In my case, I’ve sold a lot of my old gaming books at the semi-annual auction which my FLGS runs. You might also check with an online game reseller, like Noble Knight Games, to see if they’d be interested in buying any or all of what you have.
I know those guys, and they are honest.
We played Torg some in the '90s. Definitely an interesting concept, though I wasn’t a fan of some of the game mechanics, especially as big combats usually depended on someone getting a series of “exploding” dice results in order to get a massive result.
Anyway, Torg was made by West End Games, which went bankrupt in 1998 (due to some poor financial decisions by its owner), and then passed through multiple owners (as did the ownership of Torg) over the years. It looks like the current owners relaunched it through a crowd-funded campaign in 2018.
I’ll have to make a list and take pics and check with Noble Knight Games.
I should probably check with Miniature Market, Troll and Toad, and Cool Stuff Inc., I use to buy some minis from them.
Excellent suggestion, I didn’t really want to deal with eBay.
I don’t mean to imply that women players didn’t exist, only from my perspective they weren’t common. I saw a lot more women get into gaming when Vampire the Masqurade was released in 1991. By 1996 or so, the majority of my gaming groups included at least one or two women who were actually interested in gaming.
But you bring up another thought, back in the 80s and 90s, gaming groups were largely isolated from one another. You could have a totally difference experience from me, which you did if you had three women and one PoC, and I’d have no way of knowing.
I’m with you there. If any of them are standing on your lawn, I will be happy to shout at them along side you.
They all communicate via phone keyboards. DnD is so much quicker to type on a phone than the far superior D&D.
We’re separated by 3,000+ miles - yet our journeys have been uncannily similar. 
I discovered D+D in 1979 with the blue book you mention. (I think it went up to 3rd level and one ‘class’ was to be an elf!)
My group are still playing 1st Edition 
(although we have written an accompanying set of rule clarifications - which is over 100 pages 
)
…
In 1979, I started a D+D group at work. (And to this day I’m roleplaying with one chap from that time.)
But there were two memorable moments with my first-ever session:
-
when one work colleague (Paul) created a Cleric, he named the character ‘Bishop Luigi’.
Now in the manual, it said something like ‘If a character has a particular trait, encourage the player to build on it.’
So I asked Paul to roleplay with an Italian accent.
He promptly announced that was a stupid idea … and left the game.
Is that a record? Before we’ve even finished rolling characters, we’re down a player! -
shortly after Paul left, my first adventure began with the players finding a dungeon entrance. They went down and soon discovered the underground path split in two directions.
So three players said they would go a little way in one direction, whilst the other two guarded the rear.
At this point, one of the two rearguard characters passes me a note. (My first note!
)
It read “I kill the other player, take his stuff and tell the others we were jumped by a monster.”
LUckily things improved after that and I have so many happy memories of the last 43 years…
A friend of mine is running a D&D game at Origins next month, entitled “When Elf Was a Class.” 
And of course you were doing well if your character even survived the creation. I think a lot of people just house-ruled character creation because it took forever and didn’t give the player any real control, all for playing a life-path minigame that didn’t actually provide much guidance into character motivation or backstory details. Then there was the guy that first time out would try to take out an Imperial Marine in TL-13 battledress and PGMP with a slugthrower and immediately get reduced to component atoms. Cool move, bro!
I feel as through the main audience for Critical Role aren’t actual roleplayers but people who imagine that they’d like to play D&D but don’t want to bother learning a bunch or rules, or just like the way the players interact with one another in friendly bantering fashion. Anyone hoping to recreate that dynamic in their home games is usually quickly disappointed because the GM is not as quick-witted as Matt Mercer (who doubtless spends many hours of prep time crafting the narrative and responses) or as verbally clever as the players, most of whom are professional voice and/or film/TV actors with a background in improv.
The Critical Role game (or at least the little that I’ve seen) is pretty rules-light, in part because WotC threatened to sue over IP rights (in its typical short-sighted “Fuck the fanbase, pay me!” fashion of a company run by accountants) but also because a bunch of arguing over rules slows down the game and interrupts the narrative and interplay of the players-as-characters that the audience is tuning in to see, so Mercer mostly seems to improvise through anything requiring more than a simple role which is smart and works great as long as the players are on board.
Ah, some true old-school regressive roleplaying when all ‘races’ were essentially defined by one dominant characteristic or class. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Stranger
The party comprises an Elven cleric/ranger, a Human paladin, a Half-Elf fighter/magic user, a Dwarven fighter, a Gnome illusionist, and a Halfling thief.
Last year, i was part of a “NSFW” Star Wars game on Discord for a short while. I was kicked out eventually for dropping out for several weeks (caused by some health and other problems I had been having–It can be hard to play when you are sleep-deprived and depressed). But also, I don’t really care all that much about Star Wars lore, and it seemed like I was the only one playing a character roughly my own age, who had any significant weaknesses and wasn’t a stereotypical archetype.
