Why Am I Even Here?
I’ve been playing ttrpgs for quite some time now, even though I took a long hiatus in the middle. My first brush with games like this was around three decades ago. I was probably 8, give or take a year. A close friend’s dad was running some version of D&D (in retrospect I can theorize that it was a heavily homebrewed version of AD&D 1e) and his family had a party in the sandbox.
It was brutal.
Surviving past level 1 was quite a feat, and characters that had survived to level 3 or 4 were viewed as near-legendary figures to us kids. Everything was hand-mapped by the players, and you better hope that someone in the party had a cartography skill. I don’t recall any dungeons but the wilderness was a scary place (knowing what I know now, this is not a surprise). I don’t remember very much of this game, to be honest, but it will stick with me forever as a formative experience.
It was such an eye-opening thing, to play this game that was so different from the board games and video games I’d played. To have that much freedom in how challenges were approached. I’d love to someday do some digging and find out what exactly we were playing since my memories of it are so scattered.
Either way, that began a life-long love of ttrpgs. They weren’t a constant presence in my life, but I always come back to them. I had countless 8-10 hour days of D&D 3/3.5 in high school, then fell off sometime during college. Every so often I’d go to my old DM’s house and look through my old character folder from those days, or look through the fallen PCs in the graveyard folder.
Finally, about 4 years ago I dove back in and began running my own games. As much as I don’t enjoy DMing D&D 5e these days (or playing, if I’m being honest), it deserves credit for being the game that brought me back into the fold.
Without getting too in the weeds, suffice it to say that after about a year I found that I was just not vibing with the system and also (as I discovered later) the most common 5e play culture. With that epiphany, I went down the rabbit hole and got my eyes on as many other systems and play styles as I could. Ultimately, I’ve finally found my groove with OSR and OSR-adjacent (NSR, etc.) systems and communities, though I still like to branch out and will try nearly any game at least once. (EDIT: I feel the need to point out that while 5e and the style of play most common to 5e isn’t my style these days, especially on the GM side, I’m all for people playing what they like. Everyone gets different things from ttrpgs and folks should play the way that makes them happy.)
As seems to be common in these communities, the desire to create has taken hold of me (and what OSR GM isn’t already creating for their own games all the time anyway?). After many false starts with planned modules and settings, I finally took some good advice and decided to start a blog. Now instead of my half-formed ideas lying fallow in my notes, they can be pushed out into the world without the pressure of turning them into something more than they are. Maybe someday, the drip feed of creative juices into the blogosphere will coalesce into something greater than the sum of its parts. Until that day, I’ll keep rambling here.