I doubt that it’s surprising or newsworthy to anyone that I like games, and that I like them a lot. Despite my enthusiasm for games, I don’t actually have a very long history with tabletop games.
Growing up, we had the Parker Brothers/Milton Bradley staples like Yahtzee!, Scrabble, Sorry, and - of course - that filthy homewrecker Monopoly, but there wasn’t anything resembling a FLGS within a day’s travel of my hometown and the Satanic Panic had thoroughly embedded itself in the local psyche.
When I was in 6th or 7th grade, a kid (Taylor) moved to my school and brought with him the most incredible, world-shattering thing I had seen: Magic: the Gathering. He taught as many of us how to play as he could, and I was completely hooked on its strategy, art, lore, and the heretofore inconceivable audacity that some random guy could just make a whole-ass game with his own, personal name brazenly, unapologetically printed on it.
It was a gateway game. Nevermind that there were only three or four of us who played, with wildly varying degrees of success, in the entire county. This was a world apart from Don’t Break the Ice or Operation, and it absolutely did not hurt that the artwork on our Unholy Strength (3rd edition, because this was the '90s, baby) was downright scandalous - if not exorcism-worthy heresy - to the nasty, pinch-faced blue-hairs occupying the middle rows of the church pews with militant Puritanical zeal.
Magic was amazing, but also pretty limited and one-dimensional. I would imagine myself in a world like it, wishing I could sling powerful spells and summon incredible creatures to my defense. I had certainly heard of Dungeons & Dragons, but I didn’t know anything substantive about it. What I did know was that it was positively verboten in our house because of its mind-twisting, Satanic imperative to teach children how to channel occult forces and ritualistically murder their peers.
Through the strange and twisting paths of coincidence, my teenage nascent edgelord self came into knowledge of Vampire: the Masquerade. That’s something that comics - especially Vertigo comics - were really good for: full-page adverts for condoms, edgy grimdark comics, and niche gaming products. The tumbledown roadside shack 50 miles away (closest thing to a city nearby) was glad enough to have a customer that they’d be sure to stack recent issues of Sandman (FU, N.G. - DiaF) near the register when I came in.
I gobbled up everything I could about Vampire: it had such incredible art, lore, and attitude. It was dark and cynical and very self-assuredly Grown Up and I wanted to sink my teeth into that world and tag its grime-washed buildings with that defiant upside-down anarchy symbol.
Somehow, Vampire got through the parental censorship committee - probably because they never cracked any of those books open, and Tom Hanks had never starred in a movie vaguely misrepresenting it to the concerned, impressionable parents of America. It was a Magic-grade revelation: it was a book that was actually a game, and that you played with some paper, a bunch of weird dice (that you couldn’t just raid the Yahtzee! box for), and your imagination. There weren’t cards detailing your moves, or power-meters, or scores to keep - it wasn’t even a game you could win.
It was incredible.
I read the Storyteller’s Guide front-to-back a dozen times, I devoured various clan sourcebooks, I followed the character creation instructions a hundred times or more, making absolutely ridiculous (literally “deserving of ridicule”) characters to populate the World of Darkness.
There was a big, world-ending problem, though: no one cared. There wasn’t anyone who was interested in this game and no amount of my enthusiasm or bargaining or pleading would ever sway them toward giving it a chance. They just didn’t get it, and they were decidedly not going to read dozens, much less hundreds, of pages on my account. For all of my excitement (not to mention all the time and money I poured into this fascination), my teenage self only ever got three meager, abbreviated sessions of any TTRPG - two of Mage and one of Call of Cthulhu - during stolen nighttime hours at summer 4-H camps.
Roughly ten years ago I tried again. Not with Vampire, I’d parted ways with all those books long before anyone dreamed up the Department of Homeland Security and, after all, No One Cared (really wish I still had those books!). Dungeons and Dragons was promoting a Starter Set that included everything needed to play (no big investment! yay!), and there were two people in my circle interested enough to give it a shot.
We played with the in-box pre-gen characters and it was… mostly a disaster. But it was fun and held a promise of greater enjoyment. It also really seemed like a completely different game than I remembered, but I didn’t dig into that enough to discover that my prior experience was only with the first Baldur’s Gate game, and we were playing the recently-released Fifth Edition.
That tiny game group fell apart (and so did I, to be honest) when we lost Rachel, our DM, to a car wreck. We kept an intention to come back to that adventure, though. One day. Some time. When we had some people to play it with, definitely.
My friend Alex was visiting once and, probably unintentionally, rekindled interest in playing some D&D. He’s been DMing for a while now and is generally a Cool Dude, so he spun us up a single-session game and made it all seem incredibly simple and like something that didn’t even need a table full of people - like maybe just two players could get away with having a game to themselves.
So we started playing at home, just the two of us. Sara rolled up a Ranger, I made a Paladin. I DMed and had my character mutely follow her lead. It… wasn’t great, but it was something and it was engaging enough that we played the entirety of (the excellent, beloved) Lost Mine of Phandelver that way.
I didn’t quite know how to follow up that experience. Honestly, I felt like I was completely out of my depth trying to run a game - even for one person, despite her support, encouragement, and assurances otherwise - and should probably spend some time playing the thing before presuming I could run it.
So I found a local(ish) game on Meetup and talked Sara into giving it a shot, promising that we would just walk TF out if the dudes there gave off “well actually” vibes or were total creepers. We didn’t get to play that first night, there was a bizarre Friday the 13th-themed birthday party happening and over a dozen people showed up to play D&D, but we were able to join that campaign (The Moonshae Isles) for a few sessions in the following weeks and see its conclusion.
We’ve been playing in that space for the past few years. I’ve run multiple games - and a whole campaign! - there, and am immensely grateful to see that Lots of People Care.
