DDOCentral

Session 3 was held today at the school D&D Club, and it was a blast! Sixteen students showed up and one of them, the lad who took the D&D5e Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual last time, rocked up to run a game. I gave out three more sets of products – two Starter Sets and another Basic Fantasy bundle – and it looks like some of the other six students who now have product may begin to run games too.

My favourite moment was talking to the aspiring GM who said, “I’m not sure I know how to run this game, but I do have a cool idea.” I told him to set a scene and describe the opening situation, ask the players what they want to do, and if he needed to roll to adjudicate make it a D20 roll with high being good and low being bad…

Back in September, I realised that I was moving towards winter and there was a likelihood that I would need to hibernate – at least in terms of my hobby. As we enter the first week where temperatures outside have dipped below 5 degrees centigrade and my days have finally become bracketed by darkness and moonlight, it seems my prediction was correct. I have begun to slow and even stop playing.

In recent weeks I’ve taken the decision to park my Mystamyr game and I’ve even shifted away from other games in which I was planning to be a player. The last remaining area of play is the Sunday solo sessions which have themselves been reinvigorated by the fact that this play is entirely for me. No one else is involved and so I’ve been feeling liberated to play whatever I fancied.

But I am also hungry. As the activity…

This is it. This is the device that kept me in the gaming sphere until the mid to late 2000s. While most people were enjoying the PlayStation 2, Xbox, Gamecube, or whatever the hell the N-Gage was, I had this pocket sized gaming machine by my side. 

Growing up in a low income household had its challenges; one of them being not being able to afford some of the things other kids your age had. We were very fortunate to have a mom that worked her hardest to allow me and my brothers to have some of the things that we wanted. We had every Nintendo system up to the Gamecube at the time, but finding time to play is hard when you have to share one system and tv with two other people. That is where the Gameboy came in handy. Instead of fighting over who’s turn it was…

When I was a teen, I used to spend a lot of time in my bedroom, door closed, playing games so that I could escape the attention of my parents. I didn’t want to watch TV (at least, not their choices) and I certainly didn’t want another lecture on how inadequate I was as a son, brother, and student. I’d go to my room and, especially once I was at secondary school, I’d spend many an evening creating characters.

I have notebooks filled with old character ideas. I found one featuring Star Frontiers characters some months back and it was fascinating to peruse. I remember designing character sheets too – drawing them out by hand with a ruler and pencil, then filling them out. This was, of course, before photocopiers were widely available in the UK and I could afford to design a sheet and get a bunch of copies.