Regrets of a TSR Fanboy

Like the vast majority of gamers my age, TSR's Dungeons & Dragons was my gateway into the hobby of roleplaying. There's nothing remarkable in this. By the time I first encountered it in late 1979, D&D was already the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla of RPGs and its boxed sets, books, and adventure modules could be found quite widely Equally available were TSR's other offerings, such as Gamma World and Top Secret, the former of which became a near-rival to D&D in my affections for a time. 

Later, I would discover and subscribe to Dragon magazine and even joined the RPGA, though mostly to gain access to its often excellent Polyhedron newszine. In the pre-Internet age, these periodicals were one of the few ways – aside from idle chats in game stores – that I could easily learn about the wider hobby. Dragon in particular did a good job at this, exposing me to news and advertisements of which I might otherwise have been unaware. Of course, some of the news and much of the editorial content had a decidedly TSR-centric slant to it and that colored my view of the hobby for a very long time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I became very devoted to TSR and its games, most of which I dutifully bought and played as soon as they were published. Certainly, I played games from other companies, particularly those of GDW (about which I rhapsodize regularly on this blog), but it was TSR to which I owed my true allegiance. I hung on every word that flowed from the pen of Gary Gygax and can now sheepishly recall my ability to quote many of his jeremiads as if they were my own. I had found a "team" to root for and a celebrity to look up to in TSR and Gygax.

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong in this. I suspect that many boys in their tween and early teen years go through a phase of this sort, before eventually growing out of it. That was the case with me, though it took me a little longer to emerge from it than many (and some readers might well doubt that I've ever succeeded in doing so). From the vantage point of middle age, it's all a bit embarrassing, of course, but no more so than many other foolish or ill considered things I've done over the course of my half century of existence. Yet, there's still one aspect of my puerile obsession with TSR that I do genuinely regret – and that's the unwillingness it engendered in me to play RPGs by other publishers.

I did play a small selection of non-TSR games, most notably Traveller and Call of Cthulhu. In each case, I did so in part because of my prior fondness for their literary inspirations (as well as the recommendations of older gamers whose opinions I respected). Beyond those two – and FASA's Star Trek – I generally avoided RPGs by other publishers. I dabbled from time to time, even occasionally falling into brief but ultimately fruitless love affairs with the odd game here or there, but, by and large, I stuck with TSR to the point of closing off other possibilities I might genuinely have enjoyed.

This is particularly true with regards to Chaosium. Though I was an avid devotee of Call of Cthulhu, I nevertheless eschewed the company's other games. There was no good reason for this beyond an irrational sense that I owed loyalty to TSR and its games. Somehow, in my head, I saw the purchase and play of RPGs as a zero sum game rather than as an immense feast with almost infinite variety from which I could pick and choose to my heart's content. It's an odd quirk of my personality and, while I have, in the decades since, much expanded my horizons with regards to roleplaying games, I still occasionally feel pangs of regret about my adolescent closemindedness. 

Live and learn!