So what games influenced me

I'm pretty much an old school gamer, starting in the board wargames of the tabletop era like Panzer Leader, Third Reich, Richtofen's War, Dune, Outreach, Sixth Fleet, Star Fleet Battles, Car Wars and the like.  Those were not the only games, however, with something like Kingmaker thrown into the mix you also get the lesser known Down With The King, and that material got a say in the next large area of gaming which was face-to-face (f2f) Role Playing Games (RPG).  My take on RPGs was thus filtered through the military, strategic, tactical, factional and resource management lenses of board wargames.  Truthfully I went pretty quickly from player to game master or dungeon master (I'll use GM as the shorthand).  This was still in the f2f era, and one of the critical parts of RPGs that I felt was missing was getting a decent background for the setting of an RPG: without a place, without a history, without a reason to be doing what you are doing there is little more to RPGs than moving figures or counters around...and that meant all the players had to have some sort of representation via that means.  I was used to that, of course, but one of the things I learned from strategic level factional games is that hundreds or thousands of individuals could be represented in a generic way, and that what really mattered was the setting, the surrounding, the advantages and disadvantages of terrain (broadly speaking).  A map did well enough for that, and I moved over to the spoken and descriptive format of gaming for RPGS, where people set their relative distances from each other as they moved, and then I described settings that were encountered and ran a phased turn system (lifted from Car Wars and Star Fleet Battles, as well as Champions) which parsed out relative speeds of individuals and when they could take an action.

What this descriptive style required was not depending on generic encounters and generic foes.  For something like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD+D) I looked at the descriptions of creatures, personages and the like, and then played them as NPCs using what Intelligence and other attributes that they had.  Why?  These beings were also part of a dynamic, changing world in which actors took actions, and there were pre-existing relationships between actors that happened before the Player Characters arrived.  The players got limited information based on their background, chosen major role (Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief, etc.), where they came from and their limited pre-game life experiences.  If I ran a world with guilds then the guilds, themselves, were established, had a history and had their own set of entrance requirements as well as jobs that might be made available to someone of appropriate experience.  Guilds, by not operating in a vacuum, would sometimes cooperate on mutually productive endeavors, and thus the job to form a party up to do something came into being.  That was the means to implement a scenario (be it self-generated or pre-published) and then begin running it.

In a dynamic game world I did have some particular views on the Player Characters (PC) and that was pretty simple: death is easy and comes for all, living a life is difficult.  If the PCs got advantages, then the environment (broadly speaking) would respond to those.  Players soon realized that if they didn't bother to know the background of the world, handed out in various forms from various individuals, each with their own viewpoints, that they would quickly end up in hot water, dead or in a non-player position via long-term incarceration.  Yes different regions of the same world, even if it was under the same King (ruling council, or whatever) had different, local laws.  Staying within the highest law was often safest, but generally it didn't cover a whole lot, save don't antagonize a list of groups or peoples.  Diving into a dungeon was sometimes the safest place to be if you wanted to escape punishment and offered the reward of experience, goodies, or just mere survival.

Starting out I ran AD+D based campaigns as those were generally well known.  Getting a stable group of players meant being accessible, setting aside blocks of time to play, and then making sure everyone knew if anyone couldn't make it.  Those were days, especially if 2 or more players couldn't be there, when the main game was suspended and the smaller group would be offered the opportunity to do something else.  Car Wars was a good cross-over system as it had some minimal RPG elements (at the time), and served as an entree to a different style of gaming with vehicles, automatic weapons and explosives.  Basically it was a precursor to the Action RPG world, where there were some minimal advances you could gain from vehicular contests and skills that would allow you to drive, shoot, run and do other things just a bit better.

There were some restrictions to the classic RPG systems that were tailored to settings, be it AD+D, Call of Cthulhu or the Champions system in its first generation.  The subsequent generation of systems started to address this via more generic character building, skills, powers, abilities and anything you could think up and describe.  The Generic Universal Role Playing System (GURPS) from Steve Jackson Games would be an end result in that movement, but I was active in the time before that arrived and transitioning from gaming to a real life once it appeared.  I felt the HERO game system which came from the original Champions system actually did a good job of giving those running the game a good mechanic for combat and non-combat activities, and afforded players the opportunity to spend some time designing their characters.  If a player wanted more skill points to spend they could take on negative attributes such as being unlucky or being hunted, the latter of which required defining the hunter (individual, small group, or large group), how active the search was, and the chance of it playing a role in any given scenario.  Thus a world needed to be built up ahead of time and as the GM or guy running the background world that players were in, it was required to have at least passing knowledge of all the groups, individuals you could PO, and all the other fun stuff that comes with everything from a world be it Swords & Sorcery style to advanced retro-futuristic.  That was the part I was decent at doing, to the point where every player started to keep notes on just what they had been told.  It was not unusual after the 4th or 5th play session to see that the notes being transferred to a separate set of pages, with a few players starting to invest in notebooks just to keep track of all the information they had gathered.  With the HERO system that theoretically started out at the character design stage.

By the early '90s I had transitioned out of gaming, though I did spend some time with computer games when they came out, like Fallout and, later, Diablo.  Still, there wasn't much to entice me to computer games, and my work schedule at up my life.  Major life changes in the early 2000's and problems thereafter would then lead me back to gaming, but this time in the computer realm as my personal condition was not so hot and I had no connections left to the old board wargaming or f2f world of gaming.  That is where this blog, which is just personal in nature, starts.  My prior blogging got me through some very, very tough times and got me answers to some questions and led me far afield to further answers to things I didn't even think to ask.  A break from that recovery now requires a restart of it and the best place for this is writing.

Some gaming thoughts.  My thoughts on games I play.  Don't expect any Massive, Multiplayer Online games of any sort to appear.  I don't play those.  Nor any Co-op games.  Basically the single player experience is what is in store.  I know my limits.