Your RPG story

I would say Don was generally abusive of the rules and the people he played with,,,, with the noticable exception of me who had a strong enough presence he rarely tried it with me. He was alway exceptionaly brutal to Doug and Paul and managed to taint everyones behaviour towards chaotic asshole, which was probably why spanky became so reluctant to play.

Bruzynski wrote:

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How about you subtract half the difference from the winner. Then there is incentive to low ball your choice. [...]

A variation on your suggestion: Subtract half the difference from the winner, to a maximum of twice what the loser staked. There should be reasons to go high and reasons to go low. Anyway, there are problems.

Bruzynski wrote:

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There are numerous games like this online, but like car wars et al there is little 'role' playing. [...]

Yes, but why is this so?

And, why wouldn't it work for large parties? Possible answer: There can only be 1 PC-to-NPC conversation at a time, whereas in a standard adventure PCs can each act simultaneously.

Bruzynski wrote:

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Jim something?

No.

SteveL wrote:

There was another player in the club. I think he DM'd a different subgroup. He was taller than average, slightly stout, black curly hair. Might have had a beard but no moustache. What was his name?

Bruzynski wrote:

Jim something?

Ok, I know who you mean. I can't remember his name either, but Troy hated him because his character, in an Ed Greenwood session, bought a sack of apples and made a point of carrying them and munching them while everyone was riding around. I played with these guys at the brookbanks library on the weekends. There was another guy, Sarung, who played with these guys as well; at Donview we used to call Sarung 'paki guy'--ah well i've always been a bully and a prick. I also remember playing some kind of robotech game with the guys at the library. That game was like carwars with robots...setup took forever and actual fighting was kinda short.

Sarung introduced us to GURPS, which I hated, it was all freaking rules. I remember it took us two weeks to make characters and five minutes for me to die. I was just trying to scare some guys who were picking one me and then the entire town came after me and lynched me...something about being a summoner. I suppose i should have given up calling him paki guy to his face.

Sorry for the choppy posts, I have been writing from my iphone. Editing and typing in this forum form is difficult.

while not in our campaign we should solicite Pauls input, he being in so many of our early games. he's one of the only strays from game history that any of us still have contact with.

It's too damn bad there is no way to include him, he'd play in a second.

SteveL wrote:

Regnar wrote:

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From then on in, it was high school campaign in the week [...]

Refresh my memory.

Regnar wrote:

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From then on in, it was [...] Lalanne and I (and later Roddy) during the weekend ... 11 am - 10 pm is memory serves...

We met on Sunday mornings?

I went to Senator O'Connor, remember?.. so we had a group there that played and I was a part of for about a year or so... not too long, because it was one of those campaigns that was typically "high school" .. one player's character would always get picked on, and there were absolutely silly scenarios... but there were elements that i liked so I stuck with it, for only a year now that I think about it.

And as for us?.. yah, at first we played all weekend as I recall. And later, it was Sundays ... as JB said, the call would go out, seems like hundreds of calls back and forth finding out who was available and where and when...

I recall some greal all-nighters and then heading out to some restaurant to get breaky...

Regnar wrote:

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And as for us?.. yah, at first we played all weekend as I recall. And later, it was Sundays ... as JB said, the call would go out, seems like hundreds of calls back and forth finding out who was available and where and when...

I recall some greal all-nighters and then heading out to some restaurant to get breaky...

Even though our game was somewhat crude and unsophisticated (what with us being young and inexperienced), many of my favourite RPG moments date from that era.

I think we did evolve our game beyond what most others were playing, including, perhaps, even Gygax himself, who seems to have emphasized a more tactical hack and slash dungeon-based game rather than one that takes advantage of a full-blown world. This all predated the Internet, and we were more or less on our own in this development. The Dragonlance series may have been the inspiration for our own "epic" campaigns (i.e., not just one dungeon after another), but I think the truth is that my reading of LotR at that time (as early as 1981, but no later than '82) opened my mind to the notion of a larger, "sandbox" campaign setting (a sandbox game is non-linear; the PCs motivations drive the game rather than DM management). If you recall, I was the only one who had read that novel by that date, so I used that advantage to write and DM a LotR adventure (yes, the entire plot of the novel). The adventure may have been lousy, but the idea of a larger, realistic world was priceless.

I got my dad to reproduce a poster-sized map of Middle Earth, and all 3 of us adopted Tolkien's creation as our world setting. We then naturally shifted our playing style towards a more all-encompassing milieu (i.e., history, politics, continuing NPCs, world events, intertwining plotlines).

you are correct on all parts, including the LotR part. The two 'big' novels that I drew from were "The Chronicles of Prydan" and (coincidentally enough) "The Chronicals of Thomas Covenant". Both were epic in scope with great elements to draw from. And I recall a LOT of my earlier DM days I was borrowing heavily from those two sources.

Paul, what's your RPG story? I remember your anecdote (dating from somewhere between Jan. and June 1982, the end of our Milneford era) about a dragon getting its head caught in a doorway. At the time I thought that was ridiculous, but then I was new to the game and didn't quite understand it.