RPGs, that is Role Playing Games, have been my obsession for most of my life. Grade 5 near the start, when I was about ten years old, one of my friends got a few of us together and dropped this game into our laps. I was called, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and that was 1982. For Christmas that year I got Dungeons & Dragons, which is a different game, but has a similar root. Gary Gygax, may his name live on for ever, and his friend Roger Moore and a few others started this game and played it together in the late Sixties and early Seventies, creating many revered names like Mordenkaien, Zagyg, Tenser, Dramidj, Sir Rolibar, Bigby, Otiluke and many others in a world centered around a city called Greyhawk.
Then they parted ways. And they started to refine their ideas. And then around 1975ish they started publishing. There were two types of the same game. One was called Dungeons & Dragons and the other used the word Advanced to differentiate it from the other. AD&D was more complicated, it was more detailed and had a richer setting, so it was better, in my opinion. And people played the game, the created rich worlds. Other people designed worlds that were published, like Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms.
I designed a world too, I never really played in it, but it was mine with people and history. Creating the world allowed me to bring in my strengths into my world. I had been a fan of evolution for years and a fan of geomorphology and weather, I was and always a fan of technology, so the master race was a great user of technology combined with magic. There were two major continents and humans evolved on one of them and demi-humans evolved on the other, demi-humans are elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and other such creatures. The master race migrated from the one continent as refugees and landed on the other.
I don't do anything small and my creation was no different, the planet was huge. As big as Saturn. The year was twenty-five of our years in length. There were three large suns one red, one yellow and one blue. And there were six moons. The three Suns were the three great Goddesses, red for war, yellow for nature and blue, which would be invisible during the day as blue light is refracted to get the colour of the sky, was the goddess of magic. The goddesses had three husbands who were dismembered and reformed to create the six moons. The months and the divisions of the years are based on the motions of the moons, but it is the positions of the suns in the sky that govern the effects of magic and many of the phenomenons of weather and monsters.
There was a lot more of this. There were ideas that many of the monster races like Orcs goblins and such were capable of using character classes and being forces of good and culture as well as squalor and evil. The continents were huge too, with deserts as large as Asia and plains wider than the Pacific ocean. A place for any imagination to run wild.
Later editions of D&D included many of these changes, with a glossy cover too, but I had them first, even though I know they came up with the ideas in isolation.
Due to my Asperger's, I was a purist, that is to say I was obsessed with only AD&D. But going to university allowed me to meet people who broadened my gaming horizons. There was Vampire the embraced, Wraith, GURPS, MERP, Battle Lords of the 23rd Century and a few others. But I did not get as obsessed with them as I did with D&D. There was always D&D too and I became a very good Game Master during this time. In High school I was the game master because I had the books and no one else wanted to but I was not very good. But after university I was good and later I became very good.
Game Masters, Dungeon Masters or Story Tellers are the most important part of the story. The set the challenges and the story behind the scene. They need to know everything and invent what they do not know. I was the Story Teller at first because someone had to and I had all the materials. Later I became the story teller because I was a control freak and I needed to be in control and to know everything. When I was a ST at first I thought it was my role to kill off the other characters, but later through experience I learned that it was to tell a good story.
My best days of RPGs are the Exalted days. Exalted is a game unlike all others; it is the adult version of D&D, filled with dark and dirty situations, filled with moral quandaries; it is filled with opportunities for the person as well as the character to grow. Sometimes I even play a little Black Dog with Exalted. Black Dog is a fake RPG that was in White Wolf's World of Darkness, where WoD was dark and gritty the fake RPG was utterly deprived and immoral, so when someone adds Black Dog to the role playing it means introducing themes of depravity and despicableness that most well adjusted people would have nightmares about; that is good, because there is a place for this subject matter. Most people can not imagine the face of evil, Black Dog shows characters the results of evil.
Anyways Exalted is a game of gods, gods who have just come into their power in a world where the hierarchy of gods controlling the world has been degenerating for two thousand years and it is time to set things right before the whole of Creation falls apart or is conquered by one of three enemies of Creation. The dead want to destroy creation so that everything will disappear. The creatures on the outside want to fold creation back into the region that it was created from. And the demons, the ones who created the world before the gods usurped control of it from them, want it back and they will wreck havoc for the ten thousand year imprisonment upon it.
Anyways for me, RPG does not involve a computer; it never will.
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