Hi, everyone, today’s article is going to be less focused on game mechanics – it’s been a while since I talked about my journey to wind up blogging about tabletop role-playing games, and while I’ve discussed how recent events have shaped my TTRPG life, I haven’t really talked about what got me started.

Catching Monsters

Being born in the 90’s, my exposure to Pokémania was pretty much inevitable. I lived in Japan for about a year, just a little past the height of Pokémania, so everywhere you turned, you could find a little bit of Pokémon somewhere. The video games and Trading Card Game in particular really stuck with me. Namely, this was my first exposure to games which contained a “prep” stage where each player brought something unique to the table. Before that, there was no building experience to a game for me – You were told the rules and then followed them until a winner was determined.

Pokémon encouraged exploration and experimentation – finding the monsters that would help you in your journey, or ripping open booster packs to find the card you needed to round out your deck – and your strategy could be yours. You didn’t bring a customized set of pieces to a chess game, you couldn’t practice your die rolls. To me, this was a new frontier. I didn’t realize that what I was growing to like were modular systems.

MMOs and Forum Roleplays

At age 12, Runescape became my first dip into fantasy RPGs. At its peak in the early 00’s, Runescape was a Massive Multiplayer Online game whose main selling point was portability – it took a concerted effort to find an internet-capable computer which couldn’t run the game, and having a free-to-play version meant that the player base was well-populated. Its point-and-click gameplay probably would have felt more dated in a single-player context, but seemed novel when playing with online strangers for the first time.

At roughly the same time, I was also discovering text-based roleplaying forums, where writers would bring their characters to life, contributing a couple of paragraphs each post to advance a story, which showed me a potential for collaborative storytelling I hadn’t seen before – working together on a story? I’d only thought of storytelling with a single author, and this opened so many doors.

I’ve always wanted to create things for people to engage with, but the free-form nature of forum roleplay seemed too loose, and too directionless, but the MMO genre felt too rigid, bound by technical limitations and its developers’ specific vision. If only there were a happy medium.

Organized Play

In high school, I became fairly active at the local Pokemon Trading Card Game events, and while there were a healthy number of players at the events, I was in an age bracket which didn’t see many participants in our small city in the Midwest. In fact, there were a few tournaments where I and my friend Levi would basically be playing for first and second place with no competition! At once such tournament, our local game store offered a $15 store credit prize for first place. Levi and I were originally going to split the prize on booster packs, but on that fateful day, I spotted a slightly dusty Dungeons & Dragons starter set, and Levi was amenable to giving it a shot.

I’d heard about D&D before on the roleplaying forums I frequented, but only as a vague premise – each player makes up a character, and a referee “Dungeon Master” would present scenarios for these characters to overcome. The starter set didn’t really prepare me to run TTRPGs, and having to use pregenerated characters felt insulting compared to the magic I’d heard on forums. Clearly, we were doing something wrong, and it was going to take hands-on research to find this magic.

Fortunately, another game store in town had organized play events, then called D&D Encounters, a predecessor to the current Adventurer’s League play. Each 12-week “season,” players could join an ongoing adventure, and Dungeon Masters were offered incentives to host these games at the hobby shop, including freebie copies of the adventures, game tokens, and poster maps. After two or three seasons as a player, I was ready to give DMing a try! At times, the prewritten campaigns were a little grating – without knowing which players and characters would be present at any given event, you couldn’t develop personalized narrative arcs, and there was little room to deviate from an adventure’s “script.”

Free Reign

D&D Encounters let me build up a home group and taught me the system mastery I needed to take the reins and make a campaign all my own. We formed a Saturday night group, and through high school, I was able to run a longer campaign with the character-centric stories I wanted to tell. I may not be a big fan of prewritten adventures, but there’s a lot to be said for the experience they gave me, and I even kept running adventures for the Encounters events until right before my high school graduation.

Like I usually tell people, I like to GM to be surprised – if you wanted to write a prescriptive story, you could write a book. TTRPGs give you the opportunity to put multiple brains into the mix, and combine what I think are the best aspects of improvisation and structured games. It took me a while to circle around to the hobby, but I’m certainly glad I did, and I’m glad you’ve found this little corner of the internet where I continue to talk at length about it even today.