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Tell me about your first time.
Sort of a rambling post…
While Elizabeth was attending a birthday party yesterday, I took the opportunity to walk about the neighbourhood around my old elementary school. It was curious to see what has changed and what has not. One thing that made me smile a bit was a hand painted “Beware of Dog” sign that’s been on a house near my old school for as long as I can recall. The sign is intended to look fierce, but in actually looks like a giant, grinning happy puppy.
I poked around the back of the school, where remain the remnants of the metal stairs where I would play in elaborate Doc Savage and Doctor Who imagination games in the 4th and 5th grade, as well as the terribly rusted baseball… fence… thing… that was installed when I was in 3rd grade. It served as a “forcefield array” and castle in our various roleplays.
I then drove out to Westdale to visit J&F Hobbies, the dingiest and strangest of RPG outlets in Hamilton, a little store operating out of an odd nook. Much work had been done since my last visit. The owner seems to have thrown his lot in with an airplane model builder, and various model kits and a tidy construction space now occupy the back half of the store. The airplane model area is much more presentable than huge pile of moldering game books and dusty minis. I had some idle chit-chat with the owner, and the fellow who seems to be running the airplane section, as well as a customer, whom I recognized as the (past?) president of the Hamilton military gamers group.
The game store had acquired some “new” stock at some point, in the form of old unsold stock from elsewhere. I snagged a 1st edition of Shadowrun for $15. The cover is crisp, the pages are white, and it looks as though it came straight from the display rack at Games-A-Lot in the basement of the Eatons Centre, circa 1989, where I first encountered Shadowrun. The condition is so good, you’d almost think it was a reprint, except everything on the title page says it’s the 1989 edition from FASA.
Shadowrun came out when I was 15, and it was so cool it actually depressed me a little, because I was nowhere as cool as anyone in the game, and never would be. In other RPGs, you were making characters for worlds where coolness was simply not an issue. Either you were operating in a universe where power was everything, or the quality of cool was informed by standards that had no connection to the real world. A half-cloak is cool in Star Wars. Purple spandex is de rigueur in Champions. But the styles in Shadowrun were a fairly close approximation to the real world, and 15-year-old game nerds like us were painfully unable to deal with that.
Possibly it would not surprise you, then, to learn that my first Shadowrun character wore an aviator jacket over a red and white track suit. And sometimes, he wore a cowboy hat.
*cringes*
So, on that note, tell me about your first RPG characters, for whatever game.
Please. :)
While Elizabeth was attending a birthday party yesterday, I took the opportunity to walk about the neighbourhood around my old elementary school. It was curious to see what has changed and what has not. One thing that made me smile a bit was a hand painted “Beware of Dog” sign that’s been on a house near my old school for as long as I can recall. The sign is intended to look fierce, but in actually looks like a giant, grinning happy puppy.
I poked around the back of the school, where remain the remnants of the metal stairs where I would play in elaborate Doc Savage and Doctor Who imagination games in the 4th and 5th grade, as well as the terribly rusted baseball… fence… thing… that was installed when I was in 3rd grade. It served as a “forcefield array” and castle in our various roleplays.
I then drove out to Westdale to visit J&F Hobbies, the dingiest and strangest of RPG outlets in Hamilton, a little store operating out of an odd nook. Much work had been done since my last visit. The owner seems to have thrown his lot in with an airplane model builder, and various model kits and a tidy construction space now occupy the back half of the store. The airplane model area is much more presentable than huge pile of moldering game books and dusty minis. I had some idle chit-chat with the owner, and the fellow who seems to be running the airplane section, as well as a customer, whom I recognized as the (past?) president of the Hamilton military gamers group.
The game store had acquired some “new” stock at some point, in the form of old unsold stock from elsewhere. I snagged a 1st edition of Shadowrun for $15. The cover is crisp, the pages are white, and it looks as though it came straight from the display rack at Games-A-Lot in the basement of the Eatons Centre, circa 1989, where I first encountered Shadowrun. The condition is so good, you’d almost think it was a reprint, except everything on the title page says it’s the 1989 edition from FASA.
