Here’s a navel-gazey topic for ya, but I’m curious to learn about y’all’s personal history with tabletop roleplaying games.
This is long…
My Introduction to TTRPGs
Where I started, where I’ve been, and why system doesn’t matter
I was introduced to TTRPGs by the bassist of the band I was in right out of college. This was back in 2012 in Akron, Ohio (USA). We started with D&D 4E, premade characters, and a simple three-room dungeon full of combat. I was amazed and instantly obsessed. It was like a video game but using imagination (hah!).
Modern Beginnings
When it came time to actually start a campaign and make our own characters, the group decided 4E wasn’t for us (much to the bassist’s chagrin), so we explored 3.5E before quickly switching to Pathfinder (1E). As a player, I really enjoyed the system at the time—so many buttons and levers to push and pull, so much mixing and matching of skills and feats and classes and races, so much fiddling—but when it was my turn to run the game, I found Pathfinder to be too ridged and brittle in it’s rules and application for the stories (hah!) I wanted to tell.
It was around then that D&D 5E was in public testing. Codenamed D&D Next, it offered what I was looking for at the time: a system with a lighter touch (hah!) that would allow me to run the kinds of adventures and narratives I had in mind. I convinced the group to switch to the public beta and took over running our weekly game.
(The sessions back then were just as much drinking game as they were roleplaying. Someone roll a 1? They take a shot. Someone roll a 20? The GM takes a shot. Someone get knocked prone and then stand up? We all stand up or else take a shot. By the end of the night, it was hard to keep track of what was even going on. This level of drinking is not conductive to adventuring, let me tell you!)
By the time D&D 5E was actually released, we’d moved on. I was running a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire campaign, which continued through me moving away to Houston, Texas (USA). We played via Google Plus (remember that?), Hangouts, Sheets, and Drawings. The game only lasted a few more months before puttering out.
(That original group went back to Pathfinder and continued playing for about another year without me. But I made my triumphant return eventually!)
It was then that I made my first foray into old-school gaming, thanks to a Half Price Books that was a few blocks from my apartment (in the Montrose neighborhood for those who know). I stumbled upon a collection of Basic D&D and Advanced D&D adventures for cheap and bought them all up (man, I wish I’d kept all those)—no rulebooks, though. Intrigued, I picked up a pdf of Basic D&D and invited my old friends to join me online for a few sessions of B1: In Search of the Unknown. The game was abandoned after only a single session, and I decided Basic wasn’t for me (hah!).
Story Game Revelations
I couldn’t muster my old group to play online and I didn’t know anyone in Houston, but I still wanted to play something, so I turned to Meetup dot com. There I found The Gauntlet!
At that time, The Gauntlet wasn’t a publisher of games and producer of podcasts and zines. They were just a local group of story gamers (a local group that continues to this day). I joined their recurring Friday game, which at the time (and usually) was Dungeon World.
Over the next six months my whole perspective of what a tabletop roleplaying game was and could be completely transformed. First, via Dungeon World (and accompanying advice online), then through all the subsequent games. I played everything from The Shab Al-Hiri Roach and In a Wicked Age to InSpectres and The Final Girl.
(This is around the time I started designing my own games. More on that in another post.)
Occasionally, I would also join their Wednesday One-Shot game night. When it came my turn to run something, I returned to my roots and picked up the D&D 5E Starter Set: Lost Mine of Phandelver. Taking everything I’d learned from story games and applying it to 5E turned out to be a revelatory experience. The story wasn’t what I prepared—it was the emergent narrative that happened at the table as a result of the mechanics and player choices.
Fusion
After a year in Texas, I returned to Akron, Ohio. I wasted no time getting the old gang back together, along with a few newcomers. Their Pathfinder game had since ended, and they were ready to get into whatever I was running. Taking a page out of The Gauntlet’s book, I ran both a campaign night—5E—and a (mostly) one-shot night—various story games.
