Old dogs new tricks

Diceroleking

Anyone who ever said you can't teach an old dog new tricks go check out Mustered out on Regina a classic traveller campaign being played by a bunch of guys using a thirty year old set of rules (some of the players are in their forties) but using gametable to hook up over the Internet, rather than face to face! Wonder how many systems out now will keep going that long, one of them I know has been playing for nearly 34 years!

Jackofjacks

Bet the guy playing for 34 years is snapshotbygdw, guess he's gonna have to break out the reading specs soon, GDW printed them LBB's real small!

igornappovich

Traveller -- wow. Old Skool.


(In an old man voice):

Back in MY day, all we had to roleplay with was a tiny little paperback and a handful of six sided dice!
And we LIKED IT!

Dungeon_Master_Loki

Back in my day you had to use a crayon to color in the numbers on the dice. Seriously.

DarkMagus

DML you just reminded me that back in the day we colored in our dice with neon colors that would glow under the black light because we'd have candlelight and a black light for lighting. Characters sheets were also more readable under the black light because the paper would be brighter. I miss using the black light.. Can't wait until the next time I get to run games at night instead of the afternoon.

Duskreign

DM, you are bringing me back to my shame-gaming days, man! I remember all those long, dark nights in the basement, trying to avoid notice from the uninitiated adults upstairs while we fished around for our d20 and used a flashlight to see the results. Surreptitious gaming lent a lot of atmosphere to the game I was playing at the time, a lost-in-the-woods murder mystery my old friend Keith cooked up for us. Good times.

If we had a blacklight back then, it would have made things soooo much more atmospheric! Now, just to invent a time machine and bring 12 year old me a blacklight and a list of ideas and people to avoid hanging out with.

DarkMagus

Yes! Timemachines are the perfect fix for nostalgia!

Duskreign

Maybe compile a list of all my enemies' fears, hand that to the young, angry, beta-version of me...

No, time travel would turn me into a supervillain way to quickly.

twiggyleaf

I remember thinking what a stupid idea that crayon and dice idea was. Obviously I was not the only one who thought so.

DarkMagus

Well, Dusk, sounds like a good origin story to me.

Black_Vulmea

Speaking as an 'old dog' (I started playing rpgs toward the end of 1977, at age twelve) who needs to hold his game books at arm's length to read the tiny text, I think the intrewebz make tabletop roleplaying games better than ever. I found the players for "_Le Ballet de l'Acier_":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/le-ballet-de-l-acier through a gaming Meetup and a Yahoo group, and when one of the players moves back to Europe this summer we're going to transition to running the game over Skype.

Mike aka Black Vulmea
"_Le Ballet de l'Acier_":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/le-ballet-de-l-acier - Swashbuckling adventures in the age of the Three Musketeers and Captain Alatriste

RaseCidraen

.... I have an epic idea for a campaign now, so I'll drop the idea here and maybe someone can use it (I can't, as what I'm running is exciting me enough where I don't want to tweak it with this and break it :P)

The Player Characters/Heroes/Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits develop/create/buy/discover a time machine, and decide to go back and influence their former selves in (seemingly) good ways - they help them avoid a fight with a bully/dragon/girl, or give them a neat idea/lottery number/magic sword, something which they feel would have made their lives easier/more fun/awesome. Then, they meander their way back to the present - only things have gone terribly terribly wrong. Their timeline no longer exists. Their former selves have become twisted versions of who they wanted them to be. The theory is that we are a culmination of all of the experiences we slog through, and if we changed that, we'd be come not-us. That neat idea/lottery number/magic sword would cheat the person of the experiences which would have made them fundamentally good/important lessons were not learned etc. Or maybe that bully/dragon/girl was the thing that was a cornerstone event for them. Either way, their dystopian former selves are now the Big Bad Evil Guy/Mastermind/Evil Demigods that they have to vanquish. You might think that the players would whine that "My Character would never enslave an entire race/cheat at the lottery/hold a Taco Bell at gunpoint due to a price change", but the fact that they went back in time to alter their own history causes their "old" self to become an n+1 of their "old self", thus creating a new person with new experiences/worldview. Events prior to the "change" would be viewed differently, etc etc. This requires a fair amount of background on the part of your players, and a decent amount of re-interpretation on the part of the DM/GM/ST, but would create a rather interesting and epic-in-scope story that brings back echos of Frankenstein blended with the Time Machine - The characters would be battling monsters of their own creation for survival, but what makes it worse is that they're battling themselves.

DarkMagus

Rase that is an awesome idea!!

Newcomicbookday

Hi jackofjacks
Snapshot got me signed up here as well see a couple of the other old farts are knocking around his campaign as well, looks like your all still enjoying it long live the LBB's even if most players need their varifocals to read em nowadays!!