I’d love to play in an adult space opera setting. I think Star Trek is great for gaming because a lot of it is just grownups interacting in various ways–working, playing, etc.–and dealing with problems. It is a very broad, open setting with lots of room for action and drama. And unlike Star Wars, it isn’t overshadowed by the Chosen One and the Force and the One Ultimate Evil Badguy. I came up with my own version of the Star Trek setting that somewhat combined TOS and Kelvin. But I couldn’t find a G.M. (I don’t want to run a game; I want to play! … the old story.)
Nice! It sounds like they just stepped out of 1986 and into Queen of the Spiders.
“Sometimes the old ways are the best.”
Stranger
I’ve been playing 5E for almost two years and I still don’t get why there are three separate types of magic users.
Yeah, even though there were modules that linked to each other, planned out story arcs just weren’t a thing in my experience; play was more oriented to what today would be termed as ‘sandbox’ open worlds where the player decisions drove the narrative and the GM was expected to improvise. Even in Call of Cthulhu which was the first game I was aware of to actually offer fully planned out world-spanning campaigns like Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, Horror on the Orient Express, and the famed (or perhaps infamous) Masks of Nyarlathotep, I think actually playing and completing these campaigns was uncommon because players often tended to go off track unless railroaded (and the original editions of these campaigns typically offered little guidance or reasons why the players should stay on the main track), and even if they played through as intended they ended up suffering so many character deaths and replacements that the party was essentially a ‘Ship of Theseus’ with none of the characters even having a clear motivation for keeping on.
I’m sure there were women players (and I’ve met or heard from a few who apparently played back in the day) but quite honestly it was not a welcoming culture for women, ‘people of color’, or frankly anyone who was not in the dominantly-white geek culture of the time. The characters and art of the time did not reflect women or non-whites in a positive way (usually either being sexed-up bikini armor in the former or some form of villain in the latter), and the combat-focused play and general color-blindness to anything outside of Tolkien, Star Wars, you really had to be a hard-core fantasy/scifi geek and assertively outgoing to get involved in gaming.
Although I’ve never played it I suspect Vampire: The Masquerade and the other World of Darkness games, that actually presaged the whole urban fantasy wave of movies and television, probably brought in a lot of new players with its overarching narrative focus and social conflict versus combat tactics and treasure hunts. The nature of it would certainly people who viewed themselves as being on the fringes of society in their real lives instead of a band of conquesting heroes, and the ease of inclusion of themes of persecution, conspiracy, and eroticism (for those into that) were certainly outside the norm for D&D and other roleplaying games of the previous era where the characters were almost always assumed to be heroic and celebrated, or if persecuted were at least righteous underdogs.
Depending upon the kind of setting there might be multiple systems of magic and mysticism. Runequest has divine magic (from the gods), sorcery (scienc-y magic), and spirit or battle magic (for common use and barbarian shamans to master). All three serve different purposes in the world of Glorantha so it makes sense to have different types of users (even though Runequest doesn’t have classes most users of one type of magic either don’t use others or cannot master it to a substantial degree).
Stranger
RE Charisma
I understand why the folks at TSR were upset with everybody but paladins using charisma as their dump stat. But, IMO, charisma does not equal willpower or force of personality. OTTOMH A corrupt televangelist who really draws in the suckers but can’t stop having sex with hookers has a very high charisma but a low willpower.
I saw it both ways in the 1e era. Sometimes it was a bunch of hex/dungeon crawls but I also ran/played in campaigns where, even at level 1, you knew that the evil lich was trying to end the world and you had to find a way to stop him. A way with plenty of side quests and macguffins to get you to a lich-killing level of xp.
I think when Dragonlance came out, that really sort of built up the whole “Campaign as an epic story” ideal. But then, Dragonlance was the product of their actual game so obviously even before the rest of us knew about Dragonlance, people were already playing that way.
“I’m really good at selling used cars so of course I can resist a spell trying to remove me from this plane of existence!”
That’s what they keep telling me but I don’t get why they are separate classes. In game they don’t seem to function differently. Most of the differences seem to be based on the way a player plays a character.
Indeed, I don’t see why most of the classes aren’t just individual characteristics that players can color their characters with instead of choosing it as a class.
Barbarian? That’s a class? Why? Isn’t that more a set of cultural and social stereotypes rather than a profession?
And a paladin is really just a special fighter with a mission. And I have never really understood what a cleric was doing in an adventuring party.
I’d be happy with the basic classes being artificer, fighter, ranger, magic user, and rogue, with all the other stuff just being options within those, offering players the flexibility to morph their specific abilities and traits over the course of play. All the abilities of the other classes could become options to choose from.
This opinion isn’t so strong that I wish it were different or that it affects my enjoyment. I just don’t grok the underlying principle of how they chose what would be a class and what wouldn’t.
The big functional difference is that the old-school magic-users wizards have to prepare spells ahead of time, and specifically choose which spells from their spellbooks at the start of the day, while sorcerers (and warlocks) just innately know spells, and can cast on the fly without previous prep. Everything else is fluff and RP.
They did in AD&D. Different xp tables, different spell caps, different systems of memorization, roles were more compartmentalized, different attack/save tables, alignment actually meant something, etc. Now it’s homogenized and mostly inertia.
My current party is a bugbear fighter), a tiefling bard, a firbolg Druid, and a variant human ranger. I’m the variant but I don’t really know how I vary. 