I did my best to fuse 5E with my then story game sensibilities. Combining my newly learned ideas about emergent narrative and player choice with my newly acquired tools for prepping fronts (or factions) and non-player characters resulted in one of the most satisfying campaigns I’ve ever run to completion, regardless of game system.
Still, I grew to feel about D&D 5E the same way I’d felt about Pathfinder before, only now for different reasons. With the campaign over and the one-shot night ending, my frustrations were such that I stopped playing TTRPGS almost completely (aside from a short-lived 5E campaign run by that original bassists with a new group in Cleveland).
Then the global pandemic hit. Feeling isolated and bored, the dice called to me once more—virtually, of course.
I started up a (mostly) story games (mostly) one-shots night online using Roll20. At the same time, the bassists got another online 5E campaign going.
Once we could meet in person again, I ran my first (and last) Dungeon World campaign. While the campaign itself was a success, and despite the recent online one-shot successes, my dissatisfaction only grew. Neither games from the modern nor story game tradition could scratch my intensifying itch.
A few other games were played every now and then, off and on—more off than on. Then I moved away again.
Old School Revolution
I credit three games with introducing me to the OSR. Ironically, they’re all more part of the story game tradition, though they’re each designed to call back to or emulate old-school play in some way.
The games: World of Dungeons, Freebooters on the Frontier, and Trophy.
As I settled into my new home in the foothills of Appalachia and got a new D&D 5E campaign going with a new group of friends and family, I kept thinking back to the ideas found in those games. I went searching online. I found the OSR blogosphere. I explored new games. I reread Basic D&D and this time decided it very much was for me. The OSR was everything I’d been looking for this whole time. The OSR was my jam!
Some OSR ideas mixed with my old story game thoughts and combined in 5E to result in an even more satisfying campaign than the last. But there were still a few trappings of modern play I needed to let go of.
I convinced my local group to let me run some OSR games. I ran a few sessions of Old-School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics (which some would argue isn’t OSR, but whatever). Death In Space proved fertile soil for a months-long campaign. But even after all that, they wanted to return to 5E.
If I wanted to keep playing OSR games, I figured I was going to have to do so online. And if I was going to run a game online (this time with Owlbear Rodeo), perhaps I could make a few bucks in the process (on StartPlaying).
Synthesis
My foray into paid GMing started with lofty ambitions. I created a shared, living world. It was my intention to run several different parties in this same world, all playing Old-School Essentials. But the market for paid old-school referees was and is vanishingly small, so I opened my world once again to D&D 5E. And since I was going to be running 5E anyway, I invited my home game to also play in the same shared world.
This all proved to be a monumental challenge. The twin modern chains of player character centered adventure design and encounter balance weighed me down and threatened to drown me. It was then that I made my greatest (and most controversial) discovery. A discovery that proved to be my key to freedom.
With the right preparation, culture, expectations, and play style (and maybe a handful of house rules)…
System doesn’t matter.
I started running my 5E games in the same ways as I ran my OSE ones. Same prep, same random encounters, same dungeons. Nothing broke. In fact, 5E began to sing. The game’s mechanics were only there to answer a simple question: Did the action being attempted succeed or fail. And that question only needed to be asked when the outcome was uncertain and there was real risk in failure. Everything else was just window dressing.
Now, of course I start by meeting a new game where it’s at and on its own terms. But if I don’t end up liking that place, I alter the terms. After all, the system isn’t the game. The game is what happens at the table. The game is play. And play is what you make it.
Conclusion
Thank you for coming to my TED talk, haha.
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I had a pretty similar trajectory: traditional stuff → dungeon world → discern realities podcast (from the gauntlet!) → OSR. The gauntlet really does seem like quite the gem.
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I feel like trad/neo-trad → story games via Dungeon World → OSR is probably a pretty common pipeline. I also (while admitting bias) think it provides a great knowledge foundation for OSR play.
(Great podcast! Also, agree about the Gauntlet. Man, playing with Jason Cordova back before he was designing games was a real learning experience for me.)
