QOTW#9 When was/is your RPG "Golden Age"?

[Onix]

When was that time when the characters were real characters? The players were really players? The nights of gaming were never ending? How old were you and what was the situation?

For me, it was in high school. We would get together every week. We had a gaming room and a gaming table. We stayed up till 4 am playing and sometimes picked up the next day. It probably started when I was 14 and kept going until I was 18. Then people split apart, moved, drifted away. Very sad.

I had a second renaissance just 2 years ago, that lasted 4-5 years. There were late nights, (although not as late) and there was a table (but not a gaming table). One friend went away, but is now back. We just haven't been able to get things going again.

[koipond]

Now. Because I'm still making this stuff ten years later and have gotten better with every single book.

Because now I can go into a game knowing who I am much better than when I was a kid when I just thought I knew who I was.

Because I know more about how stories work, and how to play a game without worrying about playing the game.

Because I wouldn't go back to that age no matter how much money was involved.

[Abstract Machine]

Well... there isn't necessarily a dichotomy there. I agree with both of the above.

System 1 & System 2 might coalesce more easily now that we're older & (don't laugh) wiser, but youthful intensity is hard to recreate, even if there was some degree of idiocy to it. I hunger for the old drive even though I know it contains its own dissolution.

But, yeah. Design requires perspective.

[vulpinoid]

My "golden age" was the early to mid 90s...Shadowrun second edition had come out, White Wolf was invigorating things with the WoD, aD&D 2e was releasing some really interesting settings like Dark Sun and Planescape (and a whole heap of options books that expanded play styles). A bunch of interesting and obscure things were starting to appear, and I was finally taking regular journeys into Sydney to visit the "big gaming stores" (most of which are now gone).

It was a time when we had enthusiasm for the stuff we played, everyone had a favourite system to GM, and we'd regularly have sleepover weekends when 8 or 9 of us would gather, often playing 2 different games at either end of the room (because some people would be fanatical about one game, and non-plussed on another)...there might have been three or four sessions like this over the course of a weekend. I guess they were like mini-conventions.

We were drawing non-gamers into the crowd, and computer RPGs hadn't really taken off yet. Suddenly gamers were one of the cool cliques...and the scare of the D&D satanic panic was generally over. for me it was late high school, early university days. Eventually we all moved on with our lives and drifted apart...I kept the fire alive by expanding my horizons with conventions and LARP, other people I get back in contact woth from that era occasionally ask if any of us still game together. But that time is gone...no point trying to recapture the lightning.