My Intro to rolplaying games or how i learn to stop worring and love the dice
I have always been a creative guy. When I was a kid, my cousins, my brothers and I would get together, and we would weave these elaborate stories with our toys and our building blocks (usually taking heavily from any TV shows or movies we were obsessed with at the time). We all agreed that the best part was coming up with the story and building the set with the blocks; the actual playing was secondary (we were weird kids).
From those long afternoons playing at being warriors with stick swords and cardboard shields, making up kingdoms and causes to go to imaginary wars, the jump to TTRPGs was a natural one (when I learned what they were, of course).
It took some time. Picking up context clues from TV shows and cartoons, I knew there were dice, but they were weird dice,not like the ones in the family Monopoly set. Miniatures? Yes, they were always playing with those small dragons and wizards. A weird cardboard thing to cover the storyteller's plots and tricks (I had no idea what a GM screen was or half of what you needed it for). Books! Several of them for what you needed – the books I wasn't sure about, but I knew you needed them.
Eventually, I Googled "how to play D&D" and it took me to a bunch of articles and YouTube videos kind of explaining the game but not quite. Most of them assumed I knew something called "critical role." 14-year-old Daniel growing up in rural Venezuela didn't know what that was, and when I looked it up and saw a 4-hour-long video, you better bet I wasn't watching that.
Eventually, the drive died down after crashing against several walls. D&D stopped being my primary obsession for a while, until one day a college dude came into my mom's small business to make photocopies of character sheets. I asked about it, and he told me he was heading to a con where his group was playing D&D.
The session was messy, and I died pretty quickly. I think we were playing Lost Mines, just a very heavily homebrewed version of it by an old-school GM. It was also everything I dreamed it would be.
I was 16 years old, and here I had the game that I’d been looking for – complete freedom to make up my own stories and play them with my friends (if I could somehow trick them into playing). My first sessions were messy too, but for all the wrong reasons. I was a newbie who had only played the game a couple of times with these old grognards who knew the game by heart, but still, we had fun. I made all the rookie mistakes: I gave too many magic items, they fought too many monsters, then too few, then too powerful, but never too weak. I always find that the challenge made the players excited.
I built this image of being a cruel GM, "Rocks fall, everybody dies" kind of dude. It was all a façade, of course. I wanted my friends to have fun, but they had more fun if they thought they were messing with me, so I let them believe that. Most of my games were improv-heavy, after all. I didn't have that much free time, and I also wanted to adapt to what the players wanted to do.
Things happened, and I left my country just as our epic game had reached a fun climax (one of the players may or may not have used a wish spell to take everyone to a pocket dimension). Eventually, one drunk night with a group of friends in the new country I moved in, we improvised a session with paper and pencil and almost no rules. They loved it, and I suddenly had a new group.
Why am I telling all of this? I don't know, lol. Maybe I thought it was a fitting introduction to a roleplaying-centered blog, to have a little background on how I picked up roleplaying. Maybe I am nostalgic on a weirdly chilly January morning. Maybe I just sat down, and this is what my fingers wrote without me noticing while I was in a deep trance.
I am 27 now, 11 years since that first session. I moved away from the dragon game but stayed in its periphery. I tried a few systems and read a few more. I tried my hand at writing my own. I GMed many sessions and played in many more, all and every one of them has been special in one way or another.
Maybe this is all to say that I love roleplaying games because they gave a weird kid from the Venezuelan llanos a way to be himself and find new friendships, make people laugh, and imagine once again.
Thank you for reading, and happy gaming.