Odds & Ends #02 - RPGs and Me

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal history with RPGs, both due to getting back into D&D as well as starting up the Defenders of Phandalin Blog.  Unfortunately I didn’t save a single item from what was at one time a very large collection of games, magazines, minatures, dice, and who knows what else.  Though then again, is it realistic to think I would have held onto all that stuff, unused, for the last 30 years or so?  

 

I’ve always been a collector, even though that word sometimes makes me uncomfortable.  I tend to get mildly obsessed with certain things, and when I do I go all-in… though usually not quite as all-in as the true fanatics.  Over the years these passions have included comic books, RPGs, video games, books on World War II, baseball history (i.e. more books), hockey history (i.e. even more books), sports cards & memorabilia, and most recently music, specifically on physical formats (and, of course, books about music).  I’ve gotten a bit better at purging over the years when a new field of interest emerges and the others start to collect dust.  Making the decision to get rid of stuff is the hardest part for me – once it’s gone I almost never miss it.  Besides, the house is only so big.

 

Psychologists will tell you that collecting behaviors are, to some extent, about control.  There are lists, and things to research, and things to organize, all of it swirling around the chase for the next or rarest thing.  In my experience most collectors resist having any motivation assigned to their collecting other than that they enjoy it.  And they certainly do.  But if I’m being totally honest, for me the control aspect is probably at play.

 

I’m an only child (it somehow seems strange as I rapidly approach 50 to refer to myself as an “only child”…), and we moved a fair amount when I was growing up – six times we went from one state to another between my first and seventh grade years.  That’s a lot of new schools and new neighborhoods, and being smaller than average and not particularly physically gifted meant I had plenty of time to spend in my room surrounded by the comfort provided by my stuff, the stuff being, alongside my parents, the one constant that went from place to place when my life was once again uprooted.

 

RPGs were perfect for me, not only because they allowed me to create and act within fantasy worlds, but also because there was so much stuff!  Games and books and modules and miniatures.  Thinking back on it, RPGs were probably the first passion that I developed on my own and not tied in some way to things my parents introduced me to as a small child.

 

I can’t precisely articulate the timeline, but I think I first experienced D&D at my friend Stein’s house sometime around 1981.  We were living in Alaska at the time and I’m pretty sure Stein had the Basic Edition, which was a box with some booklets and dice.  I’m also pretty sure I walked back across the front yard to my house and demanded my parents get this game for me.  From there I was off and running for the rest of the decade.

 

By the time we left Alaska in the summer of 1982, I’m confident I had the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, and, believe it or not, Fiend Folio and Deities & Demigods (the early edition with the Cthulhu section).  I vaguely recall there being a cramped little game shop in town that I could sometimes convince my parents to take me to, usually when I had money from a birthday or some other holiday.  I feel like most of my money was going towards those hardback books.  

 

I bugged my dad to bring home pads of graph paper from work and would spend hours drawing maps and dungeons, eventually graduating to creating my own modules complete with numbered rooms populated with monsters, traps, and treasures.  Sometimes I’d just have my character, a lawful good paladin, fight random monsters.  It was a perfect hobby for a kid like me.

 

One of the nice things about D&D and gaming in general was it made it easier to make friends at new schools.  By the time we made our last move to the Seattle area when I was in eighth grade Car Wars was all the rage with my classmates, so I started getting deep into the Steve Jackson Games catalog.  I also got in with a group of guys who played D&D, and while we didn’t get to play as often as we liked over the next few years (hard to do when you’re too young to drive and live too far apart to connect on foot or bikes) we still managed.  I didn’t end up at the same high school as those guys that made it even harder to stay connected before cell phones and texting and email, but we played a little in high school as well, usually longer 5-6 hour sessions.  I’m still connected with two of those four guys on Facebook.  Another unfortunately passed away, and the fourth, well, I’ve never been able to track him down.  

 

There were so many games on my shelves.  D&D, Top Secret, Twilight 2000, Paranoia, Traveler, Battletech, Champions, Toon, James Bond 007, Warhammer 40K, Judge Dredd, all the random Steve Jackson stuff, assorted war games… The crazy thing is most of them I never played with another person (with the notable exception of a very wild game of Paranoia).  I instead absorbed them the way that sci-fi obsessives do book series, like classics scholars consume mythology.  I loved the backgrounds of the worlds, but I loved the rules too, something that kept everything more or less ordered and organized.  I’d make my own characters with their own backstories, sometimes taking them through various adventures of my own creation.

 

It came as a surprise to my parents when I sold off the whole lot all in one shot when I was probably 18 or 19, but it may have been a relief as well.  I’d put my info on a bulletin board at a local hobby shop indicating I had some stuff to sell and a group of guys who were probably in their early 20s scraped together what was probably quite a bit of money to them at the time and took it all off my hands.  In many ways that was probably easier and less painful than bleeding the collection off piece by piece.

 

I’ve been successfully resisting the urge to start buying all the new D&D books, at least so far.  I’m still itching to be a DM again, so perhaps once the Defenders of Phandalin are ready for retirement or, dare I say, dead, maybe I’ll get my chance.  For now my 5e Player’s Handbook and pouch of dice are enough.