Monday, December 6, 2021

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 TrekI 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!

20 comments:

  1. I think this is an area where Imagine magazine scored over Dragon - it was far more wide-ranging in its coverage, despite being a TSR publication.

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  2. I branched out as soon as products became available to me. At first it was TSR, but as other products became available, I immediately jumped on them. I was always looking for a better experience than D&D, or at least a different experience. I hate the long term campaign playstyle. I like variety and to mix it up. I don't want to watch the same thing on TV every week for a year, nor did I want to play the same game every week for a year. Top Secret, and Gamma World, and others were gobbled up my group and the other guys would run those. Other TSR games came out, like Gangbusters and Star Frontiers and I bought them, but we had moved on by that time.

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  3. This is just the opposite of my early tendencies. I was playing Wizard and Melee before Dungeons and Dragons, so I was naturally interested in TFT; between us, my best friend and I had a complete rules set (he had the Melee stuff and I had the Wizard stuff and ITL). That same friend and I both started exploring other FRPGs the same summer/fall we first played Holmes Basic: Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest, and (of all things) Warlock. So TSR never got a lock on my affections.

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  4. I was first among my group to look at other games, The Fantasy Trip, Bushido, Chivalry and Sorcery, Traveller, Runequest, they all beckoned and I answered but getting any of our group to try a different game was like pulling teeth, they had no interest in learning a new system. I didn't eventually find a group playing C&S, and when I joined the wargaming club I could finally play new games.

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  5. Interesting. I was never much of a fan of the magazines so I’d pick up whatever games looked cool in the store, TSR or not. Some I liked - Gamma World, Car Wars, Traveller, Top Secret, James Bond. Some I didn’t - Star Frontiers, RuneQuest.

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  6. I started with BECMI (well, just B, really) but I was singularly unselective about buying RPGs back in the day. If I had the money almost anything new was getting added to the collection - and if it had been easier to find older games in the dark days before the internet I'm sure I'd have tried to backfill my library as well. Caught on very quickly that there was better entertainment value in RPGs than most books could offer, even if they only saw use a time or two.

    The local gaming community also had a strong Runequest cadre, which lead me to play more Chaosium stuff than most others, although Traveller and TSR also had their share of my time back then.

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  7. Being Italian, my experience is obviously different. Not only RPGs were not common in stores, but there was the language barrier too. As a 12 years old boy, my languages was Italian and some little German I studied at school.
    So we started with what was available in Italian, which was Uno Sguardo nel Buio (Das Schwarze Auge), I guess The Dark Eye in English.
    The game was perfect to introduce new players, much better than all new incarnations that followed and increased only the complexity of the rulesets. Italians then started producing their own role playings like Kata Kumbas, a masterpiece with a spaghetti fantasy setting. We tried basically everything until we discovered the BEC (Master and Immortal were never translated in Italian, maybe Master set was but very late). When I Started High School I finally got my first lessons of English language, and I cut my teeth on Advanced Dungeon and Dragons; 2nd edition was just out.
    I remember my friends and I with the vocabulary in one hand and the PH in the other trying to understand, with the basics we already knew of the basic set, what was new in the Advanced. I guess we played for a couple of years a hybrid game, improving our understanding as our level of language permitted. Was a very good exercise however. By 18 years old we had played Merp, Star wars,Robotech, Vampire and Vampire Dark Ages,Call of Cthulhu, Street Fighter, Rolemaster, Stormbringer, Toon... I think we missed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (despite we played W40K) and Gurps, I guess we played enough fantasy at the time and there was not much room for more games in that segment.
    Part of this story is due to the fact my city has a great tradition in RPGs having the oldest game club in Italy, and nowadays it hosts the most important game fair in the country. There is a cultural thing also in games, just like in sports. If your neighborhood play, be sure at a certain point you will play too, or at least you will have a try!

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  8. I knew a guy in high School who mentioned Arduin a lot but I really had no idea what that was and my local game store didn't have it. Interesting to think how important magazines like Dragon were just to let you know what was out there before the internet.

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  9. I played my first game of AD&D at the end of summer in 1979, but once I saw the Starships book in a box of Traveller around October of that year I could never give my sole allegiance to TSR. I still have my three original AD&D books (defaced by my younger brother's scribbling over some of the art; I use other copies I've since acquired at the table these days) and those original Traveller LBB77s (which I have written a lot of notes in over the years; I use my softcover The Traveller Book or MegaTraveller these days). I did discover RuneQuest early on, and still love it a great deal, but I can only occasionally find people who want to play in Glorantha anymore. The other two big ones from the early years, The Fantasy Trip and Tunnels & Trolls, are ones I never really got into. In the case of TFT, that's because it was difficult to get, since it was five different games of which you needed to get three and none were readily available even in places that carried Metagaming games. Kinda sad, too, since GURPS is one of the games I spend most of my effort on these days. T&T, though, just had a tone that annoyed me and I still can't bring myself to like it to this day. Yeah, there are ducks in RQ, but the adventures for T&T seemed lightweight to me and then there's the presentation and unfunny-to-me sense of humor.

    Hm, maybe I'll write a post about how I feel about various games in my blog.