Shadowrun came out when I was 15, and it was so cool it actually depressed me a little, because I was nowhere as cool as anyone in the game, and never would be. In other RPGs, you were making characters for worlds where coolness was simply not an issue. Either you were operating in a universe where power was everything, or the quality of cool was informed by standards that had no connection to the real world. A half-cloak is cool in Star Wars. Purple spandex is de rigueur in Champions. But the styles in Shadowrun were a fairly close approximation to the real world, and 15-year-old game nerds like us were painfully unable to deal with that.
Possibly it would not surprise you, then, to learn that my first Shadowrun character wore an aviator jacket over a red and white track suit. And sometimes, he wore a cowboy hat.
*cringes*
So, on that note, tell me about your first RPG characters, for whatever game.
Please. :)
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But Shadowrun... That got fun when my friend Ry joined the game. He has a penchant for playing mentally ill characters in games. You never know what to expect. He played a rigger whose drones and vehicles were personality fragments of his character's split personality. For the longest time we thought the GM had given him some sort of illegal AI autopilots or something.
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If you were using the "wound" rules rather than the survival roll, and the GM allowed service changes, your character sounds very plausible. :)
Ry's Rigger sounds very cool!
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...is the one you currently hang out with on FurryMUCK.
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The first *actual* character I had was this... lizardy thing that I wrote up and the DM ok'ed. He was this short quick little thing with this great big plume of orange feathers. His named was Dadain Karo, and he was a swordsman. He was good, gentle hearted, and very brave. He (and his whole culture) found magic to be something of an abberation in the natural order of the world. As a result, he had a huge collection of magical items that he had accumulated that he was trying to destroy/seal away somewhere. Most of it went into a volcano/pocket dimension/bottom of the ocean by the time we stopped playing with those characters.
I miss him sometimes.
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It's weird; basically all through high school, characters I made were really 2 dimensional. Mostly they were there to serve the need of an overall party. I was there for the adventure, not because playing so-and-so was so much fun - I guess that's also why I ran a batch. The first characters I actually remember were from college, and that I remember only dimly.
Probably the most noteworthy of the lot was a human cavalier (nobody could afford 2e; we all made do with 1e stuff). Brave, a little bit stupid, and ludicrously historically accurate; used to carry around a small vat of vinegar and sand to clean his chain armor, bought a palfrey when he could afford it so's not to wear out his destrier, did some pretty foolish things. The best story about him involved successfully doing the 1980s throw-your-longsword-at-the-villain. At the end of the campaign, the beautiful elf princess offered the entire party anything they desired, and my character asked for a single kiss from her. That's how... um... stupidly caught up in type I was being.
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The RPG market is basically the same. This place has been dying by inches for as long as I've known about it. I started going there a few times a year in 1998. The only "new" things I've ever found there were Knights of the Dinner Table comics... and that was in 1999.
The store relies on old minis wargamers, of the sort who who talk sniffily about the Warhammer crowd.
I like your cavalier!
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That said, I'd love to come visit you guys! I've been to Imperial Hobbies in Vancouver once, in 1997. Do you know if it's a chain? There's an Imperial Hobbies in London, Ontario.
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1997... hehe... Frazer was a regular then too. I suppose there's a really remote chance you would have bumped into each other. *giggles*
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The first one I remember was a human druid named Jasla Forestfern. She was part of a 1st Ed. D&D campaign my brother (the DM) and I played with our 2 younger cousins. I don't recall much about her, either. What I remember most about that campaign was that my cousin Christina changed her character's name every time we got together.
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My first character was a straight Human Fighter named Ares who died on his first session (but second combat encounter). In the first combat session, I scored a Natural 20 and the DM made it dramatic and exciting to slay a foe in a single blow. From that point on I was hooked on the cinematical element of the game.
It was also the last time I played a straight fighter/warrior. From that point forward I have played physical combat classes, but always variations. Like Rangers or Monks.
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I was feeling invulnerable, and was proven wrong.
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My first D&D character was a basic-D&D cleric. I can't remember his name.
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In Shadowrun, this is the equivalent of giving someone a friendly noogie.
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Nothing like standing behind a wall of 5 Gangrel, two of whom are 7th gen, when a bad-ass Tzimitzi comes looking for you.
