My life as a gamer, by Ben

It suddenly struck me on getting back from Conception the other day that suddenly my gaming life is in a very good place. This got me to looking back over my life as a gamer.

I guess I've always been a gamer, when I had toy soldiers I made up rules for games – using drawing pins rather than dice. As soon as computers started being a household thing I wanted one – and was immediately drawn more to RPG and strategy/wargames than anything else.

Then of course I found out about Games Workshop – mainly through admiring the figures in the local toyshop – my first purchase was the White Dwarf boxset – I still have those figures somewhere. This grew into 40K and Fantasy Battle, much money was spent, many figures were painted and many games were played – but it wasn’t enough. Enter Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay – this was a bit more like, making your own adventures for friends to play through. To be honest I wrote far more adventures than I ever ran, and quickly lost count of the number of characters I created.

Soon the Playstation came onto the scene (I’d managed to miss things like NES/SNES and the Sega machine) and with it came Final Fantasy VII. I moved more into computer/console games than face to face roleplaying and wargames. This changed when I went to Uni, as I left the console behind, but joined a newly started RPG society. This got me into some games and running another (Aliens the RPG), but unfortunately only lasted a year as the organiser sadly passed away over the summer holidays – the rest of my time at Uni settled into work and going out.

Post Uni I started running WEG D6 Star Wars – again preparing far more stuff than I ever used, which back then was my way. When I moved away the gaming dried up and I returned to console and PC gaming.

Whilst my access to gaming – RPG’s in particular had dropped away to pretty much non-existent I did manage to get to GenCon UK twice – which was okay, but I did not like how the games and getting into them was all done.

I then went a couple of years without any real gaming of the Tabletop type until a friend invited me to Conception a few years back. Since then I’ve gone almost every year (just missing the one) and have added Indiecon & Concrete Cow into the mix as well.

More recently we attended ConDamned and are now going back again this year. I’ve started running a fortnightly game of The One Ring on G+ Hangouts, and we seem to have found a monthly boardgaming group somehow as well.

Finally I’m in a place where I’m almost getting as much gaming as I want (more face to face would be good, but the local RPG groups don’t want to play the Indie stuff that I now prefer), get to go to 4 Cons a year, play boardgames fairly often and have started to work on my/our own RPG ‘The House’ a structured freeform horror game – more about that next blog.

So until next time – Keep Gaming

B