A Colossal Waste of Time?

Sometime back, I listened to a podcast from All Games Considered on old school gaming. It was pretty interesting and went far to validate a lot of things about the hobby I knew about or suspected that I knew about. Listening to these podcasts also works for me as it makes my daily morning exercise walks a great deal less monotonous - not to mention lifting my spirits as I seem to have to be reminded periodically that I am not alone in my interest in this hobby and a big community of awfully decent and intelligent people out there share all of this with me.

A line from one of the speakers caught my attention at that time, specifically her remark that she entered the hobby relatively late in life on account of her father's adamant belief that role playing games were a 'colossal waste of time'.

Hearing this brought a smile to my lips as many of the people I grew up with shared this belief. For the record, I think they still do to this date- they just learned to watch their mouths more carefully in my presence.

Speaking for myself though, I can't deny how this interest in role playing games went far to help me out in real life.

I can't exactly remember if it was during one summer break in the eighties, late in high school when, finding myself doing nothing at home, I decided to leaf through the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. Eventually, I found myself reading up on waterborne adventures and various sea travel/combat rules none of us ever used before. While none of our gaming group really applied any of these rules, this suddenly got me interested in the peculiarities of maritime travel. Before the week was out, I started reading up on the concepts of longitude, latitude, knots, and other peculiar terms such as starboard, port, fore and aft.

I didn't think much of this at that time and just added all this to what others tended to dismiss as othewise useless bits of interesting trivia I tended to accumulate in my brain.

Fast forward to the nineties, a year after graduation and I land my first job in a firm which handled, amongst others, maritime litigation. One day, the partner-in-charge is giving me a rundown on the nature of the cases I'll be assisting him from here on. He gets to the part about Safety Of Life At Sea, charts and distances.

"Oh you mean nautical miles," I answer, getting on with the discussion. I could see he was pleased as he didn't have to spend so much time lecturing all these all over again to the newbie.

When we got to collisions and allisions, it was my turn to say, "Oh right, the starboard side of the vessel, not the port side."

I guess it was the right thing to say as he looked quite pleased and asked me 'how I knew all this stuff.' At that time, I felt that maybe it was going to be alright working in that firm.

Happily, it worked out for all of us- and it was alright.

The point I'm driving at here is that this interst of ours in gaming opens doors for many of us into a wider and more vibrant world - and many times, we don't know it has happened, until after the fact. I firmly believe that no experience, no matter how trivial is wasted in this life. Everything happens for a reason - the reason just manifests itself to us when the time and circumstances are right.

Taking the time to read up, prepare for and attend games does take up blocks of time from our already hectic lives. This said, I can't say this is all a waste of time. At the very least, the experience of hanging out and gaming with people you consider your friends is always a welcome activity which goes far to regenerate one's spirits and renew one's strength- thereby enabling one to cope with the ever-present pressures in life. If I could put the good I get from gaming in a bottle and market it to the world at large, I wager I'll make myself a crapload of money to enable myself to retire in style.

So in the face of the oft-repeated belief that this gaming life of ours is a colossal waste of time, I say: Game On! I'm a Gamer and I'm proud of it! My kids will be gamers too and I'll be proud of them as well.

I'm sure you all have similar stories where your experiences in role playing games have served you in good stead in the real world and served to advance you in 'real life'.

If so, I'd sure like to hear them.

By the way (I almost forgot this)- that podcast from AGC I linked to above also includes an interesting review of Mutant Future too!

What would our lives be without them?

This post was prompted by earlier posts by Al and Zak on the subject of the gamer-friendly significant other. In my case, it's that of a gamer-friendly spouse.

I've been married for six years now, and despite the usual challenges faced by a struggling head of the family trying to make an honest living in a third world paradise, I can't say I'd have done otherwise if I had a chance to do it all again. Much of this springs from the fact that the wifey has always sought to understand her sanity-challenged spouse, and, in the event her attempts at understanding failed, learned to accept him for what he is. I could say that this has become our mutual default policy as regards one another, but the point I'm trying to make is that my wife has always sought to understand what this roleplaying-game-hobby-thing is and went on to be supportive of my quaint and oftentimes seemingly strange interests.

I can't say more than what Al has already put so eloquently - I've run through his list and yes, I consider myself so blessed that my wife displays the same level of throughtfulness and understanding as regards this gaming-hobby-thingie of mine. That, plus standing up to her in-laws who had, despite the passage of time, always maintained an attitude towards gaming adopted by the great unwashed masses of humanity- is somewhat over and above the call of duty. And I love her all the more for it.

I can't ask for more and I'll always be grateful. Seems like I did something right sometime, somewhere to deserve this.

Mutations, mutations, mutations, mutations and even more mutations

One of the things that really attracted me (and continues to do so) to Mutant Future are the mutations. I adore tables and tables of mutations of all kinds. I guess character generation of mutants becomes a sort of 'game within a game' for me much like the character generation procedure was in the old classic Traveller rules.

I remember Jeff Rients' blogpost wherein I read of his experience in cobbling up pages and pages of mutations from all sorts of related games in his Mutant Future game thus allowing really off-the-wall mutants for his players. Jeff had a subtable connected to other mutation tables which empowered his players to come up with something even more than the original choices in the Mutant Future rules as written.

Needless to say this really captured my imagination as I firmly believe that you can't have too many random choices for your mutants (random choice being one of the strengths of the game in Mutant Future).

Doing the same thing with my available gaming materials, I drew up a list of possible sources for lists of mutational powers I plan to add to the existing ones in my ongoing game. These include the following:

1. Creatures of the Wasteland by Derek Holland and the Skirmisher Game Development Group

2. Gamma World rules, 1st edition

3. Metamorphosis Alpha rules, 1st edition

4. Assorted codices from the Warhammer 40k 3rd edition (including Witchunters, Daemonhunters, Marines and Imperial Guard) - for pysker powers

5. Fading Suns d20 Character Codex (mutations for the Changed, including such nasties like Caustic Puke)

6. Classic Traveller Book 3 (psionics)

7. Material from Warhammer's Slaves to Darkness

8. The Dead Earth player's book which literally has hundreds of mutations (which are quaintly termed as 'radiations')

9. Omegaworld by Jonathan Tweet, which appeared on Polyhedron Magazine issue 153

10. Dungeons and Dragons 1st edition Players Handbook (the appendix that deals with psionics)

I know this list is not exhaustive yet, but I've a feeling that with these additional choices of mutations, my upcoming games are going to be even more intersting in the coming days. I expect the mutants, both player generated and npc-ed to be even more wild, unpredictable and far out.

And who knows, maybe even more deadly as well.