When I was in middle school, I had a few friends who played games like BattleTech and Dungeons & Dragons, but I was out of the loop and didn’t know much about the games. I was keen on making comics, which included an interest in science fiction and fantasy, but the gaming aspect eluded me: I cared about creating cool stories.
I remember a friend showing me BattleTech art, so I made some drawings of giant robots that I thought offered better scope for fiction I would like. My friend rolled his eyes, and told me that in the game you can’t afford to start off with a cool robot, you have to start with a stupid-looking two-legged robot with no arms and work your way up. I didn’t see the appeal.
One weekend, while I was hanging out with another friend, we got to talking about Dungeons & Dragons, and he decided to teach me how to play. We didn’t have any rule books or dice, he just took the role of “Dungeon Master” and my character sheet was mainly an equipment list— interesting stuff I found in the game that my friend made up because we thought it was cool. I think I might have also had “hit points”, but the action was all narrated and resolved without rolling dice or consulting rules. It was like a kind of collaborative storytelling. I got it, and it was fun.
After that, I used the same method to run games with my brother. It was a little gonzo, but we just focused on creating fiction that was cool and interesting. Once or twice, I played a real game of “Advanced” Dungeons & Dragons, but the game play seemed so convoluted and slow that I was bored and unimpressed.
By high school, I got DragonStrike! and the Classical Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, which my brother and friends and I cannibalized for their figures and ideas, without ever playing the game as written. Shortly after that I found TWERPS and we played with those rules until I got into GURPS, which I got all my gaming friends to rally around. I penciled all my house rules directly into the Basic Set, and we used the system to build dramatic narratives filled with intrigue. I was usually the GM, but sometimes a player too.
What I liked about GURPS was that it claimed to be a toolbox to create any world— or character —you could imagine. GURPS was a serious role-playing game, one that didn’t have a bunch of arbitrary character niches with pre-determined roles to fill in the ubiquitous adventuring party. By the late nineties, I had read the texts and heard actual-play reports of a bunch of games, and most of them struck me as slavishly emulating the tropes and clichés of a genre, or worse, of each other. GURPS alone promised an open-ended system for creating unique characters and the worlds they inhabit.
When I met my wife, I lost the role-playing itch for a long time. After a couple long-term science fiction campaigns, I was burned out. I gave all my role-playing books to friends in the group I played with, all except for TWERPS, which I kept for some reason.
Now we have a nine-year-old daughter (almost ten!). Since our very first story-telling games when she was four years old, when we used Lego minifigures to represent the characters, I found my enjoyment and enthusiasm for creating cool stories through role-playing rekindled. This got me to delve into indie RPGs, and in addition to TWERPS, we also played an ultra-lite version of Sorcerer, Otherkind, Trollbabe and a few others.
Each in its own way, these are games that thoroughly energize my creative interest in the hobby: namely, story now. A legion of other games like them have come out in recent years, and I’d love to have more life to play them all.
See, unlike GURPS, authored role-plaing isn’t concerned with simulating the entire world and all it’s internal logic— it simply provides tools for focusing on meaningful scenes and resolving meaningful conflicts in dramatic, compelling, and exocative ways. They concern themselves with story: not just the Game Master’s metaplot, and not merely the “story” that provides connective tissue between a series of challenges —but story now, at the table, created by all the players, seeking and finding a meaningful theme together.
Trouble is, story now can be demanding when pursued exclusively, especially for a child. Characters in stories are challenged on more personal levels than the figures in most games. As a family, we enjoy role-playing for entertainment and fun, not for the challenging moral questions and aesthetic experiences we look for in art and literature— at least for the present.
That’s what led us to Tunnels & Trolls. For all its deceptive zaniness and simplicity, I’ve found that T&T provides a real sweet-spot for our interests and priorities right now. I’d like to say a few things about that, but I’m out of time and space for this week. I’ll write more soon.
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