Have I mentioned that I love Robotech?

Awww yeah! My childhood self would have crapped himself at this sight!

 

Note: If you can relate to this post, please comment below! I'd love to hear stories of your own Robotech nostalgia!

 

When I was a young teen, there was no Internet, no Netflix, no DVR. Heck, there were no DVD players. I guess there was laser disc. But there were VCRs. However, those things were clunky and not easy to program. And even if you programmed the damn thing, someone else in the house was going to mess things up. Because, you know, you're a kid. People don't respect your right to see your friggin' shows.

 

No, when I was a mere lad, there was none of the futuristic entertainment technology we take for granted today. Therefore, all TV was pretty much "appointment TV." Meaning, you got in front of that tube, or you didn't. And if you didn't, you missed that show you so desperately wanted to see. Too bad, so sad. Here's a tiny violin, playing just for you.

 

I'm about to get all "back in my day" right about now. Seriously, the kids these days (heh, I actually wrote that) don't know what it's like to be at the whim of the TV overlords. Nowadays, TV is all about "on-demand," of course. Now, we are the new rulers of our entertainment destiny.

 

But that's not what I had as a kid. Nope. As a kid, I had to book it home after school to catch the shows I loved.

 

One of those shows was Robotech. I loved the hell out of that show as a kid. I discovered the series at a tender young age, somewhere in the mid-80s. Robotech was something "new" back in the day. It was called "Japanimation" at the time, not anime. Wow, that sounds weird now. And maybe racist?

 

Anyway, there were only two times of day that Robotech came on back then. During the week, one channel showed it at 6 AM and 3 PM. Kid-me thought 6 AM was an ungodly time when no decent, sane person should be awake. And, school got out at 3 PM. You see my dilemma?

 

So, that school bell would ring, and I would force my chubby body to run as much as possible across town so that I could catch as much of the show as I could. I remember running through freezing cold, slipping on ice in my haste. I remember running through sweltering heat, until I arrived at home, chest heaving like a bellows and sweat pouring off of me.

 

I usually caught about 20 minutes of the show on a good day. But those were precious moments that made a huge impact on the burgeoning sci-fi fan in me.

 

On those rare serendipitous occasions when I actually got an episode on tape, I watched the hell out of it. Over and over, in awe of the sci-fi action, the giant robots battling, and the soap opera of the relationships between the characters. I mean, the show had a race of space giants that were as entranced as I was by the thought of kissing a girl. How could I not relate? How could I not love this show?

 

As time went on, as things happen, my interests moved on to other shows. I became absorbed with other pastimes, such as roleplaying of course. But my love of Robotech remained, lingering within me, and manifesting in an abiding passion for giant robots and space opera.

 

I even tried, once, to combine my love of roleplaying with Robotech. I bought a couple of the Robotech roleplaying books pumped out by Palladium...but never played the game. One of my big roleplaying regrets.

 

Recently, Robotech has made a resurgence in my mind. And, of course, I turned to the miracles of modern connectivity, and quickly found a certain 20-disc set. I bought it for a song. A gateway to hours upon hours of Robotech goodness that I never could have imagined as a kid!

 

 

I'm about to embark once again on a voyage into a space epic, one that will no doubt take me through time AND space. I give a nod to kid-me, to let him know that it's time to come home and enjoy one of his favorite shows in a way he never could. On his own terms, finally.

 

Come with me, young man. We have places to go, giant robots to pilot, and space ladies to woo!

The System Mastery Grail

I want to "master" a system. A roleplaying system, to be precise.

I read a certain post over at The RPG Corner a while back, and it's been on my mind ever since.

What do I personally mean when I talk about mastering a system? For me, the ultimate type of system mastery would be memorization of nearly all the core rules of a system. I have a strong desire to be an "encyclopedia" of a system, or should I say a living "core rulebook."

Now, this isn't because my ideal game system would have a rule for every situation, or that I think all players and GMs should strive to memorize a system. Memorization is NOT a prerequisite for good roleplaying. This is just a particular quirk of mine, I suppose. I have always been most comfortable at the table-top when I could rattle off rules without having to refer to a book or a referee screen.

Right now, I feel like I have a different, "lesser" type of system mastery when it comes to Castles & Crusades. I may not have every character class ability or racial ability memorized, for example, but I have a solid grasp of the core mechanics for ability checks, saving throws, combat, and the like. And this, to me, is perfectly fine and is more than enough for me to run a good game.

