Before Entering The Keep

The following is something I wrote for my play-by-post game over on RPoL:

I just want to say something before we all enter the Keep on the Borderlands- Red Box edition.

As it says on my profile, I am an ancient role-player. I grew up with the original red box, way back in the day when a rule book was less than one hundred and fifty pages, rules scant, bent toward on the fly gaming, and more interested in 'fee' and 'atmosphere'.

I was lent the original Advanced books so never owned them. Now that I think about it, in the good ol' days all my friends had some weird library pool of roleplaying books that floated from one guy to the other. So going for broke and buying hard cover things just didn't do it for me.

I tried following the great game, Dungeons and Dragons, into its more coastal wizardly manifestations- ie. 3rd edition. Things got really really fat since I was gone (about fifteen years) and complicated. Feats was a lot like choosing a career, or meeting with a guidance counselor that never made you feel good enough. I tried, I tried hard but craved those times in the back of chemistry lab playing D&D with a disected frog on our table, rolling with a pencil (we did not dare bring in dice because the Catholic school authorities would be on us instantly. You see at our school we had samurai nuns) and making rules up by inspiration. We got so good at improv that we declared...

"Any rule that needs to be looked up should not be used..."

And we played on. And that's the way I play.

In the last twenty years I don't think I have payed more than ten bucks for a rule book (oh okay I just had to buy the Ars Magica bundle on the Bundle of Holding but when I do find people crazy enough to play, I think I will throw a good sixty percent of the rules out the window. I just like the feel, the idea of a Covenant). In light of that I have gotten into free and minimalist role-playing (fudge, Risus, The Pool, Donjon, The Bean, Sword and Back pack, Oculus, the Black Hack, MiSO and others I cannot think of right now because my two year old son is watching Chuggington and it causes me Brain Bleach) and pretty much never came back. I like words over rules, imagination over stats, and "wowness" over calculating experience or rewards.

That is how I am going to run this game. I think I left rules-lawyers back in 1990, imprisoned in a phantom zone in the past. So while we are playing D&D Red Box for inspiration and mood and labyrinth lord for some sort of structure and accountability it will be a bunch of thirteen year olds getting together in the basement dreaming of fantastical beasts and legendary locations.

Ok? I mean just look at the font I used!