Ah, the Golden Age!

[pyat]

An online conversation about gaming habits with relee just now prompted me to calculate the amount of table-top RPG gaming I did during the "peak years" of high school. The summer between grades 10 and 11, when none of my friends had part-time jobs or girlfriends, probably reflects the period of greatest time investment. In a "good week", we'd be gaming on six or seven days, for anywhere between 50 and 60 hours. This does not count time spent drawing maps, writing campaign notes, or reading RPG books - probably an additional 10 hours or so each week.

A typical week would see a rotation between 3rd edition Champions, D6 Star Wars, and DC Heroes, with occasional forays into Justice Inc. , Paranoia, or Space: 1889. I still have about a dozen DC Heroes characters stowed away somewhere. Earlier, in grades 8 and 9, we were all about Doctor Who, Robotech and Marvel Super Heroes. Later in high school, our tastes shifted to things like Mage: The Ascension, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Call of Cthulhu, various GURPS settings, and the Middle-Earth Roleplaying System.

We never played Dungeons and Dragons, in deference to the wishes of my parents. I actually didn’t read the rules until I was in my 20s.

It was very involving. And girls were scary.

Comments

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Did I ever tell you about my plans for a Gamer Retirement Home?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

You have not!

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, the name sort of says it all for itself.

What you do is you start up a retirement home meant for tabletop RPG players (although a LARP could be a hoot too). So then everyone in it can just game to their hearts content. It would be much more engaging than say shuffleboard.

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

I have often thought that ours will be the best entertained generation of geriatrics in history. Old age homes will be all Doom Mk 1 LAN parties and so on!

[zenten.livejournal.com]

Plus the whole brain reading game controllers.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Zen will be the new button-mashing.

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

Oh when I was that age, what I would have done to find someone to play Robotech with... *sniff *

Funny

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

We could never figure out good adventures for Robotech. RPGs are weird when you tie the players down to a military organization.

Re: Funny

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I find it gives a structure that can make it easier to plan and run adventures, provided the players are willing to play along. In our Robotech and Star Trek games, we actually spent a lot of time roleplaying command chain stuff.

Re: Funny

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

I'm a lot younger than you. By the time we were mature enough to do chain-of-command stuff properly, we'd moved on to other games. We couldn't imagine military missions beyond "go to point X and blow stuff up", which is pretty weak for an RPG.

Re: Funny

[pyat.livejournal.com]

We were playing Robotech when we were 13 and 14, though. And, granted, our idea of "command chain roleplaying" involved a lot of shouting at NPCs and looking at maps of barracks.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I dunno... you might have been too cool for us. We were pretty relentlessly insular. Anything that smacked of non-RPG related fun was suspicious.