I like the Gangrel take on Malkavians: When a Malkavian speaks, listen. When two Malkavians meet, watch. When three Malkavians gather, run.
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Frazer, on the other hand, started playing D&D in grade four... during class time. Heh.
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The first character I actually got to play (for about 4 sessions) was in a Werewolf game. Her name was Fenra, I forget her tribe and auspice. I do recall that as part of her backstory her entire pack had been wiped out by a Wyrm attack, and she was out for revenge. Never got there, mind you, the game died before too long.
Then I had a True Atlantean Tattoo Mage Undead Slayer in a RIFTS game where the GM never met a sourcebook he didn't like. Don't remember her name either, probably only played her about 3-4 times, though that game was long-running - I just didn't play that often.
The first character who had enough of a personality that I can actually remember much about them wasn't until I started playing D&D in university. Astrid was a CG fighter with an 18/96 Str, a headstrong (er, also arm-strong) nobleman's daughter with a bit of a chip on her shoulder. When it turned out that her father's will stipulated that she had to bear a son before she turned 21 if she was going to inherit, she married the party's paladin, Ace, and after the baby was born, left him home with it so she could keep adventuring ('cause his player eventually quit the game, but I like my story better ;).
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...in a RIFTS game where the GM never met a sourcebook he didn't like.
*L*
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Oh yeah, I told
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The Federation didn't approve.
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Our big thing was setting phasers to self-destruct. Klingons giving you lip? Self-destruct. Tellarite ambassador giving grief to the Andorians? Self-destruct.
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Mary SueRPG-ish character that I can clearly remember was for, as you put it, an elaborate imagination game based on Sonic the Hedgehog back when I was in grade 4. And yeah, I'd call it "RPG", since it was more or less freeform LARPing. We had character stats and wrote fanfiction. It was awesome. The game was based on the Saturday morning cartoon universe, which was fairly dark and industrial in atmosphere which went well with the area of North Hamilton we lived in.My character was some strange fox/coyote mix named Forepaw (LAAAAAAAAME!) who was your stereotypical computer geek/techie character. The only thing that was notable about her was in our doodles and scribbles, she didn't wear any clothes (Like, in character design. I was dressed while playing). This was because I was a tomboy and there's some strange unwritten rule that most male Sonic characters usually only wear shoes/gloves while the female characters usually wear at least one major piece of clothing. Therefore, the character only wore boots and... maybe a utility belt.
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AD&D...1st edition I think... Elven thief called Shadowlaine, real name Julien Bayberry. He was married to a hot Drow assassin called Nightshade (no imagination) and his family name was cursed. Every time he had kids (or his descendents had kids) they would invariably be triplets.
I still love Elves. And thieves.
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Oh, not a betray-your-colleagues munchkin. Just a juvenile "I gotta +5 vorpal sword and a wand of wonder!" type. Fight monsters, get cool stuff, level up. But the characters were throwaway things and lacked any depth except my own personality.
I think part of the problem was that firstly, me and the friends I played with, were young and this was typical behavior. Plus, no one ever bothered to explain the "ROLE-playing" aspect to me. Our gaming sessions were short and had a hard time growing into a story of any length. So to me, an interesting character meant "NPC", cool people with ready-made descriptions that only the GM got to play with, wince our own characters never developed.
And the times when our GMs were experienced adults, they were in charge of between six to twenty annoying 13-year-olds at the same time, ran us through obstacle courses and ended up killing us all off in impossible-to-win scenarios (including The Village from The Prisoner, or throwing us through a time vortex into the middle of a Civil War battlefield).
Interestingly enough however, although I never developed a sense of game character, RPGs invoked a very strong impression in me in terms of exploration and world-building. I never felt courageous enough to world-build myself, but I loved the sense of wonder and atmosphere that could be found in a well-described module. So I viewed game modules not as gaming opportunities, but as abstract reading material. If there was a story or rich environment, I was entertained.
But I still didn't understand the role-playing bit. I remember picking up "Vault of the Drow", and there were maps and some area descriptions and things... and then you entered an entire underground kingdom with a city and feudal territories, and there was no story. There were things like, "Oh, and here's the capital city. And here are 17 noble Drow families. Here's some of the politics and stuff on their estates. You make up the rest." And my reaction to this was, "Whaaa? Just make it all up?"
