A Pretty Good History of Role-Playing

[omorka]

here

It says it's in five parts, but it's really nine. I think it kinda got away from the author somewhere around 1989. :)

I'm a second-generation gamer. Daddy was an active wargamer when I was very small, played Avalon Hill games by mail with laminated boards and wax pencils when I was in early elementary school, gave me my first D&D set (an old one that he had barely used) in 1986, and played wargames by e-mail before most people knew there was an Internet. He still has a couple of e-mail games going, unless he quit in the last couple of years. (I hope he hasn't.) He was a little suspicious of roleplaying, in much the same way that I'm a bit suspicious of CCGs. Still, he encouraged my hobby until high school, after which it really wasn't his decision anymore.

As it happens, I'm also a second-generation SF/Fantasy fan. Both my parents are fen; in fact, a shared love of Heinlein's works is part of what drew them together in college. (It is this one fact that gives me hope that, if they ever found me out as poly, they might not disown me on the spot.)

Gamer, fen, teacher, musician/singer, fibercrafter - how can I have rejected their core values so thoroughly and still be so much their child?

Comments

[greeneyedpagan.livejournal.com]

Gamer, fen, teacher, musician/singer, fibercrafter - how can I have rejected their core values so thoroughly and still be so much their child?

I dunno, babe, but it happened to me, too.
So different, yet so alike...

That's family for you!

[brezhnev.livejournal.com]

My dad is heavily into science fiction too. I got to read a good bit of his extensive collection in my youth. I was reminiscing about The Jupiter Theft lately, in fact. Pretty good, as I recall -- in that one, the aliens really are aliens, if you know what I mean.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I haven't read that one, although I'm vaguely familiar with it (I think the aliens are one of the ones Barlowe illustrated for his Guide to Extraterrestrials).

Yeah - I remember the joys of borrowing Daddy's SF books in my childhood, and discovering as I got older that there was a method to his shelving madness - he'd put the books with actual sex in them too high up for my acrophobic child-self to find them, but where my post-growth-spurt self merely had to reach a little bit. By then I was competing for them with my three-years-younger brother . . .

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize exactly how late into the game I came. (Or, more to the point, what competition already existed when I joined...) I can't exactly put my finger on a date, but I played my first game of Tunnels & Trolls in, probably, 1978. I recally doing T&T for a month or so before playing D&D. It was the following summer that AD&D Players Handbook 1st Ed. was published.

Years later (1984?), at Herod's in London, I bought a revised T&T rule book, I believe published by Flying Buffalo. Wish I could find it again...

[bassfingers.livejournal.com]

I should note the british ruleset I had bought may have been a later edition. I'm seeing first edition and boxed set on eBay, now that I look. Don't know enough about the history of the game to know the specifics of revisions, though.