I was thinking back today to my early adolescence, with that mixture of wistfulness and crushing embarrassment that might be familiar to some of you. I was thinking about my “Dungeons and Dragons” years. The coolest thing about this period was how I discovered the game. I believe it was 1977 or 1978 (I was 12 or 13 at the time) and I read an article about this new “role-playing game” in Psychology Today. Yup, just one of a few brainy mags I read at the time, including Omni, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics. I even tried to read Scientific American for a while, but that just went over my head. Brooke was a little embarrassed when I told her about the D&D years (or, more correctly, the AD&D years), even though (or perhaps because) I protested that “I was always the Dungeon Master!!” Another aspect of those years is that since I couldn’t always convince many of my friends to play, I found a sort of club that met Sunday mornings in Toronto’s Eaton Centre. There must have been 40 or 50 of us there, and meeting those people was sort of a precursor to the kind of relationships I’ve formed online, relationships formed around common interests and not where you lived or went to school. Those were great times…
Anyone else have a geeky RPG past (or present!)?