The long-term effect of this is that to this day I don't think I've had a real role-playing experience, and have missed the opportunity to grow that experience. How to put it... I worry that if I developed a character with depth, I would lack emotional maturity if the character died, unwillingness to let it go. If I'd gamed enough when I was younger, I would've eventually gotten over that sort of thing. I still experience frustration at the "*You* know something, but *your character* doesn't know it" situation.
My other problem is that well, I don't know how to give a character depth. Sure I took drama in school and am good at improv, but for a *real* character... I feel a Stanislavian need to ask, "What's my motivation?" Like I'd need my entire character history, childhood and everything, as context. And I've tried; I just get instant writer's block. Failing that, I'd likely pick something cliche or one-dimensional, which really does not make a character, or I'd feel an urge to give some smarmy, emo teen background ("My parents were killed by demons!").
It occurs to me that I like to have the "whole picture" given to me in advance, be it for a character or when picking up a game module and being able to take in a complete world at once. I don't know how to build in an occasional, modular, need-as-you-go fashion. Being able to add new traits to a character as the need arises, worrying that I'd be violating self-consistency or something. I never understood how an improvising GM could just make up a dungeon map as they went along, I thought that it lacked... adherence to an organized greater plan that ought to have been stuck to. I completely missed the fact that it should have been about a bunch of characters having fun in the space provided.
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Failing that, I'd likely pick something cliche or one-dimensional, which really does not make a character, or I'd feel an urge to give some smarmy, emo teen background ("My parents were killed by demons!").
Also not uncommon. You don't NEED a deep background for most games. Some of the most memorable and even emotional games I've played in made very heavy-handed use of melodrama. As one RPG book puts it "Melodrama is easy, and it works."
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1) A Ravnos in Vampire LARP named Minette... I got a "monkey wrench" award from the GM for doing something or other. That would've been 1995, I think. I hung around that gaming group a lot, though -- mostly as audience or videographer.
2) A Scottish Gangrel (or maybe she was a Brujah?) in
3) A female character in
I'm a horrible gamer. I can't keep rules straight, can't remember (once I finally decide) what I'm supposed to be doing, am attention and auditory processing deficient, can't sit still, and have no ability to strategize at all. (Have I put you off gaming with me, yet? :)
But, when it comes down to it, I've been LARPing since I was a small child (hasn't everyone?). Pretending to be a character from (or fitting into) various books and TV series and movies was the chief diversion among my groups of friends (the cottage kids in summer, my friends in elementary school). Star Wars, Gilligan's Island, Anne of Green Gables, G-Force... So I grok the concept, at least.
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No, this sounds like most gamers I know, really. This is why most of my games have tended to end up with things on fire. Most gamers are channeling something akin to Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China. I'm sure you'll fit in well, once we get things going. :)
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I played mostly with my brother, when he'd let me. Later my friends and I figured out the games and did it on our own. TMNT in junior high, Rifts in high school, Champions during both until my brother left. With college came Werewolf (I played Vampire once, too angsty and emo for me) and Earthdawn and Shadowrun and Guildspace.
My first Champions hero was a mutant named Kangaroo Man. Yes, it was that bad and cheesy. He was a mutant kangaroo, go fig, not a mutant human. He was a jack of all trades kind of hero, at say the Spiderman level, not the Superman. He was strong enough to lift a car, tough enough to take a few hits, could superleap really far and had a gun stolen from a villian organization that I was really happy about how I designed it (7d6 NND EB, 1 hex AoE, 36 shots), it impressed even my brother and his college Champions group.
My first, dimly remembered, D&D character was an elf named Stience. I don't remember what class or anything about him other than he could use the great magic tree that was apparently the equivilant of the One Ring + the White-Gold Ring. Yeah. After the tree was recovered, I don't think I ever got to play again.
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I always wanted to play Earthdawn, but never managed to acquire a copy until they were giving away the free PDF in Wizard magazine. Sigh.
That does sound like a pretty effective gun!
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