Board Games & RPGs

This post on Metafilter got me thinking about my youthful days as a board gamer & D&D nerd. The post is about a "monster game" called "The Campaign for North Africa," reputed to be one of the most complex and long board games ever created. Clocking in at 1000-1500 hours of gameplay for 10 people to complete, it's more like an accounting job than a fun night of Balderdash with the family. But, something inside me would love to try it, if I had unlimited funds and time.

When I was younger, I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by a friend (I don't remember who). I started playing in junior high with a small group of people I went to school with. I read tons of the D&D world novels (I remember reading about 60 in one summer), got as many of the books and expansion packs as I could, and went to local gaming conventions whenever I got the chance. But, for all that, I was never much of a serious player.

Part of that may come down to the people with whom I was playing. Besides myself, there was Jesse, Hans, David, and Chris -- I think that's everyone. We all had our own strange ideas about what the game was for. Chris was always the knight (or, Paladin, as it was called under the AD&D 2nd Edition rules we used). He was a fairly straightforward and serious player, if somewhat lacking in imagination. David used it to fulfill his fantasies; he was always wanting his character to find some river nymph to get it on with, and when he was Dungeon Master, there were always more than a few erotic encounters in our campaigns -- well, erotic by a 13 yr old boy's standards. Hans was also fulfilling fantasies, but of a different type. A typical encounter would go something like this:

DM: You are led into the King's throneroom. He says, "I have a mission for you."
Hans: I attack him.
DM: What? No, he's a good king, he wants to hire you.
Hans: I want to attack him and take his gold.
DM: sigh...

And Jesse was just there to ruin everyone else's time by screwing around. He wasn't really into the whole idea of role-playing games, but he did it because most of our group of friends was into it.

And me? Well, I always wanted to have interesting and complex campaigns. I was fairly serious, but I wanted it to be fun. However, I was (and am) a bit of a control freak, so I had a specific idea about how the game should have been played. I wanted people to take the game seriously -- that is, become absorbed into the world of the game -- because they wanted to experience the new worlds and storylines we had available to us. Not that jokes and silliness were not allowed in my mind -- but in service of making the experience fun for all, not in service of winding up others because you're an obnoxious jerk. It is probably no wonder that I a) am pursuing a career as a literature professor, and b) focus on the Renaissance. But I digress...

So, I wasn't with the most serious gamers, and to be honest, I didn't have tons of fortitude for playing the game endlessly myself. I loved to read the rulebooks, though, imagine scenarios, create characters, come up with ideas for campaigns and encounters, design new worlds and weapons... Perhaps if I had gotten hooked up with some big time gamers I would have been more hardcore. But, those hardcore gamers also intimidated me. I remember going to the gaming and comic book conventions when I was 12, 13, 14 years old, seeing the hardcore nerds playing weekend long marathon sessions of different games -- sometimes D&D or some other RPG, sometimes the historical wargames, sometimes other wargames like Warhammer or whatever the mech-battle games were. Those guys (and they were almost always male -- there were few women at these cons; in fact, I don't remember seeing a lot of RPG females until Vampire came out, and then Magic: The Gathering after it, 2 games that I never played), who I didn't really look up to as "cool" in any way, did impress me with their dedication and knowledge and, yes, their ability to play these games. In a well-run campaign, strategy is an important part of gameplay, and I was impressed by how much these cats knew, or appeared to know, at least.

Anyway, I never got into that level of play, which is probably for the best -- if I had, I'd probably be stuck in a miserable job spending my weekends playing games constantly, as opposed to stuck in a low-paying but rewarding job and spending my weekends researching and grading constantly. (Is that better?) But, I always kind of wanted to; those gamers had something they were really good at, something they were devoted to, something that created a community. My gamer friends were not much of a community, and while sometimes the gameplay was fun, we never created those lasting memories that you're supposed to create with your friends during your youth.

I still miss the gaming, or at least, the benefits that it brought when things went well. Getting together with a group of people, laughing, eating, talking, having a common task to accomplish, creating a story together. One thing that can be lacking in an academic life is that sort of casual group camaraderie and play. I really think that games are one of the best ways to have fun group interactions. Unfortunately, in the US, there are some pretty stark lines between gaming subcultures. You've got the nerds and geeks who are hardcore gamers, love big games with lots of rules and set-up and dice rolling and charts etc. Then you've got the people who are obsessed with 1 "adult" game -- usually something like Scrabble -- or with a solitary game like Sudoku or crossword puzzles. And finally, there's the rest of the population, who occassionally like to play Monopoly (a game that can be sort of fun, if you like spending 4 hours grinding your friends into the dust) or a silly social game like Balderdash or Taboo (both of which are pretty fun).

I recently bought Settlers of Catan after hearing a lot about it -- it has a short set-up time, quick play, balanced and nuanced rules that encourage thoughtful play but don't require memorizing tons of rules, and a generally fun, competitive, but not vicious design that eliminates the harshness and misery of a game like Monopoly while keeping the competitive element alive. The problem is, it has enough of a learning curve that you don't just pop it out like you would Trivial Pursuit, and it encourages a long-term committment -- that is, it isn't something to play just once, but rather something to play with a group of people who want to get together semi-regularly. So, it kind of falls in-between the casual non-gamer & the hardcore gamer crowd. I hope to find some people who'd like to play it semi-regularly, but that may be difficult. We shall see, I guess.

In the meantime, if anyone needs someone else to join their D&D campaign, I'm happy to jump in, if you're willing to bring me up to speed. It's been about 20 years since I played, so I may be a bit rusty.