Edit: This post was imported from Point of Play, my gaming blog, which I’ve collapsed into this one.

My first brush with roleplaying was coming across some polyhedral dice in the back of a desk drawer at my father’s house. His girlfriend told me that they had belonged to her son and that they were used for ‘fortune-telling.’

A year or so later, I bought the AD&D Player’s Handbook (against the advisement of my father’s girlfriend, though I didn’t make the connection with the dice at that time). Not that it did anything for me, since I didn’t really understand what to do with it. I was pretty sure that I needed other people to play and it never even occurred to me to try to rope in any of my friends. Now I wonder if I might not have gotten together a group, but at the time I just shelved my PHB and forgot about it.

When I was a junior in high school, I started dating a girl who had a brother, Patrick, a couple of years younger than us. To my surprise I discovered that Patrick was into something called GURPS. He’d only gotten to play it once or twice, but he knew some people who were into roleplaying and we might be able to get a game together. Eventually we found another guy, Big Ed, who had a cousin visiting from Texas for the summer. Ed’s cousin was a huge fan of Rifts and was more than happy to run a game for us. We were free to pick whatever we wanted to play out of the immense stack of books that he’d brought with him.

I remember that I played a Tech Ninja from the Rifts Japan book and Patrick played a Dragon Juicer out of the Juicers book. I don’t recall what Ed played, but I have very clear memories of the Negavampire NPC that his cousin stuck us with. I recall that we ended up fighting vampires in Texas, and that Patrick got some SAMAS powerarmor and I got some sort of plasma powerarmor from the South America book. It was a fun time, but I wasn’t really satisfied. I felt like there must be something else that I wasn’t getting. The game only lasted until the end of the summer, though, and Ed’s cousin went back to Texas.

Around this same time period, Patrick and I got into CCGs, starting with Jyhad, then discarding that for Magic. We got pretty heavy into that, pulling in about a dozen or so of our friends to greater and lesser degrees. At Ed’s urging, we took a side trip into Spellfire. The cards were incredibly cheap, so we snapped up several boxes and Ed taught us how to play. It wasn’t until a couple of months later that we realized that he’d just been making up rules and that what we were doing was completely different from the actual Spellfire rules. It was also a lot more fun, which won’t come as a surprise if you’ve ever played Spellfire.

Time passed, we played Magic and Spellfire, talked about how much fun it would be if we could get a regular rpg going, and eventually I graduated high school and went off to Ole Miss. It wasn’t long before I spotted a flyer for the campus roleplaying association.

I had no idea what to expect at the first meeting. It was at the Union and there were a whole lot of people talking about games, but I didn’t really see anybody looking for players. Especially players who had no real clue. One thing kept getting brought up, though. Something called “The Masque.” The people who seemed to be running the show seemed to be annoyed by that, though, and kept pushing the topic aside. The masque people seemed to be okay with that and murmured something about sticking around to talk about it after the rpg association meeting. I decided I’d stick around too. I was curious.

It was live action Vampire: The Masquerade that they were so hyped about. Oxford had just recently joined a multi-city game calling itself Dixie By Night, with chapters in Jackson, Vicksburg, Hattiesburg, and Starkville. I signed up on the spot, even though I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into. It sounded exciting, though.

The rest of that school year, I played in the monthly Oxford game. Once I even went to a Vicksburg game. I had a Ventrue and I tried to work my way into local politics, but I wasn’t a big participant. I didn’t hit enough games to become any sort of powerhouse player. I ended up running with a bad crowd of Tremere and their cronies. They pulled my ass out of the fire a few times and I did my best to advance their interests. Eventually, though, the game started getting hectic. Disciplines like Thaumaturgy and Viscissitude had gotten out to just about everybody. The powers that be decided that it had gone too far, so the whole game rebooted. Start fresh.

My fresh start was a Gangrel nobody. Somehow I ended up as Oxford’s Sheriff in the very first game, but that didn’t last long. The old Oxford Storyteller got ousted and a new ST was voted in. He’d had problems with a lot of the people in charge of the game and he wanted some radical changes, stuff that the rest of DbN wouldn’t stand for. He was fine with that, though, and broke ranks, taking Oxford solo. Later, this period of time was called the Oxford Crash.

I’d never wanted to split from Dixie. The single-city game just wasn’t as fun, and I didn’t like a lot of the stuff that got put into play, so I just dropped out of the scene.
I had a couple of roommates that continued to play, but I wasn’t really interested. Too much out-of-game politicking, not enough in-game fun.

Several months later, that new ST got replaced again and his replacement smoothed over the rough patches and brought Oxford back into the DbN fold. My roommates convinced me to come back and give it a try and I enjoyed it so much that I started playing harder than ever. Memphis came into the game around then, so we had six cities to choose from. We’d hit at least one game every weekend.

At the same time, I started getting into tabletop games. They were always secondary to the larping, but we played a little Rifts, some Vampire tabletop, some Mage, some Werewolf, some West End Games Star Wars d6, a GURPS Vampire game, and I finally got some use out of my old 2nd edition AD&D Players Handbook. None of these games were particularly satisfying for me. Oh, they were plenty of fun, but it just wasn’t quite right. It always felt a little hollow. In some cases, I could see problems, like when a GM would make the game all about his ultra-powerful NPC (who used to be his own character in the games of his youth) and we were just there to see what “his guy” could do. For the most part, I played as much as I could, enjoyed what I could, and put up with the rest.

It was around this time that I first tried my hand at running a game. First was Rifts, since that was what I had the most experience with. That was pretty laughable, and I don’t really want to think about it. Let’s just say that I had no idea what I was doing and leave it at that.

Second up was Dark Sun AD&D. I’d read a bunch of the DS novels and I’d gotten the boxed set and I just luuuuuurved Dark Sun. I ran one game that lasted for three or four sessions, and maybe a couple of other one-shot games, I don’t really recall. Tabletop games were really just a way to pass the time during the week, though. Weekends were for larping, and that’s what we all lived for.

Next up: My first real long-term tabletop campaign.