determinedThe very first role-playing game I played was Other Suns, courtesy of my then-boyfriend being friends with the author of said game. Nicolai Shapero was greatly impressed that the first thing I did upon getting ahold of the game-books was to *gasp* read both books from cover to cover and then rolled up twelve characters, one for each playable race. That was late 1983. I played AD&D a few months after my first Other Suns game, using a character that was created by a "Random Character Generator program" written by Ogre. I still play a variant of that character, whose war-dog has become a player character in her own right. My AD&D adventures were with several different DMs, mostly with one who built her own world and had several different rules systems for magic that she would swap around from game to game. Barbara also ran a variant Champions game, using the Hero System rules to run inside a D&D fantasy milieu. Another DM used the "Arduin Grimoire" books rather heavily, which are one of those 'old school D&D' add-on books that only the hardcore gamers knew about.
I've played Villians & Vigilantes, Traveller, Gammaworld, Paranoia, Runequest and a few lesser known/used systems; I still play Champions, AD&D and occassionaly I run an Other Suns game. On the other hand, I have not attended gaming cons or competitions for the purposes of roleplaying, and I didn't bring my books to school/library/conventions to find a game to play in. I didn't have a lot of referee/DM/GMs, either. I can count two 'primary' refs that I played with, Nicolai Shapero (for Other Suns) and Barbara Haddad (for AD&D, or at least her interesting variant of it); there has been a few 'one-time' refs I've played with, less than the fingers of one hand.
The most memorable game wasn't because of fun. The impending disaster started when a fellow of the high-school SF club found out I was in good with the creator of Other Suns and wanted -- nay, demanded -- I bring him to a game he was running. It was a disaster because said classmate Matt was a heavy Traveller player/referee and had only glanced at the Other Suns rulebooks and just gleaned the parts he was interested in (character races, technology) without actually learning about the underlying rules system. So, what we 'played' was a Traveller game using Other Suns background milieu. Sounds like no big deal unless you understand that every roleplaying game has a focus -- Traveller's focus was combat, but Other Suns' focus was exploration/personal interraction (and --if playing with the creator-- political intrigue). Nicolai made the combat system of Other Suns more lethal than reality to discourage the very types of scenarios that Traveller thrives on. Setting a Traveller scenario into the Other Suns universe equals 55% casualty loss of player characters winning a combat. Stacking the odds so that the player characters are without armor or weapons equals 100% casualty loss of player characters. Period. Matt, my classmate, was caught offguard by just how fast his high-flung scenario went into the crapper, and was even more traumatized when both Nicolai and I reamed him a new one over not *reading the rules* before concocting the scenario. I still remember it, 20 years later.
I should start running Other Suns again, if only to renew my interest in the game system so I can pull that project out of its dusty storage. Among my acheivements is that Nicolai, when he wanted to play a game instead of running one, would ask me to run my games, set in my silly khromat sub-milieu (hard SF meets toon-magic-fantasy, whee!). Yes, I have khromatai statted up to play in the Other Suns system -- they've even done their small part in Hegemonic History. I have ownership of domains currently empty and waiting for data about Other Suns, khromatai and the khromat native milieu; I have reams of material to imput, format, and upload; there are dozens of pieces of art that needs to be done both for the new edition and for the websites; there's the Ring of DM Control that I still want to build. There's much for me to do and not much energy to do it. I get bogged down in the details. But darn it, when I think about my gaming history, I want to do something, get these projects off the ground again. Having money would probably help.
