Or: Games I Have Known. For the sake of my patience and yours, I have mostly restricted this to games I either owned or played – ones where I read a friends’ rulebooks and only dimly remember have been ignored, with a couple of notable e[…]

There was a divide in role-playing between people who treated it as a small-scale, modular wargame and people who treated it as a way to tell stories interactively. (You could argue for a third type of player, who treated the games as a way to enact […]

D&D nowadays is publically remembered as a cartoon, or a fad. A core of gamers still play it, of course, but the RPG hobby as a whole is a cultish and diminished thing. And yet – unless I’m missing out some really obvious antecedent*[…]

A minor point of terminology: (more…)[…]

From the time I got into role-playing games, the selling point was well-established: the games allowed players to create stories in which they were the heroes. But what kind of stories? The RPG set-up requires a group of characters (4-6, on average) […]

Dungeons and Dragons is the game most identified with roleplaying, but it certainly wasn’t the only option. In fact, once you’d got into the hobby you quickly realised that most vocal gamers had a certain disdain for D&D, seeing it i[…]

At first glance the I Was A Goblin series seems out of place on TMFD. Certainly when I was small, and played D&D, not many of my fellow enthusiasts were what you might call sportsmen. The gangly types were occasionally required to make ungainly […]

A tiny piece of gaming history made itself available to me yesterday – this PDF of White Dwarf #1. I’d never seen a copy before but its instantly evocative.
Of what? Not my gaming past exactly – WD had brightened up its act by the t[…]

It’s surely an indictment of something that the two pop-culture events I’ve been most excited about this year have been a comics series and Doctor Who. Certainly I’ve been spending more time than is perhaps healthy exploring my chil[…]

Enough of the rules. How did a typical D&D game actually unfold?
The adventure would begin with a lengthy introduction – very lengthy, in the case of some published modules. It would usually start “It has been many leagues since you l[…]