Some time ago, I blogged heavily about the fact that perhaps the answer to my feeling of gaming loss, was that I needed a gaming group. A new group of adult friends that I could connect with over gaming. Especially over games that I wanted to play. And then, lo and behold, they reached out to me. I had a great guy, super nice, who wondered if we wanted to get together and game. He had a friend or two and asked if I knew anybody else we could game with then maybe we could start a game. It seemed as if exactly what I wanted was coming to pass.
What happened you ask? Well, I was a dad. Getting time away when you have three kids at home wasn't exactly easy. So I took my two oldest kids. Not exactly what I pictured, but we work with the tools we have, right? And don't get me wrong. I have since gamed with my kids as much if not more than anyone else. Then, as I emailed back and forth and talked over email and phone with these new gaming contacts, they asked me what I wanted to play. I chanced it and said I would really like to try HackMaster 4e.
A brief divergence is in order here to explain the significance of this. As I've written about before, in the deep of the OSR, around 2007 or so I re-encountered Knights of the Dinner Table. I can't quite describe the feelings I had as I read more and more of this perfectly captured gestalt of the gaming world I recall. I felt like I was coming home. It was soon after that I found out that HackMaster 4e. was an actual game! My excitement was overwhelming. All of the hopes and of the OSR seemed like they were being realized. Here was a company that had written a game that seemed to carry on the proud AD&D tradition. But then, everything changed.
KenzerCo, the company that had created HackMaster revealed plans that WoTC was shifting gears and their agreement to use the license they had been granted was coming to an end. As a result they were going to create a new version of HackMaster, Fifth Edition. My stomach dropped. Would that change things? What would the new edition be like? How much could it be like AD&D? I would just have to wait and see. I did, and was disappointed. While HackMaster 5e is a fine, beautifully produced game, it was not AD&D.
It was awhile later that these new guys had reached out to me, but I was still enchanted with HackMaster 4e as the potential true heir to 1e. So I told them I wanted to try HackMaster 4e. And believe it or not, they agreed! It was decided I would GM, since I was most familiar with the game, though I had never actually played it. Within days the new guys had created new characters. They were fully embracing the idea, but ... they had a different idea than I did. I can't blame them though. They saw HackMaster as the parody it was presented as. As a made-up satire of a game played in a made-up satirical universe. They laughed about their characters taking so many quirks and flaws their characters were practically unplayable. I didn't handle it well. They did not see what I saw. That HackMaster was a brilliant game, that it could be played as a real game, not as a joke. I still recall the awkwardness on this phone call, and how I struggled to not appear offended, and failed to do so. But these were good guys. They backed off the idea, and I gave up pushing HackMaster. It was a short time later I gave up the GM role, even before we started, and another guy agreed to GM what he was comfortable with, 3.5.
I was right back where I had been many other times. We gamed for about six sessions and I called it quits. So what was wrong here? Was it me? Was it the other guys? Was it the game?
I don't blame the other guys. They were good guys. I don't blame my kids--I'm the one who invited them and the guys were more than glad to have them join. The game was maybe partially to blame. I mean the guys had seen the aspect of the game that was implicitly a part of the game. The game is a parody, of a sort. So I can't really blame the game, it is what it is. So, the fact is, I am the only one left to blame. And that's not new. I blamed myself then and I do so now.
So why did I quit? It wasn't the kids, it wasn't the guys, it wasn't my other responsibilities, it wasn't even that we were playing 3.5. But in some strange way it was all those things.
As I ran the game club at the school where I taught, we had lots of fun playing lots of different editions of the game. 3.5, Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, 4e, Call of Cthulhu, and OSRIC. I definitely had the most fun playing OSRIC. I sort of had to exert myself to tell all the club members that I was only going to GM OSRIC. And the club members jumped in with both feet. Our campaign in OSRIC was some of the most fun I had playing in the club. I actually had told the members that we were playing AD&D and that I would be using the AD&D rules, but OSRIC was a near exact clone so they could use those rules and we would be just fine. But the fact was, we weren't. I mean the games were great, but what began to come up again and again, were the little niggling differences between OSRIC and AD&D. Club members would come up and ask questions about rules, make declarations based on OSRIC that did not jive with AD&D. Granted the differences were small, but somehow they loomed very large in my mind. It was some months later that I cancelled the OSRIC game and we switched back to Pathfinder, by popular vote. I didn't vote, I let the students do it.
Who's to blame here? The kids? The game? Me? Yeah. Me again. Sure there are plenty of reasons, but we were having a great time gaming first edition. I mean no one can not call OSRIC first edition. It's as close of a clone that has been written. But I wanted my 1e books at the table. I wanted them to be the ultimate recourse. I was still looking for something else.
And what happened with HackMaster? Well, I may have my timelines messed up in the re-telling, but when HackMaster 5e was released in 2009, and actually when Basic was released, I could tell right away that this was not the same game. But I jumped in, tried to embrace it, but it never took. It was so different from 4e that I just couldn't stay excited about it. And the company that created it would of course shift to 5e. I had some hope that KODT wouldn't be affected, but it was. Now, don't get me wrong, I still love KODT. I just try and look past the little differences they've added in that refer to 5e instead of 4e. I mean, heck, back in the day when I played AD&D I probably wouldn't have liked KODT. I would have seen it as a crass parody, making fun of the game I loved. And I would have seen all the variances from AD&D as proof that they weren't really talking about my game anyway.
But time is a funny thing, and memory even funnier. I re-encountered KODT at a time when I was desperately longing for some connection to the world of old school gaming. In the satire that was KODT, I recognized the truth of what it was trying to represent. I saw in it and the game a chance to return to the past. The same thing the OSR had promised. But time travel is not possible. No one gets to go back. We just go forward with the experiences of the past to shape us.
I could say I misjudged OSRIC, I misjudged the OSR, I misjudged KODT and I misjudged HackMaster. Maybe it was because I didn't know what I was looking for. Maybe because I didn't know myself. Maybe in the end I misjudged myself.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. I don't even know whether to call it an emotion. I've studied it alot since the OSR grew wings some 20 years ago now. Truthfully, psychologists aren't agreed about what it is, and what purpose it serves. I've read lots of theories, but nothing quite rings true. What I have heard is that nostalgia is stronger for some than for others. I certainly admit it is a powerful force in my life. So I have to admit how much nostalgia has played a role in my gaming life, especially since I picked it up again back in early 2000.
How do I separate the strong feelings I have about the game as it was for me and the current reality of the gaming world? I've tried so many times to game other editions. I always end up quitting; disillusioned by the current game and the lack of what I'm looking for in the experience. For awhile I thought it was the lack of friends to game with. Friends that were more than just my students or even my own children--since the relation between a teacher and his students, or kids and their dad will never quite be like gaming buddies. That is, after all, what KODT seemed to capture. BA, Sara, Brian, Dave and Bob. Gaming buddies. I wanted something like that. But the guys who had reached out to me certainly gave me that opportunity. But I walked away from that too.
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