This is my obligatory "who I am" and mission statement post. It's dry, boring, and self-aggrandizing. If I have other stuff to read on this site, go read it instead.
My name is Rich. I work for a conservative, mid-western state university. I'm not surprised, but I didn't think this would ever happen to me.
I also have a history of posting as "francisca" at various rpg-centric messageboards around the 'net.
The focus of this board will be tabletop gaming, primarily concerned with old school D&D, which for my purposes, I'm loosely defining as AD&D, OD&D, and Basic/Expert D&D as published by TSR up until the time Gygax left the company. (Gaming material outside of that timeframe is fair game too, but my point of view is from a 70s/80s perspective.) I'll also be blathering about other RPGs, boardgames, and miniatures from time to time, as well.
Topic and content-wise, I intend to provide commentary and reviews of various products which I find interesting. I'll also use this as a sounding board for bits and pieces of homebrew material. In short, this blog will be very much like a multitude of other old-school D&D boards...only far less clever and interesting.
This is also my 3rd, and last attempt to blog.
My background as a gamer:
I grew up in a family of card players, with double-deck pinochle being the game of choice. I had the typical boardgames found in a many North American suburban homes when I was a kid: Monopoly, Yahtzee, Battleship, and Stratego.
I first encountered D&D in the late 70s, witnessing a much older cousin playing it on a ping-pong table in a basement, complete with lava lamps, smoke hanging in the air, and Rush playing on the turntable. My mom would usually usher me out of there in a hurry, so I didn't learn much about it.
In 1981, I noted some guys at school were playing a mish-mash of Moldvay Basic and AD&D, and I soon joined them. Lacking any published material, I created my own game on 3x5 index cards and used dice liberated from the Yahtzee set. I talked my Dad into playing, and a few days later, he came home with the Moldvay D&D Basic boxed set, followed by the Gamma World set a month or so later.
At some point in late middle school, I saved up my allowance and gift money, and bought the core 3 AD&D books, along with A1, G1-2-3, and D1-2 in one big purchase. That, along with the boxed sets my Dad picked up for me, was all I had back in the day. No Dragon subscription (though I mooched a couple issues over the weekend from time to time), and I only knew one kid who had Unearthed Arcana in High School. Pretty spartan compared to the plethora of material many others had.
I played AD&D and Gamma World all but exclusively, almost entirely in home-brew settings, until 1986, when I left the group I was in due to "philosophical differences". That is to say, they were enamored with the new style of AD&D exemplified by DragonLance and the Survival Guide books. I didn't play really much of anything again until 1997.
In '97, a guy I worked with got me into Magic: the Gathering, which I described as "Kinda like D&D without the 6 month commitment." In 1999, I joined his AD&D game, and trekked down to Indy nearly every other saturday for 7 years to play good-old home-brewed AD&D.
In parallel, I also spent 2002-2006 running 3e D&D in a homebrew world along with a B/X game set in Mystara. When my 3e game wound down, I was very dissatisfied with the game as a DM. The B/X game wound down at the same time, and I merged the groups and ran series of 1e AD&D games set in Greyhawk until I handed off the campaign to my buddy Joe in 2009, due to too many demands on my time.
I continued to play in a friends 3.5e game set in DragonLane (ironically! though it was non-canon and very "Sandboxy") from 2005-2010, as well. So, when I complain about 3e, it's from experience, not some irrational, luddite-esque hatred of anything "new". I also gave 4e a try, playing the original gamestore demo, and read the PHB. It isn't for me.
Apart from D&D, I've amassed a bunch of other RPG material and boardgames. Somewhere between 2000 and today I morphed into a more general "gamer guy", though in my heart and mind, I'm a D&D player first, and a generalized tabletop gamer second.
So there you go. That's my general background which forms the lenses through which I view gaming material. There are certainly other influences and experiences which I'll allude to when appropriate, but I think that should be enough to give you a rough idea of my frame of reference.
--Rich
