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

Interjection: I just remembered a few more games from back in the day. One of the ever-popular fly-by-night games back in Oxford with my first gaming group was Shadowrun 2E, and my second group spent a few months on Battletech and a Mechwarrior game that eventually tapered off.

Back to the matter at hand. I wanted to run a game that was different in style and substance than everything I’d done before. I wanted Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Big Trouble In Little China. I wanted fast, flashy combat, like an action-movie. I didn’t want anything remotely tactical. I was tired of the miniatures-based combat from 3E. I was tired of the tedious character generation, the stacks of books and layers of system and subsystem and rules piling up to the ceiling. My friends tried to tell me that I could do whatever I liked with d20, because at that time, everybody insisted that d20 was the future of roleplaying and that eventually one day all games would be d20. I refused to be reasoned with and I hit rpg.net to find a game that would do what I wanted.

I found two. Hong Kong Action Theater! and Feng Shui. Reading review after review, I eventually decided that FS was the one for me, had my Friendly Local Game Store guy order it for me, and chewed my nails until it came in. It was perfect. I had to drop the stock setting and work out some ideas for how vampires would work, but it was a cakewalk. I pulled my stalwart hunters together and I got my game going. It was, for me, a whole different outlook on how a game should play, and I started revising my ideas on what was Good about rpgs.

Around this time, I got involved in a sporadic Shadowrun 3E game with some of my Feng Shui players and some other folks I’d never played with before. It was a lot of fun, despite everything Shadowrun could do to kill a good time. We also made a quick side-trip to try out Hackmaster, which was probably the worst system I could imagine, especially after running Feng Shui.

I ran that FS Vampire Hunters game for about a year or so, continually revising what I was doing and how I was doing it, learning what I liked and what seemed to work. My players gave me good feedback and I tried to act on it, and everybody seemed engaged and excited by each game. I made some mistakes, but the end result was pretty positive. One technique that I came across that seemed to work really well for me was to treat each session like an episode of a TV show. I’m not sure whether I came up with the idea or whether I swiped it from somebody, but just that little change in attitude made a world of difference for me. We wrapped up the “first season” of the game with the intent of taking a couple of months off and coming back fresh. Unfortunately, we never did.

One of folks in my VH game took an interest in FS and between us, we worked out a slight modification to the sorcery system to allow it to function more easily like D&D fantasy magic. He started up a new Feng Shui fantasy game that I played in for a few months, but I just couldn’t get a good feel for it and eventually dropped out.

I played in several short-lived games run by my roommate, including a D&D mafia game, a Swashbuckling Adventures d20 game, and one rather fun straight-up D&D game that lasted for quite a long time, comparatively. Eventually all of them tapered off and died. I sat out on more than a few games, looking for something different. I was getting tired of d20 in general and D&D specifically, but that’s about all I could find. I eventually buckled and joined a new campaign starting up with a GM I’d never played under before. It promised to be different and fun, and for quite a long while, it really was. Eventually the things I didn’t like about it started to outweigh the things I did like, and I wasn’t sad when it came to a convenient close.

During all this time, I’d occasionally run a Feng Shui one-shot, mostly for people who’d never played it before. I wanted to show gamers what it was like to play something completely different from D&D, and everybody who did had a big ole blast. I think my favorite one-shot was probably the all-girl group. They all commented on how much fun it was to play with so many other women, and I had fun showing off my favorite system. All these one-shots were pretty standard A-B-C clue-chain mysteries, but I think they were pretty satisfying despite that.

I’d come to the conclusion that I just didn’t want to play D&D anymore. I was over and done with it, and I wanted something different. It didn’t matter what, as long as it wasn’t D&D. I’m not smart, though, so I reluctantly agreed to take one more shot at a D&D game. It was with some people I’d never played with before and it was supposed to be a whole different experience. For one thing, the GM was planning on a big Middle Earth thing and he made it sound pretty good.

It wasn’t. It was terrible. It was a by-the-book Greyhawk module and the GM’s style was circa early 2nd Ed. AD&D. He read the flavor text boxes verbatim. He grew confused when we tried to talk to NPCs rather than just killing them. I played the three or four sessions I’d originally agreed to, then ran.

Right afterwards, I got into a fun little Alternity game with another group of folks that I’d never gotten to play with before. It was different and interesting, but ultimately it didn’t last. I realized that I’d come to really dislike a lot of the stuff about the system that I’d once thought was so great.

That pretty much brings me to the present. I’ve been on a gaming dry spell for quite a long time, but lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking and now I’ve got a new game coming up. I’m excited about it. It’s going to be different from all the stuff I’ve done before, and I think it’ll be good.