The first wargaming I can remember doing is playing with those plastic green army men with my brothers. We would set up wood scraps as fortresses and hide our men behind them. Then we would take turns shooting at each other’s army till we found and shot the “commander”, the army man with the binoculars. Running bazookas was fun as we would take a glob of play-doh and throw it at the fortress. Whatever fell down was down and any green army men caught underneath the rubble were “dead”. Not very accurate, but it was fun.
I started playing D&D2E during high school back in 1978 or 1979. Yes, that’s right, back in the late ‘70’s! A boy I was dating took me to a game that he was GM’ing. I was interested and started to play. It was a year long campaign that took place every Saturday. The plot was a trek down into a castle then into a mountain dungeon to rescue a princess. The greatest scene that I can remember was a terrific battle with 300 orcs against the seven or eight PC’s. We had several high level characters which made this go a lot smoother. It was the first “nail-biter” that I had.
After that the GM went to college, and the troop that was left went looking for a new GM. Several people tried it and after a while the troop had a falling out with each other and I learned a very valuable lesson. I learned that I never wanted to play with a party that stole from each other or fought one another. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t pretty. So I said never again.
Years passed. It’s 1991 or thereabout. My best friend moved to Austin, Texas and I followed. She married the store owner of Dragon Lair’s Comics, (gratuitous ad placement!). At that time a large group of people went out every Friday night. I joined in. I had a great time and to this day, we still go out every Friday night (when money allows ;-)) from there.
Members of this group wanted to play a new game called “Bureau 13”. Remembering the good times I had playing, I agreed. It was great fun. When it was over, someone else wanted to run a Forgotten Realms story. I joined that too. This is where I got to know my future husband, Gordon. I was used to the “kick in the door, kill the monster, grab the treasure” type of play, but Gordon had a different style of actually role playing. I found this fascinating and when the module ended, I quickly joined Gordon’s try at “Dark Sun”.
This was one of the best games that I’ve ever played. To this day I’m trying to find a way to get Gordon to run it again (hint, hint!). When things were going bad with his first marriage, he stopped running “Dark Sun” and I got the courage to run “Ravenloft” which is my favorite D&D campaign setting. I don’t think that I was a very good GM, but as Gordon says, as long as the players are having fun, who cares? I did learn a lot and stored a lot of plots away for the future.
A couple of years passed, when D&D3E came out, Gordon and I were married by then (hey, good GM’s are to hard find!) and we wanted to try out the new system. I thought it a very big improvement from the 2E. With a couple of false starts and some shaky starts, I encouraged Gordon to GM Titan, a world that a friend of his envisioned. It’s been running every since. A credit to his GM’ing and the fun all of us players are having. He in turn encouraged me to run Ravenloft in 3E and that is still running.
Recently we found a new game system called “7th Sea” which has been a blast for all. I’m running the “Casa Blanca” and “Tales of the Red Avenger (TORA)” series and I’m a player in the “Men in Black”.
I’m waiting for others to pick the GM mantle and run some more scenarios so that I can play a character with my husband. I believe that my husband and I are cursed in that every game that we have played characters in love (or at least in lust), the games have ended badly or stopped altogether for one reason or another. But we have several more tries coming up, so here’s to lifting a curse!!
Also on a side note, Gordon introduced me to wargaming. Kind of an updated version of my “green army men”, except in this case they’re WarHammer 40K ‘Nids. Love those Bugs! We play when we can and do a lot of painting, just in case we do play. And speaking of mini’s, is it just us, or do you the reader like to find and paint a new and different mini for every character you play?? Humm....thought so....
All in All, we have about 7 or eight different games running with several
“one shots” coming up. One runs on Thursday, the others on alternate
Saturdays, with one other running on alternate Wednesdays. We have a great
gaming group that respects each other and has some really fun times. And as
luck would have it, the group just keeps growing.