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I was introduced to TTRPGs around the release of D&D 3rd edition. I had a math teacher that was into it and he organized some games during the lunch time. I know I first played 2nd edition, because that’s what he liked, but I remember nothing of the system. But I really liked it.
I started buying some 3rd edition books and played non-stop during high-school.
I hoped on 4th edition when it came out and played a lot. It received a lot of backlash, but it’s a fantastic game with really good design decisions.
Then I had several years of no play because of life. Moving city, going to university, etc.
I bought 5th edition around 2016 or so. Read the books over several months and started playing around that time. 5th edition brought me back hard. It’s also a really good game.
I work in the indie video game industry, so I’m exposed to a lot of different ideas, creativity and avant-garde products. I started to wonder if TTRPG had something similar because I was playing so much 5E that I was starting to get over it.
My first jump was Starfinder. I really like the setting. Played it for two years. Wouldn’t play it again, I can’t do 600 pages rulebooks anymore.
Then it kind of blew from there, around 2019-20. I have four bookshelves full of games now. I explored a lot of Free League games, Vampire the Masquerade, a lot of OSR (still have not played though), etc.
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I come from a long line of nerds. When I was a child in the 80s, I was at my uncle’s and saw a bunch of giant tomes with dragons on them. I asked my mother, and she recounted her experiences and ideas behind playing D&D.
From that I ran a game for my two younger siblings. I remember having them encounter a giant, them running from it, and little else.
This experience colored my view of role-playing games probably more than any other experience, and I feel the way I run even today is highly informed by this.
Afterwards my uncle ran a Mentzer Basic game for me and some cousins, and shortly after I would receive that set for Christmas. This led to me starting to run for my peers.
I eventually graduated to my uncle’s “adults” game with my older cousins and his friends, this was a mix of RuneQuests from the time, and was set in Glorantha.
Over the years I continued to play games of all varieties - we had a big flgs game using BECMI and the Gaz’s. Lots of RQ and BRP. I of course played tons of Palladium which was very in-vogue at the time. I discovered Harn, dabled in the WoD, and would also get into stuff like Whispering Vault, Unknown Armies, Ars Magica, and Over the Edge.
I also participated in the early Forge (among many other forums, some more as a lurker than others) and played lots of proto-storygames (The Pool, Hero Wars, and Sorcerer). Around the same time, 3e D&D came out and I played in a friend’s massive Forgotten Realms game. I appreciate him and my friends, but it was one of the most disappointing campaigns I ever participated in.
Looking for alternatives, I discovered the burgeoning then-not-named pre-OSR, and got excited for a game named after the old Castles & Crusades society.
We played a very fun campaign of C&C, until I could convince my group to move over to Labyrinth Lord, and then when Swords & Wizardry finally hit, I was very into the recently dubbed OSR - finding many great connections online, playing in fun games, and going to cons.
I still dabble in many forms of gaming, but I’ve found I have less time and thus less interest in much beyonf my favorite games. I also found, echoing back to my childhood experiences, that I prioritized trusting everyone at the table and to just do the damn thing, and that mechanizing things can not “produce” or “emulate” experiences, the players all have to do that. So I kind of dedicated a little over the last ten years majorly to traditional adventure games.
I run a fun meetup in my hometown, and am almost always juggling a big open table, with one or two closed table campaigns. I also frequent cons, doing 1-2 local ones a year, and about 2-4 regional as well.
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I was a very late comer to TTRPGs. I always loved RPG videogames growing up but I don’t think TTRPGs ever came up in my life until I was way older.
I played D&D for the first time when I was in my early twenties. Because it was my idea, I was DM by default, which was funny because I also had no idea how to play. And while D&D was theoretically fun, it really wasn’t until I discovered Mork Borg that I actually got into the hobby. I have a few friends that are long time TTRPG players and this allowed me to dabble in a lot of different kinds of games, like Alice is Missing, World Wide Wrestling, Dogs of the Vineyard, and a few others.
I don’t have a game group so I’ve mostly just played Mausritter with my son, which I really do enjoy.
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