Recently my wife posted an article on Facebook about how different parenting was when we were kids and now. I’ve seen several similar articles and sentiments in the past, most of which boiled down to “our parents made us play outside more often.” Such articles reminded me of my early days of gaming, where a group of friends and I would want to play only to find that we had no place to play. Our parents wanted us all out of the house.
I began roleplaying in the early 1980s, just when the appearance of console games, home computers, VCRs, and cable TV often made staying inside a more attractive option than going outside. Add roleplaying games to that and you get a guy who suddenly had sunburn issues during the summer when he never had them before. You also get a guy, who, along with his friends, was so addicted to indulging his new passion that he wasn’t going to let a little thing like the outdoors stop him from playing.
Playing outside had its challenges. Wind was a huge factor, and in winter months it was difficult to play on snow and ice-covered tables and benches. I also didn’t enjoy keeping my books outside, as they tended to get dirty and wet, depending on conditions. Given that there was usually only one picnic bench to hold everything, one strong gust of wind or careless reaching of the dice could cause a river of soda (pop) to drench half the materials on the table.
Taken together, these factors forced my GM (at this point I was more player than GM) to take a rules-light approach. Our fantasy games (usually Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, although we went through Runequest and Rolemaster phases during this period as well) became less about dungeon-delving and more about court intrigue, diplomacy, and investigation.
As players, this meant that “who” our characters were became more important than what was on their sheets. Rolling dice, specifically combat, was so minimized that there was little difference between “barbarian with +2 battle axe” and “paladin with +5 holy avenger;” as far as we were concerned they were both good warriors. What mattered was whether the barbarian could navigate her way through a civilized city in order to find her imprisoned brother or whether the paladin could sniff out the vampire pulling strings in a royal court using probing questions, intimidating lackeys, and waving garlic around.
The rules evolved into a “diceless” system where we let a PC succeed or fail based on the strength of her roleplay or whether we felt she was skilled enough to succeed in any particular dice roll. When we felt that a situation really called for a dice roll we’d keep a d20 in our pockets and make up a percentage chance for success or failure. If we really felt the need for a proper battle then we’d wait until we were inside again.
Looking back, I think those days really shaped my own style. I tend to run NPC-heavy, investigative campaigns with little emphasis on combat. I spend a lot of time working on PC and NPC personalities and connections, while not worrying so much about what’s on their character sheets – I can make that up as I go. I also tend to enjoy rules-light systems over rules-heavy ones and I think this is a large part of why.
So how about you? Has any inconvenient or unusual situation really influenced your style? Do you think you’d be a different GM or player without that experience, or did it simply expedite the evolution of your style?
Back when I was in the Army National Guard in ’98 during basic training (we trained alongside the regular army recruits) one of the girls in our barracks was a big D&D fan and was happy to game for us during our (rare) times personal free time, but of course the drill sergeants weren’t about to let us have dice, let alone gaming books in the barracks during basic.
She still managed to run a pretty decent (albeit short lived) campaign during those few months. Kacking dice we used drawn chits, (torn up pieces of paper with numbers of them tossed in a can) and later on a deck of cards to resolve character conflicts.
Having only our collective memories to go off and had rules light character sheets written on note pad paper we kept tucked away behind our ID’s in waterproof cases for those rare occasions we could squeeze in a session.
I learned back then the rules were only a frame work to a greater story, and the specific class stats for a character was largely secondary to how well the player presented that character and a wizard (or ranger) was more defined by how they reacted to situations and how they solved problems than what was written on their char sheet.
Even now I tend to favor a “quick and light” approach to rules and am happy to hand wave them if advances the plot, which has served me well when running games on the fly, or when a much needed rulebook got left at home by accident.
Go Army! I would have done that at Ft Benning during training if there had been anyone interested. My platoon didn’t have any RPGers, but later on I met some. It would be cool to read about military campaigns and how they operated during deployments. Carry on!
Awesome article! I liked it so much that it’s my first comment here at Gnome.
It was almost as if I was reading someone describing MY roleplaying experience, reminding me of my teenage years in the late-90s and early-00s 🙂
Although we were raised in different decades, I think that our “learning experience” was very similar, which led me to prefer rules-light systems as well. The biggest difference is that, where I lived, we couldn’t stay inside not because of the “parental culture”, but because of the lack of space in our tiny apartments.
Thanks for the article, it was great!
Silveressa, I enjoyed reading about your basic training game. I took Shadorun with me to Somalia, and ran a couple of sessions for a few of the guys. I had the core book, my notebook, and a bunch of six-sided dice I’d squirreled away in my map case.
A couple of years before that I took Shadowrun on a long road trip with a friend. It was just the two of us, and I ran the game while he drove. It was a bit insane really: me in the passenger seat with the rulebook, supplements, my notes, his character sheet, the pencils, and the dice. Somehow we made it work, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. At the end of each day of driving, we’d continue the game at a campsite.
Walt, the timing of your article couldn’t be more perfect. Lately I’ve been thinking about how fun it would be to take my gaming crew on a weekend hiking/camping/gaming trip. Gaming out in nature, particularly if the game is one where the characters are out in it, can be a blast.
My preferences have blown like a weather vane over the years, but early experiences are formative.
I’ve really enjoyed “let’s walk a neighborhood and see how it’d be in the game world”, particularly for modern day games. One night, werewolves were bounding in from the north, and we had to hold them at the river…