Getting in to Role Playing Games is probably a profound experience if one is old enough to appreciate the absurdity of sitting around a table top pretending to be mighty warriors, elven wizards or space pirates, but for the rest of us we don’t really notice it. I, like many other players, fell into RPGs when I was still young enough to be running around at lunch time playing various rules-free versions, involving space men, the police, King Arthur, velocoraptors, and on particularly inspired days, a mixture of all four. With this in mind, it was therefore only a small matter of adding die rolls so that you could tell when someone actually hit you with a ray-gun and a modicum of structure before we were able to achieve the necessary abstract thought process required for Dungeons and Dragons.
From personal experience, I’ve found it very difficult to maintain an interest in the game for any sustained length of time. I played when I was about 10 years old in the school playground for a while, then a few years later attempting to use the actual published rules in full. I then found myself playing a lot of Games Workshop war games with friends and only later rediscovered role playing when stumbling across GURPS, which I stripped down a little in order to run an impromptu one-shot sci-fi session during a lull in conversation that ended up snowballing into a campaign lasting months. In fact, I’m sure if I somehow managed to get those players together again, they’d take off from where they left it without much prompting. Now I have somewhat come full circle and stand on the precipice of running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with primarily new players and my interest seems to be back to where it was thirteen years ago.
Inevitably, there is some sort of dissatisfaction that comes with the territory of role playing. I’ve never really experienced players that have to be ejected from the group as many gamers have, because my groups have always been of friends, or people I knew, or people that knew the people that I knew and could be vouched for. I also got remarkably adept at shuffling player characters in and out of sessions during the long running sci-fi campaign and have therefore never really had a problem with actual real life people issues. There are however always moments when things don’t go quite according to plan, such as forgetting to mention something that you mean to rely on later in the campaign, or accidentally leading players into a railroad plot, or something just not being as amazing as you envisaged in your head. I always find myself driven to bouts of inarticulate sentences half way through gaming sessions as I slip through puddles of half completed notes, and find things in my notebook where I’ve written “must finish this later…” and just occasionally entirely stumped when someone suggests something entirely plausible and sensible that I just hadn’t thought of. Sometimes combat is a drag, sometimes the role playing is a drag, and sometimes the game just feels like too much of a grind.
Despite all of this, I still find myself in somewhat of a cycle with this game. I’m sure the campaign I’m planning will disappoint me endlessly, and all the amazing stuff I plan won’t be discovered and all of my areas of minimal preparation will be scrutinised by near obsessive compulsive players, but I’m still excited and eager to play again. Who knows, in another 5 years time, maybe I’ll be getting back into GURPS with a fresh sci-fi campaign to try out and maybe 5 years after that, I’ll be back to Dungeons and Dragons. All in all though, I’m growing ever more aware that this probably isn’t something I’m going to “grow out of” as I expected and for that I am eternally grateful.
From a neutral perspective, RPGs are very childish concepts. I tried to explain them to a colleague who could only respond with “I think you need to get out more” which is a common response that I can sympathise with, but as a childish venture goes, it has a very enduring pull that I can’t ignore. It doesn’t matter how we get into them, what’s noticeable is the fact that many of us find we can never get out.
Tags: Experiences, Origins, RPG, Starting
