Sorry, I moved to California in 1978.
Well SingleDad, thanks for clearing that up, phew. 
I really couldn’t own up to the way we treated the kids at school who played role-playing games. Sorry :(.
:getting all misty eyes:
Ahh yes, the good old days. When all the rules for D & D came in one small blue book. When I could play Champions by tossing every die I had onto the table.
:wipes tear away:
“My mind reels with sarcastic replies!” - Snoopy
Boxed sets? Are those, like prewritten campaigns? I know those existed but it always seemed indescribably lame and we never used them.
–
From an actual catalog: “Disco balls create an enchanting, dazzling effect of light shafts, adding movement and glamour to any occasion”
the Abrams’ bris was certainly memorable
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com
Still play. Can’t let age destroy imagination. AD&D’s the game: Where else can one crawl inside the anus of an Ancient Wyvern and find the +4 Storm Giant’s Gauntlet of Rectal Examination?
It’s tough finding a good group, no doubt about that. The usual available players are either ultrahardcore fruity losers or half-assed beer & pretzel guys. I had a great group going on in Maryland and just got into a new one out here in Portland. Two guys & two gals: they seem pretty into the game and they’re a great bunch of people so it should be pretty cool. They’re a little more bound to the rules & regulations than I am, but then again, everyone seems to be - even in real life.
I play entirely for those rare moments when the fantasy completely eclipses drab reality. Then, the magic becomes real.
Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.
Oh, hell, drag us all back to our geeky younger days (as opposed to those still-geeky current days), why don’t ya?
I’m guilty, too. I co-founded the RPG club of my junior high school (George Washington of lovely Wayne, NJ). In high school, I played AD&D, Runequest, Twilight 2000, Stormbringer, a weird “no-rules” thing a friend ran, and the greatest RPG of all time, the magnificent, usually fatal MERP!
So, is there anybody out there that remembers MERP? Has any clue what it stands for? (And, no, I’m not misspelling GURPS, this is something different.) Anyone else fondly recall the Ram-Butt-Bash-Knock-Down-Slug-Attack-Table?
Ah, memories!
I’m your only friend
I’m not your only friend
But I’m a little glowing friend
But really I’m not actually your friend
But I am
::hand goes up::
When I joined the rpg club at college I commented with surprise that I was the only female there, one wag responded that I was probably the only woman some of those guys had ever seen…
Had a lot of fun though and met my SO during a fire fight free for all
All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people.
Yankee - sometimes it does seem that female RPGers are few and far between. I was lucky enough to mostly play in a group that was pretty evenly split in the male/female catagory. Makes the games more fun
“My mind reels with sarcastic replies!” - Snoopy
Raises hand
Hell, I’m playing NOW, on Compuserve. . .
– Sy the Sly (assassin, that is)
“Excuse me, are you reading Torah and eating crayons?”
:drags out the slightly dusty dice bag:
Coff, Coff.
Would these be the dice you were refering to? I played for a few years, until our DM went off and got married. You lose more good DM’s that way than any other, it seems.
I don’t know anyone out here that plays.
Carpe Jugulum
Well now let’s see?
I am also known as Celest the head of the Cult of Ecstascy.
And then of course one of the newest members of the chantry, Wyllow of the Euthenatos.
These are Mage characters for those who aren’t familiar with the tradition names.
We play on Sunday nites, and everybody brings something to share for sustenence during heated battles with the Technocrancy.
My one down fall is that I am die impaired. What that means is that I have a hard time telling some of the similar ones apart. Therefore my group took up a collection and bought me all different colored dice. Now they just say pick up the two green die and roll them instead of roll two die ten.
I have gotten to know the difference, but they still have yet to let me live it down after three years with the same group!
Great thread by the way! I have been meaning “out” any Mage players for a few weeks now.
On a sad memory note. When in grade school I used to play D&D with the guys in the neighborhood and had to quit because I was always the first elf sacrificed.
Also quit because of the stigmata that went along with it for a while. I grew up quite a bit and realized that it was a fun outlet to be out of time for a while, and be someone else for a day.
Okay some people have molded their characters after themselves after a fashion. Just to give you some insite, one of my characters is COE, and the other a Euthenato. There was one in-between that was COFE (F is for Final) but she took the good death.
Now for those Mage players figure that one out.
Mistress Kricket
Are you stuck on stupid?
Ah-henh. Don’t talk to me about Vampire: The Masquerade. I’m the VTM fuckin’ mastah. I live and breathe this game, and I have quite a coterie here. Of course, I am not the prince of this city, but I do get to wield tremendous clout.
