques’ of like-minded players were perhaps the only viable means of playing MUSHes for any length of time. Going ‘out on the grid’ was fucking dangerous — because, as I said before, those people were insane, and you were too once you had to start dealing with them.

Round about this time, my wife (the girl who got me into MUSHing) pointed me at the Introduction to GNS essays, and they made perfect, immediate sense to me — not necessarily the labels, but the phenomenon — people want different stuff from a game, some games work well for some things, and others don’t. And outside of the occasional whackjob, most gamers are kind, creative people who simply don’t have the words or tools to effectively communicate what it is they want to their fellow gamers.

What I Took Away from WoD MUSHing:
Seeing players as people and recognizing their sometimes distressing social situations as the source of their discontent. How to present (but not implement) a theme or mood that permeates a game. Making the game about the real world — however obliquely — and not simple power trips, can create player investment. Lastly and most importantly, constructing a game as a social situation of people interacting, rather than as some sort of simulation using human brains as coprocessors.

In Which We Kill Tribe 8

I should also add in that period of time where I was writing for Dream Pod 9’s Tribe 8. This actually overlapped portions of the above segment. You can be a gamer, playing lots of games and buying lots of books and even following your favorite writers, but once you step across the threshold to actually designing games, your entire understanding of your own hobby changes. This goes doubly so if you start working for an established game company on an established game line. You’ve heard the thing about laws and sausages, right? That applies to books, too.

A group of friends and I wrote what amounts to a year’s worth of a game line, which was five (six?) books, both sourcebooks and campaign materials relating to the game’s metaplot. We were given assignments and parameters; we wrote within those parameters. We didn’t always agree with those paramters; we wrote within them anyway. We dealt with lots of fans and even talked with some players, too. We heard what they said that they wanted and we saw their reaction when they got what was published. We also dealt with our fellow writers on the game line — you know all the people who bicker on RPGnet about what a game is “supposed” to be about? Yeah, the writers are having the same arguments, and that influences what gets into the books. It’s not uncommon for the writers’ arguments to become the fanboys’ arguments once the books come out. As I mentioned before, we wrote what we were told to; some outspoken fans really really really didn’t like it. They blamed us. The beleaguered game line floundered the next year. Hence, “we killed Tribe 8.”

One of Tribe 8’s most intriguing elements was its metaplot, built into the game line and revealed in a sequence of campaign books. I like to term it an ‘experiment’ these days, because it failed, which tells you something about how gaming and the gaming market works. When we were writing, pretty far into the metaplot, we had lots of difficulties with the fact that folks who had been playing the game through the first three or four campaign books had wreaked changes that were not envisioned by the writers of those books. Consequently, when we wanted to involve some of the setting’s characters, the campaigns at home may have already made them dead or disgraced or leaders of renegade religions or the like. This was, basically, the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast writ large: the game company could not “control the story” if the players at home were “controlling the characters.” The games diverged until the campaign books were all but unusable, and stopped selling. However, the games that I played in with my fellow writers, who knew large portions of that metaplot and where it was going, diverged even further and made profound changes to the setting. I’ve only recently started to realize the implications of that one.

What I Took Away From Tribe 8: Game Design is a terrible, terrible business to get into, with impossible expectations and little reward. A game designer does not, will not, and cannot dictate the experience of play at the table. One useful technique I learned: we made sure that every single thing that was put into our books was a “plot hook” (an imprecise term; now I use flags, situation, et al) and could be used in an actual game. Let me repeat that: every single thing printed could be used in an actual game.

Gettin All Indie

I’ve skipped over lots of one-shots and games that didn’t really impact me very much — I’ve played in exactly one D&D game, where I played a halfling corsair in Al-Qadim, with his dual scimitars dragging along the ground behind him. I played very briefly in a MERP game, and then convinced the GM to convert the entire thing to GURPS. The big ones, though, were TMNT, GURPS, World of Darkness, and Tribe 8.

These days, I’m fiddling with indie games, and the reasons why and my reactions to these games are strewn all over the rest of this blog. Further, reminiscing on something that I’m in the middle of is kind of silly. So no ‘What I Took Away’ here, since I’m still in the process of pulling the interesting stuff off the walls. Suffice to say, I am enjoying these games far more and far more regularly than I enjoyed any gaming I’ve done beforehand. Here’s hoping I continue to learn from these games, and am able to apply what I take away to even better gaming yet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Gaming Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.