August 11: Which gamer that you have played with has most affected the way that you play?
I would almost take a look at the alternate questions for this one. It's not that I don't have an answer, but I assume that naming names won't be all that interesting to people who don't even know the friend that you are talking about. My good friend Lemuel Eubanks--he's also real and on Facebook--has consistently run games from elementary school up to this very day. He was the DM of my main group from about '92 to '01~'02ish. In '92 I would have been 18 years old and a fresh high school grad.
I would tell you of the glorious times of those years. We would play AD&D, World of Darkness (old versions), RIFTs, Deadlands, various titles from Palladium and others. On top of that we also had a Blood Bowl league, Warhammer Fantasy and 40k, and video game tourneys and anything else that we could get our hands on to play or read. WCW and WWE were appointment television during this time. I once had over a dozen of the guys (and a couple of girls?!) watching PPVs in the bedroom of my parent's mobile home. I developed an unhealthy obsession with the Sailor Moon anime--ah, sweet Sailor Mercury the best of the sailor scouts--This didn't even count the partying or the fact that a lot of the guys were also playing in bands--not me I'm not musically inclined. Most of us kept regular jobs too...when I think back on those times like I'm doing now, I realize that we were a lot more productive than I gave us credit for. Things started to "fall apart" as they often do because we got older. I didn't want to be single for the rest of my life, so I started being proactive in terms of looking for a wife and...for better or for worse...that just won't happen if you are spending all of your free time at the gaming table. Maybe it's getting better for some of you young single gamers nowadays, but it wasn't going so great fifteen years back. The upshot is that I pretty well missed all of third edition D&D while I was on hiatus, but I did manage to gain the wife that I wanted, so I have no regrets there. I've since had a great renaissance--some details of which have already been blogged about earlier-- and I play more consistently each week than we ever did in our prime.
Enough of that...back to talking about my once and (hopefully) future DM, Lem. Nowadays there are many innovations and refinements to playing that those of you who are not oldskool won't appreciate. The games often took an adversarial tone between the DM and the players. Some still run this style today, but most have concepts like 'fail forward' or 'player narrative' and 'encounter balance' that just didn't typically fly back in the day. Lem was doing that sort of thing before it was cool. He literally let us get away with just about anything that we wanted to try and yet the narratives ran fairly smoothly. Most of the time the other players and I were--unintentionally--wrecking the game.
I remember a time when we were hired by an NPC fighter and his halfling friend to explore some old ruins...as soon as we got down in the dungeon...My PC crushed the halfling's head with his warhammer...the rest of the party then killed the NPC fighter...we were far too chaotic. We searched around on our own and found a necromancer sitting at his desk. He wouldn't look at us and never attacked. He pretty much just told us to bugger off. We couldn't attack him either and had no idea what to do...this taught us all a lesson. It isn't that you need to be "railroaded" as PCs, but if you want a story to make sense, you should go along with the DM on logical things. It makes it more fun for everybody. He was also the type of DM that would let individuals go off on tangents...he never killed a character who didn't deserve it, but that's not to say it never happened. All of the guys remember an 'Orange' D20 that Lem had. It was a killer of many PCs across many different game systems. He had kept it for years and it's a part of our group lore. He finally lost it during a recent move, and we think of it as the one ring...biding its time in the shadows somewhere waiting for the perfect time to show up again. I hope to play with him and the guys and get the band back together someday, orange D20 or no.
I had to post this comic from a couple of years ago. Not that there's anything wrong with Pathfinder, but it isn't The Old Testament. Play a real oldskool game and Pathfinder becomes more like Scientology.
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