Author: Chris S.

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1977

1977 was not just the year I turned 10.

Or the year Star Wars first premiered.

Or even the year I got Baron Karza for my birthday (he was in his box on the kitchen table when I came downstairs for breakfast).

1977 was the first year that I seriously started to pay attention to baseball.

I considered myself a baseball fan since I was 4-5 years old, because on weekends we seemed to live at the ballpark, especially if there was a Sunday doubleheader.  I never paid attention to the games as much as my parents and my brother did back then.  I was more interested in when the next time the food vendors would come by our section (General Admission 28).

But two things happened in 1977 that changed the way I saw baseball.

The first was the premiere of “This Week In Baseball”.

Aside from the occasional Giants game, and that day in 1974 when we saw Hank Aaron break the all time-home run record, I’d never seen anything like TWiB, a weekly recap show of baseball, much like the older “NFL Game of the Week” show that would come on in the afternoon on Saturday, after cartoons.

TWiB introduced stars of the game who I was not familiar with, since we only ever saw the Giants on TV.  And the dulcet tones of Mel Allen’s voice made the recaps somewhat exciting.

How about that?

The other thing that happened in 1977 was Chris Speier being traded away from the Giants to the Expos.

Speier was my favorite player on the Giants since my first exposure to baseball, which started my ‘root for the Giants player with your first name and last initial’ thing.

I don’t know if I ever rooted for Tim Foli.  I simply couldn’t, because he took the place of my boyhood idol.

I think I ended up picking either Johnnie Lemaster (another shortstop) or Jack Clark or Bill Madlock or John Montefusco as my new favorite Giants player, mostly because they had cool sounding names.

Years later Speier came back to the Giants, just in time to watch them become a contender in the late 1980s.  By then my ongoing love for baseball had become a permanent thing.

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Figures

I have a great idea for a custom figure that I should have made years ago.

Mission-class freighter captain.

I have to wait until Cotswold restocks their basic figure assortment.  Hopefully they’ll restock this month.

Or I could make a HeroForge miniature of him.

The custom action figure won’t come with a leather jacket.  Or whip.  Or laser rifle.

Maybe a miniature would be a better option.  It’s certainly cheaper.

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Last

RPGaDay 2019

Last day of this exercise, and like all of our past RPG campaigns, I don’t know how to end it.

As far as I’m concerned, all of our past campaigns are still ongoing, since we never formally ended any of them.

I had mentioned an ending to our West End Games Star Wars campaign, where my bounty hunter turned the rest of the party over to the Empire and collected the bounty.  But who’s to say that that was the last story to be told?  Maybe they escaped.  Maybe it was a setup to get into a maximum security facility to free another Rebel operative.

Heh, I just made that last one up.  Too bad we never played it out.

On that note, I hope all of your future gaming sessions are memorable ones.

Because in the end, that’s what we’ll carry with us.

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Connection

RPGaDay 2019

Connections between characters can be a tricky thing to create when first starting a new RPG campaign.

In the FASA Star Trek system, we were simply assigned to a ship and that’s that.

In FASA Doctor Who, the Time Lord picked up his companions.

In D&D it was usually a meetup in a pub.

In superhero RPGs it sometimes turned out like the tryout scene in Mystery Men.

In Star Wars it’s usually an underground Rebel meeting or mission.

In our latest D&D 5e campaign the 3 PCs simple met up in town at a local tavern, along with my NPC sidekick bear.  A couple of us belong to the same backstory organization (Order of the Gauntlet).

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Evolve

RPGaDay 2019

RPG evolution timeline:

  • The Fantasy Trip (Metagaming’s Melee/Wizard)
  • Star Trek The Role Playing Game (FASA)

And then it gets fuzzy, because we jumped into Top Secret, Doctor Who, Palladium FRP, DC Heroes, Ghostbusters, Top Secret S.I., Star Wars RPG, and then dabbled in Twilight 2000, Traveller 2300, Gangbusters, Paranoia, Boot Hill, James Bond, Men in Black, and The Babylon Project.

I may have forgotten a couple or a few.

And this was all in the 20th century.

Role playing games were off the radar during the first decade of the 21st century, though we may have played Top Secret S.I. with 1:6 scale action figures as our miniatures.

After that, gaming in general simply fell by the wayside, until we started a monthly meetup back in 2012.  And then we included RPGs into the rotation, which eventually caused us to schedule a second monthly meetup for non-RPGs.

Which turned into Gloomhaven sessions.

In the past 5-6 years we’ve played:

  • Dungeons and Dragons 5e
  • Star Wars (Fantasy Flight Games)
  • Hyperlanes
  • Mutants and Masterminds
  • Mighty Protectors (Villains and Vigilantes v.3)
  • Traveller

And currently we’re in another D&D 5e campaign.

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Suspense

RPGaDay 2019

Our group was more apt to have a cliffhanger than actual suspense.  We rarely finished a scenario in one session, regardless of how late into the night/early morning we’d play.

One that sticks out was FASA’s “A Doomsday like Any Other”, a sequel to “The Doomsday Machine”.

Upon trying the ‘Kirk maneuver’ (i.e. blow up a ship from the inside of the maw), the crew found that we failed, and the GM stopped the adventure at that point.

Cliffhanger.

Suspense would be not revealing the result until the next session.

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Idea

RPGaDay 2019

The one problem I have as a gamer is the number of ideas that have fallen by the wayside because of lack of time to really do anything with these ideas.

We had huge plans to introduce a full on galactic war with our late ’80s FASA Trek campaign.  Three of us spent a couple of hours in the back room of the old Gamemasters on Geary Blvd.   I even hung up my copy of the Star Trek maps on the magnetic board in order to visualize where the war would take place.

This was supposed to be in conjunction with a ground forces module that never came to be from FASA.

There were grand ideas for all of our systems that we played in, past and present.

I still get ideas now, but these are put on hold/permanent hiatus because of the ever-changing wants and needs of our current gaming group.

We’ve changed RPG systems so quickly due to lack of material or simply loss of interest (in my case) of playing/running a system.

And now we’re back to D&D.