BUT I would REALLY love it if I could muster up the time and brain power these days in order to memorize character class abilities, racial abilities, poison creation rules, etc.

I am currently not what I would consider a "living core rulebook" for any system. Perhaps in my teenage years I was a near-master of AD&D or the Palladium RPG system. But this is just not possible for me at this point in my life, at least not when it comes to games like Castles & Crusades.

But of course, in typical "me" style, that darn system mastery urge won't go away.

So I've been looking at Basic D&D (B/X to be precise) as my most likely candidate for system mastery. I think the rules are short enough for me to have a good shot at memorizing most of them. And more importantly, it's D&D and I've got years of using that system under my belt.

But it seems that system mastery may come at a price: most likely, mastering a system takes all of one's mental and temporal gaming resources (or at least, this will be the case for ME). So forget about becoming similarly erudite in any other system. Unless you have unlimited free time (that's not me), have an eidetic memory (my memory is still pretty good, but not photographic by a long shot), or some combination of the two.

Now, combine all this with my sometime-desire to run games in genres other than fantasy, such as cyberpunk, post-apocalypse, Cthulhu mythos, etc. This makes me think it would behoove me to master a more "universal" game system that lends itself more readily to different genres of play. Yes, yes, you can of course remove the fantasy from the D&D engine if you tried, but that's just more work for which I don't have time.

The only universal game system with which I have current experience is Savage Worlds. I suppose the Palladium system is universal, but I've got a "been there, done that" relationship with Palladium from my teen years and I really have no interest in picking it back up. I've never played GURPS, but I've dabbled in the rule books and was never really drawn to it.

So would the solution for me be to dedicate myself to mastering a simple-enough universal system, so when I get the genre "switch itch" I wouldn't have to change game systems as well? That is appealing, not having to learn a new system all the time, as well as not having to ask players to learn new systems.

Anyway, here are some questions for you:

1. What would you define as system mastery?

2. How important is system mastery to you?

3. Is there a system (or systems) that you can confidently say you have mastered, or that you would like to master?

A final thought: all of this makes me wonder if the system mastery desire is part of the reason many OSR gamers, especially GMs, seek to create their own versions of the old D&D systems. A system that you tweak yourself may, by extension, become one that you know very well.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing from you all out there!

I, Gamer: A Testimonial in Three Parts (1)

PART THE FIRST: Portrait of the Gamer as a Young Man (Ages 13 to 19)

So, in reading many gaming blogs recently, I’ve seen several authors give accounts of their personal RPG journeys. Therefore, unoriginal and potentially boring as it may be, I think I will do the same. This is really more for my own benefit, when it comes down to it. I’m trying to codify my own gaming history to get some perspective, etc.

Here goes nothing:

My mother was into a strict Baptist thing when I was very young, and she therefore saw fit to indoctrinate me, her imaginative and bookish son, into said sect. Suffice to say that as I neared the teenage years and the subject of Dungeons & Dragons came up, she and the preachers at the church went all hellfire and brimstone and denounced it as a tool of the Devil. And of course, I was given the infamous Jack Chick tract.

And the smear campaign worked…for a while. Yes, for a while I was very VERY scared of Dungeons & Dragons, and how the game could supposedly lead my immortal soul into the clutches of Satan himself.

Oh, brother. Well, he who isn’t naïve as a child is a rare bird indeed, and much poorer for it.

But as time went on, certain elements within me conspired to eliminate my fears. First was the obligatory teenage rebelliousness. Second was my inexhaustible imagination, curiosity, and innate open-mindedness, fueled by devouring many books over the years (much to the chagrin of my blue-collar father and my macho older brother). And third was my best friend at the time, Pat, who happened to possess several Dungeons & Dragons books (I believe they were the 1E AD&D books with the revised covers). Pat was a Catholic, also, and I think the Catholic priests were much less rigorous than their Protestant cousins in their denouncement of Dungeons & Dragons.

Around the time that Pat was showing me D&D (this was the late 80s, around '87 or '88), I also discovered a book called Stormblade, a novel in the Dragonlance world (I’ve read/heard some controversy surrounding the supposedly “negative” influence of Dragonlance and other “shared worlds” on D&D, but that’s a discussion for another time).