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    1. I've often wondered what better distribution and more extensive product support might have done for TFT back in the day. But that would have needed a longer-lived Metagaming, or Howard turning the rights to the game back to Steve earlier on, and neither happened. Always felt like one of those "could've been a contender" games, and I was honestly kind of disappointed with GURPS initially because it wasn't as sleek and streamlined as TFT had been.

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    2. @Dick McGee: Yeah, I get it. My first experiences of GURPS were disappointing. It felt like it was trying too hard to be everything to everybody, and ending up like cold oatmeal as a result. Over time, I feel like that problem has been successfully resolved, and now (for me) it fights for position with AD&D1E, Basic Roleplaying, and Traveller/MegaTraveller for my top 4 games of all time. It's also a lot easier to set up some of the weirder game ideas I have than any other, especially when I need a specific way for magic to work, so that's always a plus.

      But also yeah, now that I have TFT (old copies of Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, and In The Labyrinth; I intend to get the new edition at some point, but it's a lot lower priority than some other things), I do know what all the fuss was about and wish things could have gone differently with Metagaming. I sometimes wonder if Thompson regrets his actions, but of course he might not even be alive at this point for all anyone knows.

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    3. RQ play in Glorantha is seeing some resurgence with the new RuneQuest Glorantha edition. I have been running an RQ1 Glorantha campaign for several years now and several of my players are in at least one other Glorantha campaign, or at least have played in such recently.

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    4. @faoladh I've come around on GURPS over the years and it's certainly produced some outstanding setting books, so I'll concede my initial reaction was flawed. I blame part of that on Man-to-Man, which I expected to be kind of GURPS' equivalent to TFT's Melee but never caught on as separate game the way Melee/Wizard did. That's my unfair expectations rather than Steve's fault. My nostalgia for Metagaming and the other "microgame companies" like Dwarfstar and Task Force Games and Mayfair is pretty blinding sometimes.

      FWIW I don't think I've ever played Runequest proper outside of Glorantha, barring a few sessions in the Chaosium Questworld setting. Lots of other games (Worlds of Wonder, Superworld, Stormbringer, Corum, CoC) using the BRP engine, but RQ itself always sat solidly in Glorantha for me.

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    5. @Frank: Yeah, and I have picked up the box of new RQ books, plus I still own some of my old RQ books (Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, and Gateway Bestiary) and picked up the POD reprint of RQ2. But, as it happens, I don't have any gaming group at the moment, so Glorantha is probably not happening soon for me.

      @Dick McGee: Did you know that SJ Games has re-released a number of their old pocket box games? Not just Ogre, either, they've got Kung Fu 2100, Raid on Iran, One Page Bulge, the old Illuminati and supplements, Undead, Awful Green Things, and classic Car Wars.

      I did use RQ3 as the rules for the homebrew setting that most occupies my mind. That setting has undergone quite a lot of revision over the years, but that's easy to do since I have never really written a lot of it down in anything like a final form. But most of my RQ play has been in Glorantha, for sure. I think my favorite take on the setting is still Oliver Dickinson's body of Griselda stories, which has had a huge impact on how I present that world.

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    6. @faoladh Where are you located? What time zone? I have room in my RQ1 Glorantha campaign... Wednesday evenings 8:00 PM Pacific Time on Roll20...

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    7. Oh, and another note - up until this summer I also hadn't used RQ proper much outside Glorantha. Like Dick I did explore Quest World a bit, but I'm not sure we even played. I also did one session of RQ in space before I switched the campaign over to Traveller (keeping my Starfire inspired ship building and Paul Gazis Eight Worlds inspired non-jump based FTL travel).

      But this summer I started a mashup between RuneQuest and Gamelords Thieves Guild set in Haven (NOT to be confused with Robert Lynn Asprin's Thieves World/Sanctuary...).

      Hmm, I did run something in Thieves World using the Chaosium boxed set once, but I don't recall what rules set I used, could have been RQ or could have been D&D.

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    8. @faoladh Yep, I've picked up a few of SJG's microgame releases to replace the originals long lost to flood and fire, although not all of them. I'm nostalgic, but not quite enough so to want to own Raid on Iran or One Page Bulge again. :)

      Their versions of Awful Green Things and Triplanetary are the best those games will likely ever see, though. Really quite happy to own them again.

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    9. @Frank: I'm in the right time zone (I'm outside of Seattle), but unfortunately those are frequently working hours for me.

      @Dick McGee: My copy of Triplanetary is the GDW boxed set (in lousy shape; I'm one of those people who can't keep boxes from damage, with very rare exception). I keep meaning to get the SJG version, but other priorities keep coming up.

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  10. My group had no fidelity towards TSR and played every game we could get our hands on. Learning new rules wasn't a barrier; we had all the time in the world.

    But I did experience the dynamic you're describing, with Marvel Comics. For years, I felt I owed it to Stan the Man to not buy anything from DC, until Frank Miller and Alan Moore made DC impossible to ignore.

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  11. While early on I mostly played D&D, I did dabble in almost everything with Chivalry & Sorcery actually being the game of choice for my first campaign (I was using a borrowed copy, and photocopies, I didn't own D&D at that time). By sophomore year in college, I had abandoned D&D (to pick it up again late in grad school only to abandon it again, only to pick it back up again in 2003).

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