I’ve been going over past games and remembering the old systems I used to play and I’ve came to realise that I really miss playing some of them. It could be the rose tinted spectacles but I do really miss them.
I think it’s time to fire up the ebay-mobile and see just how many of my missing books I can track down.
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I’ve been trying to think back over my first games, my first characters and my first sessions as a GM and do you know what? I think I may have mixed up a few of my firsts.
My first gaming session and my first character are well documented thanks to my drug fueled GM and his knack for memorable sessions. Where my memory has started to slip though is in my very first GM’ing session. I could have sworn it was for a Rolemaster game where I threw dragons on an hourly basis at my friends Arch Mage and Warrior Monk. In fact I was so convinced of this until I tried to remember the Spacemaster games I used to run.
One summer when I was about 14 I had picked up a copy of the Spacemaster box set from the Virgin Megastore in Glasgow. It was the first ruleset I actually owned as until then every game we played was owned by either Joe or Chris. There was nothing wrong with this but being 14 it was very much a case of getting half way through a campaign and then falling out with one of my friends who then took their books and went home. My parents were going away for the weekend and taking my brother with them so I had the house to myself on the Saturday and Sunday. I locked myself away for those days in an attempt to learn all the rules so that the following weekend I could run the game. My friends wouldn’t hear of it though as knowing I would have an empty house they all wanted to come over and stay. that wasn’t going to happen though as I was determined to get these rules into my head. I told a white lie in that I was actually going away with my parents in an attempt to stop them coming round. They still did as they knew fine well that by the time I had told them this my parents had already been away for 4 hours.
So anyway I sat in front of the TV with my years supply of Irn Bru and a bag full of snack food and went to it. I’ve no idea what time I was awake until but I remember waking up in a heap on the floor with my face in the middle of the star map that was included in the set. You can still see the drool marks if you hold it up to the light! By about 7pm on the Sunday night I had drawn up a few characters and ran through a couple of combat scenarios so that I knew the differences between Spacemaster and Rolemaster. Whilst not ready to GM I knew the rules.
Over the next few days I came up with very brief scenario to start the game off and decided to wing the rest. My limited experience was already going to mean regular stoppages for checking the rules and mistakes would happen without a doubt. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. I managed to limit the players to Frank and Joe. Anymore than that and I would have seriously struggled.
So the Friday night arrived and we were staying over at Frank’s house so we could have a good run at the opening session. Frank had decided he wanted to be a space pirate so had drawn up a mercenary of sorts and Joe was the pilot for the ship. I filled out the group with a couple of NPC’s and surprisingly the game went very well. My only regret about the game was using our original GM’s star chart instead of the one supplied. There is only so many times you can let the players visit the planet populated by Ogryns that manufactures rubber sex toys without wanting to give up.
How did your first GM’ing session go?
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It’s been a slow weekend here at The Dice Bag. I’m off to Sweden for a few days this coming week so I’ve had a lot of prep for that but every time I thing about roleplaying I keep getting the same image in my head and I have a slow chuckle to myself.
I’m told everyone has moments like this during games but I swear I’m sure it’s only me that gets hit with them.
The prime example is the memory that keeps coming back to me this weekend. It was a Saturday afternoon, I was 15 and and staying over at my friend Frank’s house. We didn’t have a game planned for that weekend so I was working out a quick single-shot game based Terry Pratchett’s Discworld that had been published in a short lived RPG magazine. The plan was to get some characters drawn up and run the game once one of our other friends turned up later that night. Anyway there was a knock at the back door and who should enter but Frank’s cousin who had been our first DM all those years before. He was on leave from the army again and had heard we were about and so he’d brought his Rolemaster books and our characters along to see if we fancied a game that night. We settled down with our bottles of juice and our sweets and waited for him to start the game.
Frank’s cousin always played with the strangest music playing in the background. This night we were in for something different though as he put on his most prized possession. He carefully placed the tape into the player and when he pressed play Jim Morrison was giving us a spoken word tour of his drug addled brain. Several joints later our DM was struggling to keep the game from becoming real in his head and constantly stopping mid-sentence to let us hear his favourite bit of the tape. Usually when our illustrious DM was in these states we enjoyed the ride as we usually ended up with homosexual dungeonmasters from the cartoon that could chop their head off and heal it back up without magic or other weird and wonderful things that only drugs could produce. In this case we just sat staring at each other as he worked himself into a fever over the meaning of every second line on the tape.
We were just getting to the point in the game where you would usually start tooling up and getting ready for the final monster when the sound started to break up. Our DM sat bolt upright, spun around to the tape player and burst into tears. The machine started to eat his precious tape and he was in tears as he tried to press the eject button with little success. Frank tried to help and after a few more minutes they both just gave up and our DM collapsed onto the floor in the foetal position crying to himself. There was nothing we could do for him so we left him to it and went through to watch some TV. We were two 15 year old boys that spent our weekends playing Dungeons and Dragons. We had no social skills so I’m not surprised we left him to it. We went back through to the kitchen about 30 minutes later to find him asleep on the floor so again we left him to it.
About an hour later Joe turned up so we retired to Franks bedroom and started the one-shot game I’d been writing. It was great fun and when you have skills such as ‘hang upside down from chandilier and swing axe’ you can’t go wrong. About half way through the game our dopehead DM came and joined us. You would never have thought that a few hours previously his world had ended. He was laughing away and really enjoying the game and to this day I do not think anyone of us has actually mentioned the tape incident to him whenever we’ve came across him.
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