Gaming Pedigree

After that mildly depressing post about who I am, I thought I would follow up with another about my gaming history and background. Lets kick off by saying I LOVE GAMES. All kinds of games from card games to board games to roleplaying games to war games. Love them all!

I always had a lot of games as a kid. Most of the traditional ones, Monopoly, Risk, Cluedo, Ludo and other stranger ones and it was only a matter of time before someone bought me something that would lead me into paths less trodden. When I was about 12 or so, my Aunt bought me the Dragonlance boardgame. I had read the books and enjoyed them and was reading Tolkein and all that traditional gamer type stuff as well. At the same time I was reading White Dwarf (back before it became a catalogue for Games Workshop stuff) and this led me to a local game store in the neighbouring town of Whitehaven in Cumbria, UK.

In this store I picked up copies of the ADnD Players Handbook, the DMG, the Monstrous Compendium and a copy of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I am not sure which I managed to get hold of first but at the time I was pretty interested in roleplaying. Sadly I had no group up in the wilds of West Cumbria (there are more sheep than people). So I had to take matters into my own hands...

...My friends were quite cool; grungy but cool; and they were pretty happy to give the games a go. On popular vote (some of them used to play Fantasy Battle) we started with Warhammer and in leiu of an experienced GM I had to take the reigns and run a game I have run countless times since that day, The Oldenhaller Contract, from the back of the rulebook. No one was sure what was going on and I am sure we got some of the rules wrong but we managed to get through it, mostly in tact with only a few slight cases of Nurgle's Rot. From that point I pretty much ran Warhammer and DnD for the same group every Tuesday night and we even managed to get a little society set up at my sixth form centre (college).

Then I was allowed to play. There was another kid there called Newton who had also played DnD for ages and he was running a game of Dark Sun. It was the first time I had ever had a chance to play rather than run. I played an Elven Bard that was lucky enought to roll a decent psionic wild talent that meant he could make attacks at range with his mind and also meant he had the prerequisite of telekinesis and a reasonable pile of power points. It was a pretty standard game of slaves make good, but it was great and I loved it. I played lots throughout my college years and finally headed to university with a little experience under my belt.

The university had a roleplaying society. This was a good thing. It was also close to a large city that had a really big gaming store. I played in a good few long running campaigns, mostly Rolemaster, Vampire: The Masquerade and Rifts in my university years and ran a good few, namely Kult and some DnD. I was even President of the society for a few years and I still host their web forum on my webspace. My love of pretty cards also came to the fore during these years and I have since had to restrain myself from getting involved in collectible card games. I had a tendency to buy cards whenever I passed them and as some of you know one pack here and one pack there quickly adds up to a sizeable fort to hide in.

We were fortunate one day at the society that Lindsay had given Paul (who runs Yog-Sothoth.com) a conference microphone she was not using to test out his new Minidisc player. This was tested during my game of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and resulted in the birth of RPGMP3 with the first ever recording. It was pretty ropey but it seeded an idea and we have been running with it ever since.

Every gamer had ever spoken to had story about games they had played in and excellent times they had had. Moments that formed legendary events of their formative years. Obviously these were just stories told over and over and over again at conventions and down the pub, but why did it have to stop there? Why couldn't we record these stories and let others listen to them. We started with a couple of one offs of Call of Cthulhu and then finally progressed to AEG's The Worlds Largest Dungeon. At this time we started to podcast the recordings and were pretty much the first with any kind of gaming content. we did finish the World's Largest Dungeon and the little character in the title bar of this site was actually an Ogre NPC from that game kindly drawn my one of the folks on the site.

Since then I have run and recorded a lot of games. Mostly DnD as this is the backbone of the site but I also have a strong interest in indie games and always run a Christmas Special using some set of indie rules. I have to say I have a very soft spot for My Life With Master and have run it numerous times. Currently I am running DnD 4e and Rolemaster and playing nothing as I rarely get a chance to play any more. I guess through my gaming "career" I have GMed far more than I have played but I don't really mind that.

I don't attend anywhere near as many cons as I really would like to and I must improve on that front. I am a little slack with regards travelling, but I did try to attend Dragonmeet in London every year when I lived in the UK. Not really found anything in Houston and perhaps thats what the world needs... A BIG Texas-sized con! I even have a web address picked out! What do you think?

First Post (Again!)

So here we are kicking off a new blog. I have tried this lark a couple of times in the past and either they fail because I run out of stuff to say or I get distracted by some other project that seems more shiny and interesting. This foray has been inspired by the articles on writing an RPG blog over on the Musings of a Chatty DM blog so you can all head over there and complain!

My aim is to write something every day (or most days, lets not put the pressure on just yet). currently I run the website RPGMP3 which has been recording and podcasting actual play tabletop RPG session for around 5 years now. We have just broke through 1 terrabyte of bandwidth downloaded each month and we are starting a site redesign project to make the place a little more Web 2.0.

I am currently running (and recording) Dungeons and Dragon 4e Keep on the Shadowfell every Thursday evening and Rolemaster 2nd Edition every other Sunday. I have to say at the moment Rolemaster is my favourite, but I always found it nice to GM something that I can make up on the fly rather than having to plan it out too much in advance. The Rolemaster game has just headed into the start of The Grand Campaign and I will consider it something of a personal achievement if the players get anywhere near through the first section of it. The adventure is incomplete but there are some guildlines on where it was supposed to go, so it will allow a good amount of flexibility when we finally get there.

With regards to DnD 4e, I have found the jump from 3.5 a little more difficult than I would have hoped. I think most of that is due to a necessary change of mind set. I have heard 4e refered to; both positively and negatively; as a board game, a minis game, a wargame and even a card game. At the FLGS nearby they run a 4e game and one of the regular Magic players taps his cards as he uses his abilities. I am still on the fence about 4e, I really like some of it, but I am also rather dubious about other bits too.

I have noticed a large increase in traffic on my site due mostly to 4e and the recordings we are putting out, but most of the folks that come through and comment on the forums are more interested in picking us up on rules calls that have since been errataed than on telling a decent story and it is further increasing the divide between the two types of gaming, as I see them.

There are those who like to play a role (I guess I fall into this camp as I will often let players get away with things if it increases their enjoyment and further the story) and there are those who roll to play (where rules and dice and levelling are more important than why you are doing it in the first place). I have met players from both camps, and there is nothing wrong with either style of play but I prefer story over dice rolling. Generally this means I will tweak the rules on the fly to suit the situation. I never break the rules, but my rules calls often fall more towards the drama of the story than the needs of the system. But at least I am always fair.

Anyway, enough for a first post I think. I will try and keep things light and happy round these parts - even thought he background I seem to have picked is a little dark and dreary. And I will try to update this as much as possible.

On a side note, anyone out there who can code PHP or CSS drop me a line as I have some lovely site redesign work that needs some attention.