Why I No Longer Hate Playing RPGs

by James on February 6th, 2010

Warning – this post talks at length about role playing games. If this type of geekery is not to your taste then give it a miss.


I can remember exactly when and where I got into roleplaying games. It was the spring of 1989 in a school camp in Scotland. I was 9 years old and obsessed with Lord of the Rings, martial arts and horse riding. The camp was a dull affair – walking around some woods cataloging trees and insects, learning about the industrial revolution and being very careful not to make too much noise.. During the few hours we had free in the evenings we were supposed to play football and the like, keep out of the way of the teachers and not break any windows or each other. Football wasn’t really my thing and so I initially spent a lot of time reading. On the second day I noticed a group of boys from the year above me heading off to one of the classrooms. The next day I plucked up the courage to ask what they were doing.

MERP’ was the less than illuminating reply. This, it turned out was a game where you could pretend to be a hero, or a villain; to run around Tolkein’s Middle Earth and kill orcs. There were no pieces, no board just imagination, paper and some odd looking dice. I could be anything I wanted, anything in the whole of the Tolkein mythos. Like a Dúnadan fighting monk with a warhorse. This was pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen. 2 hours in I was hooked. MERP proved too complex for me to play with my friends at home, and a helpful cousin provided a first edition copy of D&D that he had never played. This was the real gateway drug. 1st edition dungeon crawls were soon followed by AD&D, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Star Wars and tabletop wargaming. I had a freaking huge dice bag and shelves full of rulebooks.

As soon as I went to the Comprehensive school I started a gaming club, with a friend running a totally awesome Warhammer 40k game with on some homebrew rules taken from the Fighting Fantasy books. This was where I met up with friends who I still have now. As we got older we joined a larger gaming club and after a while I got a job running games for the local community centre. The games we played became more and more varied  – Blood Bowl, Mighty Empires and the magnificent Cyberpunk 2013. This latter co-incided with my discovery of William Gibson, and the whole cyberpunk literary movement. I was obsessed.

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Quote of the day

by James on January 9th, 2010

Comes from the LPUK blog:

Listening to ‘Farming Today’ this morning, an East Anglian Farmer said twenty years ago he would be out with his tractor and snow plough keeping the rural roads open for his and neighbours benefit. He was told along with all other farmers to ’stop it’ because they were using red diesel to power their tractors on the public highway and it was illegal.

Direct evidence that jobsworths and the obsession with taxing everything has lead to the reduction in voluntary emergency capacity.

This is why it is portant people do stuff for themselves. The state cannot solve all your problems for you. Get a spade.

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Cabbage, Bacon & Barley Hotpot

January 7th, 2010

I like to rattle the pans a bit, and I’m a fair amateur cook. One of the things I want to do this year is improve those skills a bit, and branch out into using techniques and ingredients I rarely use. To that end I plan to post up a few recipes of this I [...]

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On those planned new airport body scanners

January 6th, 2010

I can’t help but think that this is yet more theatre, more about being seen to do something, than actually, you know, doing something. It is clear that there are still people out there trying to blow up planes but they are not being very successful. This may be because of the heightened security, but [...]

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I’m teaching in Wales…

January 1st, 2010

Just a quick update as details of an event I’m teaching have just been released. I’ll post some more information when I have it, but for now here’s the press release:

To celebrate the arrival of the Rawlings range training swords and the opening of the Knight Shop’s WMA academy we are holding
Two Days of the [...]

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A Review of BusyCal 1.1

December 29th, 2009

Via Daring Fireball, comes this review of BusyCal 1.1, the replacement for Apple’s iCal application. Seems it is good, but they make some glaring UI errors.
For me, however, the lack of Exchange support means it is never going to even get considered. Without the ability to sync with my work calendar it is useless to [...]

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Work The Chest

November 16th, 2009

A tweet by one of my favourite all time authors, William Gibson, has pointed me to this article on the importance of continuous chest compressions in CPR. This matches the advice given in a lot of first aid training now. Make sure it’s safe to help, make sure an ambulance is called and get pumping [...]

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Sparring. A Rose By Any Other Name

November 15th, 2009

A number of years ago I was criticised by one of the stuffier historical fencers for using the term sparring to describe competitive free fighting. Much better, I was told, was to use the term bouting or freeplay. This seemed altogether foolish to me at the time, part of the same school of thinking that [...]

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Lest We Forget

November 8th, 2009

Remembrance Sunday is not just about those who died, and are dying in the armed forces, it’s also about those who survive. There are an awful lot of people who rely on the work of charities like the Royal British Legion, Help For Heroes and BLESMA. If you can, please stick the price of a [...]

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This is a problem

November 5th, 2009

With a tip of the hat to Wat Tyler & Mr Eugenides

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