![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynToday I got smacked between the eyes by the fact that I have not only earned the title of 'hard core gamer' - despite a shocking dearth of tabletop RPG experience - but by the fact that I seem to have wandered into the outskirts of 'old school' as well. Oh, not far in, because you have to have been there from the beginning to truly qualify; but close.
I went into Wizards of the Coast's store in the Willowbrook Mall today. The counter was staffed by the gray-haired, goateed fellow with glasses that I tend to think of as an underweight boggan. Very helpful, very friendly, very talkative and quite good at listening. I told him I was looking for something from Legend of the Five Rings, because a friend had recommended something very specific in it as background source material for a Mage campaign I was running. (Pause while people planning to be in the VicMage.Asia game scrabble frantically to figure out which bit.) He had several Rokugan sourcebooks and the GM guide to LOT5R, so I bought the appropriate volume, commenting that it would be helpful even though Mage was such a different setting... one of the other customers, a teenager of some sort, then asked about the game and whether Mage was as difficult as it seemed. He'd just bought the book and started looking at it. I told him I'd been playing it forever, so I was used to it by now, but that it could be a little confusing in the beginning. You had to get used to it - what other RPGs had he played?
I was expecting to hear 3e AD&D, or possibly Shadowrun or something from Palladium. Maybe even Ars Magica - I was assuming that if he'd gone to Mage it was because of an interest in AM. I was not expecting to hear video game titles rattled off, culminating in 'Baldur's Gate'...
Sheesh. Nothing against video games, but it's kind of a shock to suddenly realize that the generation coming up behind you (it turned out he starts college in the fall) has never yet dealt with pencil-and-paper RPGs, and that where you'd buy a game supplement, they'd buy an Electronic Gaming Monthly strategy guide.
I don't feel old. I feel like I need to go out and evangelize for tabletop, for these poor benighted souls that have no concept of what it's like to sit around a table with a bunch of friends and collectively go 'ouch!' as the dice come up double-sixes, then swat the GM's ferret away before it can steal the character sheet too close to the edge of the table. The videogames are a different experience altogether, a totally different form of entertainment, and they're valid in their own right. But it'd be a real shame for these kids to grow up thinking that there were only CCG's and computer games, not games where you could interact with people and get up the kind of weird creative synergy that leads to Triad members getting the character for 'Idiot' written on their forehead in lipstick before their unconscious forms are dumped on the steps of the local police precinct.*
Well, maybe Neverwinter Nights will be good for them. I still want to find some way to show them how much else there is.
*This is the same Feng Shui campaign that featured the lionfished ninja and Colonel Sanders' Gojira-Fried Eunuchs with Extra Crispy Skin.
I went into Wizards of the Coast's store in the Willowbrook Mall today. The counter was staffed by the gray-haired, goateed fellow with glasses that I tend to think of as an underweight boggan. Very helpful, very friendly, very talkative and quite good at listening. I told him I was looking for something from Legend of the Five Rings, because a friend had recommended something very specific in it as background source material for a Mage campaign I was running. (Pause while people planning to be in the VicMage.Asia game scrabble frantically to figure out which bit.) He had several Rokugan sourcebooks and the GM guide to LOT5R, so I bought the appropriate volume, commenting that it would be helpful even though Mage was such a different setting... one of the other customers, a teenager of some sort, then asked about the game and whether Mage was as difficult as it seemed. He'd just bought the book and started looking at it. I told him I'd been playing it forever, so I was used to it by now, but that it could be a little confusing in the beginning. You had to get used to it - what other RPGs had he played?
I was expecting to hear 3e AD&D, or possibly Shadowrun or something from Palladium. Maybe even Ars Magica - I was assuming that if he'd gone to Mage it was because of an interest in AM. I was not expecting to hear video game titles rattled off, culminating in 'Baldur's Gate'...
Sheesh. Nothing against video games, but it's kind of a shock to suddenly realize that the generation coming up behind you (it turned out he starts college in the fall) has never yet dealt with pencil-and-paper RPGs, and that where you'd buy a game supplement, they'd buy an Electronic Gaming Monthly strategy guide.
I don't feel old. I feel like I need to go out and evangelize for tabletop, for these poor benighted souls that have no concept of what it's like to sit around a table with a bunch of friends and collectively go 'ouch!' as the dice come up double-sixes, then swat the GM's ferret away before it can steal the character sheet too close to the edge of the table. The videogames are a different experience altogether, a totally different form of entertainment, and they're valid in their own right. But it'd be a real shame for these kids to grow up thinking that there were only CCG's and computer games, not games where you could interact with people and get up the kind of weird creative synergy that leads to Triad members getting the character for 'Idiot' written on their forehead in lipstick before their unconscious forms are dumped on the steps of the local police precinct.*
Well, maybe Neverwinter Nights will be good for them. I still want to find some way to show them how much else there is.
*This is the same Feng Shui campaign that featured the lionfished ninja and Colonel Sanders' Gojira-Fried Eunuchs with Extra Crispy Skin.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2002-08-16 12:16 pm (UTC)[/rant] ... sorry. Guess I feel pretty old-school too. :->