This game rocks. But we limit our games strictly to LARP, so there’s none of that table-top shit.
This is the real deal Holyfield. We get all geared up in character, go out and interact with one another (and with “mortals”) in various settings.
There are hand signals for nonverbal things and the storyteller wields godlike power.
I don’t care if anyone knows that I do this, it is so much fun, and really cool, when it’s done right. If you are with the right people, and have planned it out, and your story-teller is good, the feeling is well nigh inimitable.
It’s like starring in your own movie.
If you ever get a chance to try any in character, live action role playing, I suggest you try it. The rush is exquisite.
“Winners never quit and quitters never win, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.”
And
“This site is more addictive than caramel-covered crack!”
Bump.
Let’s bring some more of you back out of the role playing closet.
Mistress Kricket
Are you stuck on stupid?
I love that game.
O.K. you finally got me. I am currently involved in an AD&D campaign (going on two years now) that started out as a Runequest campaign (don’t ask!) My husband is the DM. We meet at our house on Friday nights. There are 6 of us. I didn’t start RPGs until a few years ago. I picked on gamers in junior high and high school. Now I am married to one and I am one myself.
SingleDad–love the lightbulb joke!
“You don’t have insurance? Well, just have a seat and someone will be with you after you die.” --Yes, another quality sig custom created by Wally!
A Jesusfied sig: Next time I covet thine opinion, I’ll ask for it!
I used to have a good friend back in High School who was sort of into it, but then he went Christian and burned all his D&D books, as did his best friend (also a D&D fan turned Christian). I never played a campaign with them at the time, as it seemed more complicated than it was worth for me.
A few years ago, a different friend was involved in a group, and as we were both Fantasy novel fans, he convinced me to come along - and so i joined the group.
They were an okay bunch of people, a wide range of types, both in gender and age, and we had fun. I was a dwarf (I forget my name) and I was more of an explorer than a treasure hunter (this confused my co-players, as Dwarfs are meant to be Treasure-mad: “gold gold gold gold”)
However, the DM was a bit… annoying. And she put us all in a situation where, though we didn’t know it, one direction was where the adventure was, the other direction was certain death. And the other direction was much more interestingly described.
And we all died.
So that was that.
-
Shadow of the Pigeon -
Weirdo of the Night
I still play various versions of En Garde, where you role play in Paris around the time of the Three Musketeers.
Yup… I’m a geek.
D&D and then AD&D
Twilight: 2000 (anyone else remember that one?)
The Marvel Superheroes game (which was kind of lame, but I liked making up powers)
Shadowrun
GURPS
Vampire: the Masq.
Wraith: the Oblivion (personal fav.)
And the jewel in my RPG crown… Bunnies & Burrows - the game where you play a rabbit! Anyone who’s read Watership Down has a good idea what I mean.
Of course the real mark of an RPG geek is when you say “I’m going to make my own RPG!”. I did so twice (one sucked, the other was actually pretty decent), and wrote about half of the spell list for another game a friend was making.
I’d love to play some more, but don’t know anyone and getting a group of RPG folks together when you’re pushing 30 is a hell of a lot hard than when you’re 16 or 20. Damn kids, jobs, spouses… etc.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
My way-back machine seems to be broken- I did the whole high school AD&D thing, but I can’t remember the name of the game I was especially addicted to- this RPG where you were stuck on a huge, city-sized space ship that had gone off course and wandered through a radiation cloud, the result of which was that the characters all had various sets of mutations that in some cases gave them special powers, or in other cases just gave them an extra nose, depending on what kind of bizarre drug-induced nightmares the GM had the night before. I gave my players some truly wild mutations.
Can somebody help me out here? I wanna say Alpha Ship, or Beta Disaster… I’m pretty sure a Greek letter was involved.
Opus: I’m 99% sure you meant Metamorphosis Alpha. I have some ancient copy of The Dragon (back when it was called that and not “Dragon”) that has special mutation tables for the game.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
I run an AD&D campaign for three other players. I don’t ever forsee giving up the hobby.
A lot of my GM ways are abhorent to some purists. After all these years, I’m still no expert on the rules. They aren’t always required. I haven’t bothered to create my own campaign world. Whatever setting I use becomes pretty well my own by the time I’m through with it. I don’t know my modules backwards and forwards. They are broad guidelines, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like to kill characters, though I do delight in almost killing characters. I don’t sweat game balance. I don’t see any reason why a human couldn’t be split-classed. I start each character out with a randomly generated “Gradma’s Closet” magic item. Sometimes I’ll even let them re-roll it if their classes can’t use it.