Playing the Dream

I’ve been hang­ing around gamers since high school. I was exposed to Dun­geons & Drag­ons sev­er­al times as well as a bas­tardized ver­sion of Trav­eller on the bus we took to march­ing band com­pe­ti­tions. I kept run­ning into more and more peo­ple who were into LARPs (which sound real­ly fun, although I haven’t tried one yet) and oth­er RPGs. Still, I nev­er seemed to meet any oth­er women who played and got the def­i­nite impres­sion that gam­ing was a boys’ club. I was curi­ous, but not quite enough to try get­ting past the implied “No Gurls Alowed” sign on the club­house. Besides, every­body else seems to get into gam­ing as a teenager—I was a lit­tle old to start, right?

Back in 1998, though, an acquain­tance from the music com­mit­tee in our UU con­gre­ga­tion intro­duced me to an old friend of hers, Sam, who was a game design­er and a won­der­ful gamemas­ter. They played Were­wolf on week­ends at the acquain­tance’s place and I was invit­ed to join. Every­one in the group was very patient with me as a new­bie. Yes, all of them had been play­ing since their teen years—but they were always will­ing to wel­come new gamers to the fold, no mat­ter how old or young (we had a 10-year-old play­ing with us and hold­ing his own).

As much as I want­ed to try play­ing an RPG, I did­n’t find the whole idea of play­ing a were­wolf very appeal­ing. That came out in my char­ac­ter, who was expe­ri­enc­ing a fair amount of angst about it her­self. I quick­ly found, though, that it can be very fun to lose your­self in a char­ac­ter who can be very dif­fer­ent from your­self, or very much like your­self but doing things you’d nev­er dare do in your mun­dane life! And you can learn quite a lot about peo­ple pret­ty quick­ly by gam­ing with them—more so than in most social sit­u­a­tions I encounter, anyway.

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, the Were­wolf game end­ed more quick­ly than nor­mal. We moved on to play­ing a vari­a­tion on anoth­er White Wolf game, Mage, that Sam changed a fair amount (we played in the “World of Most­ly Dim­ness” rather than the World of Dark­ness™). He called it Thresh­old Mage and I loved it. My char­ac­ter was com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from me in almost every way. We end­ed up with eight play­ers in that game, which I’m told is close to the max­i­mum who can eas­i­ly par­tic­i­pate in a non-LARP game. I would have very hap­pi­ly con­tin­ued that cam­paign indef­i­nite­ly, but Sam start­ed with a def­i­nite end in mind.

We played third edi­tion D&D right after it was released. That game even­tu­al­ly includ­ed 13 play­ers, I think, which was way too many. Over time a few of us moved on to a dice­less, not-quite‑D&D game, which was great fun. Over the next few years, I was intro­duced to mul­ti­ple indie games like Prime Time Adven­tures and Spir­it of the Cen­tu­ry. We also played Amber Dice­less for a bit. Sam and I were part of a live-play broad­cast of Seren­i­ty: Out in the Black.

In the last few years, I’ve got­ten to play sev­er­al Fate-based games includ­ing The Secrets of Cats and The Dres­den Files. I played in Dun­geon World, Apoc­a­lypse World and Sav­age Worlds games a cou­ple of years back.

Fifth edi­tion D&D has been what most peo­ple seem to want to play recent­ly, and I’ve been part of two week­ly cam­paigns. One played via Roll20, the oth­er using Dis­cord. In 2016 I final­ly got the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play Shad­owrun at Nuke Con in Oma­ha. Now Rick and I play in a local Shad­owrun game every cou­ple of weeks. We start­ed play­ing the Fire­fly RPG with some friends, but the GM moved out of state so we lost our game. We’ve also been to a few of the local RPG mee­tups and enjoyed play­ing swash­buck­lers in 7th Sea at one of them.

I’m thrilled that my daugh­ter, Katie, grew up gam­ing, as I think it’s a won­der­ful way to social­ize. Sam played D&D with our kids (as well as what­ev­er oth­er kids end­ed up here) almost every week­end. They played the old Star Wars RPG after we all went to see Phan­tom Men­ace togeth­er and the girls played the Sailor Moon RPG with a friend of theirs. They also had a Vam­pire game going for a while.

Gaming As a Parent

Or actu­al­ly, with your kids around. I did­n’t ini­tial­ly real­ize it was an issue since I had only gamed with kids around, nev­er with­out! It seems some peo­ple think that you can’t game with chil­dren present, or some­thing like that. I’ve encoun­tered sev­er­al peo­ple who said they stopped gam­ing when they had kids. Well, Sam’s kids were around gam­ing through­out their lives, and Katie was around it from age 8 to adult­hood. We did­n’t ever have any prob­lems gam­ing or let­ting the kids play. We did make sure we gamed in our home or at anoth­er house that was already set up for kids, and we made sure we had things set up to keep the kids busy—videos, Playsta­tion or PC games, board games, Nerf guns, bof­fer swords, etc. Our kids loved gam­ing nights because we had more junk food around than usu­al and did­n’t enforce their nor­mal bed­times. They fre­quent­ly want­ed to sit in and lis­ten to our game as much as pos­si­ble. (They were shooed away for some parts of the game, such as when the plot got nasty/dangerous for our char­ac­ters, etc.) It was nec­es­sary for me to explain the nature of role­play­ing to Katie in the beginning—otherwise, if my char­ac­ter got upset or hurt, she got upset because she thought I was upset. She under­stood that much bet­ter after that she start­ed play­ing, too.

For­tu­nate­ly, the folks we played with under­stood that occa­sion­al­ly kids are going to inter­rupt a game with requests or minor crises or just the need for some atten­tion, and the kids under­stood that we were busy and kept those to a min­i­mum while we were play­ing. Since we played with sev­er­al oth­er par­ents, too, we used round-robin or trib­al parenting—if there was either sus­pi­cious silence from the kids’ part of the house or sus­pi­cious amounts of noise, who­ev­er was­n’t imme­di­ate­ly involved in the cur­rent play went to inves­ti­gate and deal with the cause.

Links

These are a few links I’ve book­marked while learn­ing more about RPGs.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel.

Back To Top