I was already thinking about doing a self-indulgent history of my gaming post but I just couldn’t bring myself to. Then I was poking around on Cannibal Halfling Gaming (as one does) and I saw the above question and a link to a Reddit post with the same.

And I thought, hmmmmmmm. How HAVE I changed how I game, over the years? And that got me thinking about the D&D B/X boxes that my mom bought for me when I was in middle school. To the AD&D, 2e books that my brother and I poured over. Through the AD&D SSI video games, through the long break from RPGs, the pitstop into Magic: The Gathering, and then my reemergence with D&D, 5e. All the way to now where I’m exclusively solo RPGing.

The Beginning

Much like with Dr. Who, I have no idea when I first heard about Dungeons and Dragons. I grew up in the 1980s in a town of about 50 people in rural Kansas, the nearest gaming store was about an hour away. Just about everyone else I knew didn’t play RPGs and some even thought they were Satanic.

At some point when I was in early middle school or late elementary school I talked my mom into buying me the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Masters Guide. I read through the book a few times and could not for the life of me figure out how it worked. I was intrigued but none of it made sense.

I thought at the time that it was because the book was “Advanced” and that I needed just Dungeons and Dragons, the Basic Set. Again, I have no idea how I knew these things existed. So one day we were at a store for building models (my dad liked to build models, planes and cars) I saw the Red Box and talked my parents into purchasing it for me. I played through the solo adventure in the players manual and tried so hard to teach my brother how to play, so we could play together.

As time went on we got the Blue Box and some adventure modules. I remember reading through The Isle of Dread and so desperately wanting to play it but I had one. Gradually, as my brother and I got older we played little adventures that he or I would create. We really didn’t know what we were doing, but we spent hours doing it. Once AD&D, 2e came out we asked for the various books for our birthdays and Christmas and throughout high school we would read through the books and learn the lore of the Forgotten Realms. One early AD&D, 2e campaign we played had my brother playing two characters who were tasked with collecting books which allowed their quest giver to build all of the different types of golems which could be found in the various Monster Manuals that we had.

The SSI Years

Because we were two boys with no one else around us who played we quickly found the SSI video games. We poured through Pool of Radiance (in fact I played it so much that when I revisited it about 4-5 years ago, I remembered everything. Where every secret was and how and when to defeat all of the sections of the city). We got all of the SSI Forgotten Realms games, plus the Eye of the Beholder games, Hillsfar, Heroes of the Lance (a Dragonlance platformer), and one of the SSI Dark Sun games, probably Shattered Lands.

It was through these games that I came to see what D&D could be and how to play it. It gave me the confidence to play in campaigns while working at my area Boy Scout camp and to play in a few campaigns during my first attempt at college.

I absolutely loved the SSI Forgotten Realms games. You could take your characters from first level in Pool of Radiance, through, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, and finally to level 40 in Pools of Darkness. Being in earlier high school in the middle of nowhere, those games, and the novels which were being published at the same time, became my main source of RPGs.

(Quick aside while I was writing this I found all of the games on Steam for 50% so I went ahead and got them all.)

Long Break & MTG

As high school continued I picked up lots of various other RPGs, Marvel Super Heroes, GURPs, Heroes Unlimited, The Revised RECON, and maybe others. All of them had a one-shot or two and tons of characters. At this point, a friend of mine had gotten into RPGs as well so it was him, me, and my brother, which meant we could actually have games. But around this same time Magic: The Gathering came out. And our attention shifted from RPGs to MTG.

As I headed off to college all of my time, money, and energy is going into MTG. I played a couple games in college but the luster of D&D had fallen off for me. Or rather I thought I was too cool to play. So I stopped playing table-top RPGs but kept playing MTG. After about 5 more years of that by the early 2000s, I wasn’t playing RPGs or MTG.

Reemergence Campaign

So for about 10-15 years, I’m not playing TTRPGs or MTG. But I started to grab some of the D&D, 4e books right when it was sundowning and 5e was on the horizon. At this point, I got a group of local randoms to meet weekly for 3+ years to play through a homebrewed campaign that I developed as we went. Near the end of that time I was really starting to look for something else to play. We played a few one-shots of Call of Cthulhu and I picked up some Legend of the Five Rings books, but I couldn’t get them to move away from D&D. It just felt like there was one path to resolve all issues and that was in fighting and I wanted something which actually had a bit of a story with some conflict, not conflict with a story wrapped around it.

So I left the group. I had a gaming club at the school I was working in and played a weekly game with some students. Many of them were taught to play D&D and MTG by me. I ran a campaign that I had been developing on Roll20 for a little while and played in another game for a little while. But I just wasn’t feeling the D&D vibe anymore.

It wasn’t until Spelljammer was relaunched for 5e that I actually picked up a campaign and ran with it for a while, under a year. It was on Roll20 and I had gotten to a point in my gaming where I was prepping less and making stuff up more on the fly. I was letting the characters drive the story and we were all having a blast. But as is often the case, my life shifted a little bit and I just didn’t have the time.

Currently

A colleague introduced me to 1000 Year Vampire and I have been off and running since then. Playing numerous solo TTRPGs and playing various group TTRPGs, as solo. I find that it is much easier to get some gaming in when I don’t need to do it with a group, as I can pick it up when I want. Further, I’m not stuck just playing D&D every week. Instead, I can mix and match to my heart’s content and not have one system on repeat.

I have noticed that solo RPGing has shifted how I look at games. Not just in terms of what it might be like to run the game solo but also in terms of what would it be like to run those same games in a group. And I feel that solo RPGing has just furthered my move toward more improvisation and less prepping.

What about you? What does your RPG biography look like?