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First Blood
The childhood experiences that turned me to the dark side
Like so many of my generation in Britain (born in the early 1970s), my first introduction to fantasy gaming was through Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. These came to my school as a fad that stayed for a season and then passed away when I was about 10. I'd read The Hobbit already and heard of Lord of the Rings, but these were fiction. The idea of a game set in a fantasy world was new to me. We (my brother, my sister and I) started reading Warlock (the FF magazine) and from this we learnt of the wider world of gaming, with its RPGs and its boardgames. White Dwarf was a general British gaming magazine in those days, and a good one, and we soon longed to taste the fruit of the roleplayer for ourselves.

The game I cut my teeth on was Dragon warriors, around the age of 11 or 12. This is a great game for a 12-year-old to learn roleplaying with, because the rules are quick and simple and there's lots of fighting in it. But one problem with the game is the lack of backround material. What brief mention there was of the game-world made it plain that this was a fantasy version of Europe during the Crusades, and I thought that this really was supposed to be set in Europe during the Crusades, just a version of it with magic and monsters. This led to me being docked experience points for bad roleplaying when my character referred to a swarthy Easterner as 'an Arab'. I have since learnt that there is loads of background material in the original release of the game, but it's all in the pre-written scenarios. There's nothing in the sections that the players can read except a map and a bit of flavour text here and there. Anyway, the idea of distinct game-worlds was not yet in sharp focus in my mind at that tender age.

I ramble. This is by the bye. I was playing a Knight, and the first scenario involved entering the lair of a Troll to rescue someone. This seemed to me pretty heroic stuff and just what Knights should do. So I was cautiously advancing along a smelly tunnel and this Troll apppeared, and it was about 9 foot tall. 'I'm not fighting that thing!' I thought, so I threw a dagger at it and did a runner. It turned out that throwing daggers had a much greater chance of hitting than fighting it in melee would have done. At that time I had no concept of learning the rules and working out the best way to attack, but it was plain to me that this knife-throwing lark was a lot safer than standing toe to toe with a 9-foot man-eating bastard.

The great thing about that scenario, simple as it was - essentially just me fighting the Troll - was that it really felt like a dnagerous adventure. I, seeing my foe, instantly formed the conclusion that no normal man could fight such a beast and win, so I fell back and resorted to using the advantage of missile weapons, playing a game of cat and mouse with the Troll, hitting and running. Now, of course, I realise that while a Troll is a threat to a starting character, it would be a fairly inconsequential foe to an experienced adventurer. After all, this is a game where humans can kill Dragons. But to me at that time the slaying of a Troll in one-on-one combat was a mighty feat of valour to be celebrated in song and story. In fact, I've a feeling that this was just a minor encounter on the way to the main scenario, but it's the bit I've carried away with me for the rest of my life.

There are lots of things about that game which I would like to recreate.

The feeling of risk - My character was putting his life on the line to save an innocent from being eaten by a Troll. I felt like he was taking a big risk doing it. This enemy, it seemed to me, vastly outmatched my character in combat ability, and I had to outsmart it (admittedly not difficult - it seemed unable to grasp the concept of ranged weapons) to win. The problem with a lot of games (from D&D upward) is that characters can become so powerful that they just shrug off opponents that in reality the world's hardest special forces soldier wouldn't be able to defeat in hand-to-hand combat.

One way of creating a feeling of risk is to have lots of character death. Call of Cthulhu often plays like this, but the problem is a that characters are treated as disposable pawns. What I'd really like to write is a game where a player plays a group, and that group is put into situations where it will usually take losses during a mission. The group would then have to be reinforced before another mission. The problem with this is that again the characters would tend to be treated as disposable grunts. Perhaps I've just seen too much action, and I can no longer feel that feeling of risk. It's tough in peacetime, being a veteran. Goddammit.

The feeling of mystery - I didn't know the game at all well. I was playing a young Knight with no real experience of the real world, and I as a player knew little about this world. That meant that I really didn't know what would happen if I came up against monsters. I was like a raw recruit going into battle for the first time, and not knowing made it exciting.

A few modern games have tried to recreate this by having a background full of surprises. Dead Lands starts off with the players (and their characters) knowing very little about what's really going on in the world, and so when you find out about new things they can come as a nasty surprise. This is good but it means that you can only play one campaign of it and then you know, and the experience can't be repeated. Of course, the games companies love this because it means that the game has a limited lifetime and then it's dead and you need to buy something else. It's like built in obselescence for RPGs.

I had a good experience like this with Vampire. I'd never heard of it before the evening we played it for the first time, and I had no idea of the rules. I was playing a character who got turned into a vampire at the start of the first session. So I had the same level of knowledge of vampires as my character - no idea except for what I'd seen in horror films. I started feeding (meaning to take only a little blood), and then I learnt about feeding frenzies for the first time as I went into one. After that I decided to burn the house down to cover up the evidence of my crime, and that was when I learnt about the terrible fear of fire that vampires have (cue my second frenzy of the evening). Gradually I learnt how dangerous everyday life is for vampires, about the existence of the Camarilla and the Prince - all of which was completely new to me. This was really good, but of course I can't repeat it with the same game.