Where it all began | |
by Debbie Ginsberg | |
|
| |
|
Like any good geeks, us lady gamers all had to begin somewhere. I asked my fellow writers
how they got into this Nancy started playing AD&D when she first got to high school. Unfortunately, the GM was a horny 15-year old-and Nancy figured she could do a better job. Come the second semester of her freshman year, she recruited players and started her own campaign. She’s been "that evil GM woman" ever since, especially at GenCon. Ask to see her 200+ volume White Wolf collection sometime. Marinda’s prom date convinced her to ditch the dance for a Vampire LARP. It turned out to be way more fun! Marinda, you had a awesome date for the prom. She later picked up Warhammer 40K and Fantasy. In 1999, she found the addiction that was Frances is a life-long gamer, staring with the board games that she played with family. A high school friend told her of a game that she should try to play when she went to college. During freshman orientation, she found the gamer group’s table but couldn’t remember the name of the game. So she started to describe it. Turns out she was talking about Paranoia to the group’s only Paranoia GM! She was quickly brought on board and soon joined other games like AD&D, Marvel, and Rifts. She’s continued to game ever since, both board and RPGs. An avid MiB, she is a likely presence at almost any local con. Tonya stared with AD&D back in 1978. Since there weren’t too many RPGs around then, she played board games for many years until she could find more RPG players. Eventually, she was playing quite a variety of RPGs, including Stargate, GURPs, and Amber. She’s been involved with Susan Van Camp’s Dragon Storm game (an RPG without books). She is also an MiB (I’m starting to sense a conspiracy). Megan, always up for a challenge, started her gaming life with an epic Hero campaign. Although she’s relatively new to gaming, she’s had the chance to try out all kinds of systems, from White Wolf to 7th Sea. She’s recently begun running games both in her group and at cons. A long time Whedon fan, of course she started with the Buffy RPG! When not rolling dice, Megan can be found in front of her X-Box or PS2, most likely playing something like Final Fantasy. Debbie was ready to never RPG again after one bad AD&D session (see Nancy’s entry as to why; same high school; same GM). She wound up joining her college gaming group because that was the closest thing they had to a sci-fi club. And since there were games there anyway, she figured she might as well play them. How hard could Cosmic Encounter be? From there, it was only a small step to the world of RPGS -- first Call of Cthulhu, then Champions. Debbie will pretty much play any game except for certain computer games. It’s not so much that she doesn’t like them as that she’s a Mac user. Jennifer, an actress, writer, and historian naturally fell into gaming in high school starting with RPGs before moving onto LARPs and online games. Look for her in the Lovecraftian or Pirate worlds, or perhaps in the Court of Good Queen Bess! Looking back at all of this, I was a little surprised to see how many of us started with AD&D. I suppose that although a number systems were out by the time we got to be gamers, AD&D was the most popular. And, all things considered, it’s not a bad place to start role-playing. However, the younger gamers had more variety available to them, both in systems and in types of games. I’m kind of jealous, actually! Ok, I really just wish I had a better computer in high school so I could have played online too. Fortunately, I don’t think us older gamers missed out because we started with dungeon crawls. Since we picked up our first 20-siders, we’ve all had the chance to read quite a few rulebooks and learn new gaming styles. And all of us, both older and more recent gamers, now play a huge variety of games – what a great pool of talent to draw upon! | |
Copyright 2004-2005 The Lady Gamer. All rights reserved. |