Stormblade was a revelation for me. Something about the fantasy genre intrigued me like nothing else before. I had heretofore been mostly a fan of Star Wars and science fiction, but it felt like destiny for me to read that Dragonlance book. I had come home, arrived at my preferred genre. Here was an accessible story that appealed to the sense of adventure and escapism that I craved. The fact that it was derived from a Dungeons & Dragons game world only furthered my interest in the game. Of course all this was before the stigma of “gaming fiction” versus the works of the likes of Howard and Tolkien. Conan and Middle Earth were things I had heard of, but hadn’t delved into as of yet. And I’d never even heard of Jack Vance or Fritz Leiber at that point.

(I know there’s someone out there reading this that is really balking at the fact that a Dragonlance novel was my first real experience with fantasy fiction. Hey, no one’s perfect…)

Back to the game itself. So, after reading Stormblade and having listened to Pat’s rave reviews of D&D, I finally decided that I didn’t believe it was evil anymore. At this time I also had a budding desire to be a writer of fiction someday in the hazy future of adulthood. And therefore the shared storytelling aspect of D&D was also a great draw to me. I wanted in.

I started out as a player, creating characters to play in games where Pat was the Dungeon Master. But as time went on I grew ever more eager to take the reins, devise stories and characters, weave my own legends of valor for my friends to experience.

That was the golden age, a span of a roughly two years (13 to 15) when everything was new. I can see us around the gaming table in Pat’s room…me and Pat and our friends Jay, Dan, and Pat’s younger brother Sean. We spent hours upon hours poring over the D&D tomes in our possession. Whole weekends were devoted to the adventures we faced. We didn’t worry about rules, or the fact that none of our campaigns ever really had conclusions (or that said campaigns lasted no more than a month or two). We started fresh so many times and had a blast every time.

But time ground on inexorably, as it does. And our attentions were drawn further and further away from D&D as we journeyed through the teens. The distractions of high school drama, girls, and other pastimes like video games (which were getting better and better than the old Atari stuff we played when we were really young) and plain old TV ate up precious time (how we squandered it! Youth is truly wasted on the young!).

Between ages 15 and 19 D&D would rise and fall among our group in fits and starts. By my senior year in high school we had started playing D&D with two guys who were from the neighborhood but we hadn’t really been friends with. But we thought it would be a good idea to bring some new blood to the table. As it turns out, that really wasn’t a good idea.

These two had a very aggressive style of play that focused on player characters as just above the level of villains. They were fond of playing drow elves, for the most part. And they introduced us to the concept of the anti-paladin…which never made sense to me. I mean, isn’t a paladin of an evil deity still just called a paladin? Suffice to say that these two guys were “munchkins,” “roll-players," and “min-maxers” to the Nth degree. But since we didn’t know those terms, or they didn’t exist yet, we just called them “a-holes.”

But somehow we got roped in to their antics. And our roleplaying lives suffered for it. Specifically the D&D roleplaying we were still doing. We began arguing over rules, getting angry at bad dice rolls…all of the behaviors that reveal the fact that the pastime was no longer fun.

From 15 to 19 we had also branched out from D&D to explore other RPGs. We as a group became primarily entrenched in the Palladium game system. We played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, and finally Rifts. All of which served also pull us further and further away from the grandfather of all roleplaying games. We slowly began to disrespect our elders, so to speak, and an insidious disdain for D&D crept into our hearts. We began to see it as a kid’s game, in a way, and looked to other games like the Palladium offerings for a more “adult” experience.

By the time high school came to a close, we also turned our focus on the impending higher education experience. To which I was looking forward with great anticipation, having finally been freed from the prison of high school. True to dorky form, I had been tormented for my bookish ways for four years (except for some grudging respect I temporarily garnered for playing on the football team in 10th grade).

By the time I was 19, all roleplaying fell to the wayside. I spent the summer before starting college in sort of a vision quest of self realization. I was full of youthful fire, thinking existential thoughts and plumbing the depths of philosophy with a few close friends. I was an embryonic adult, and had no time for games. I was preparing to come out of my cocoon, to read “real Literature” (there was no doubt I would be an English major in college, my mind firmly set on the certainty of becoming a published author someday). I still loved to read fantasy literature, but was content to use that, rather than a D&D campaign, as my avenue of escape from the trials of life. And I was also determined to really develop a social life beyond the friends of my childhood and teenage years.

For the moment, I had left the gaming table behind…

Continued in Part Two!