Topic: When did you start playing ICE rpg's?

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

I started in 1985 when I was stationed in England with the Air Force.

[GrumpyOldFart]

There needs to be a "what ICE products do you currently use" poll and a thread that keeps track of the comparison.

[Marc R]

We've had a lot of those, this one is rather original.

[GrumpyOldFart]

I'm saying we need the comparison between the two. I can see the results are rather original, I want to see exactly how they differ from the usual.

[Zhaleskra]

The first time I played Rolemaster was somewhere between 1996-1998, and likely near the latter. Same GM who introduced me says that RM Classic is most like what he ran then.

[Vector Z]

MERP liberated me from TSR

[Zedul]

I originally injected Arms/Claw Law into my AD&D1e game when they were first packaged together in a box.  Pre-Character Law.  So, whenever that was.

The original parchment set came out in 1981/82.   I only remember because I was a freshman in high school and at the gaming shop looking to buy a monster manual for AD&D and noticed this very fun set of attack and spell charts in parchment and cardboard stock.

Spell Law was similar it came in a box with little parchment booklets.  "Of Mentalism" was green, "Of Channeling" was blue, and "Of Essence" was burnt yellow and each spell attack table was on an off white cardboard stock.  I still have the Channeling booklet.

I don't remember when character law came out because the first time we played Rolemaster we spent 10 hours making five characters and they all got whacked to pieces by 3 orcs in the very first encounter in the first dungeon.  We all thought "huh?  this is impossible!" and it took me about 2 years before I could talk my friends into giving it another shot.  Once we adapted it stuck and it's been our campaign gaming system since 1984.  (Some of those original players still game with our current group from time to time.)

[GrumpyOldFart]

I remember those... I may even still have mine.

[ob1knorrb]

[Zedul]

Aha!  Now those look familiar, thanks ob1!

Makes me wish I had them all intact... except for Channeling mine have all been pilfered or  "folded, spindled, and mutilated"*



* 3 points for anyone who gets that reference.

[GrumpyOldFart]

Yep, those are the ones. I think my copy of Spell Law has a small embellishment added later by one of my players.... there's a crate labeled "Beholder Yummies" with something disgusting dangling out of it.

[Zhaleskra]

When I looked at D&D without the "I like this game" filter, I noticed that it is actually more mechanically complicated than HARP and RM. There's still a setting I'll continue to use D&D rules for, and the other you may have noticed I'm converting to HARP.

[arcadayn]

I started with a mishmash of AD&D and Moldvay Basic in late '81.  At the time, none of us realized they were supposed to be two separate games so we just glopped it all together.  Within a month, I was already looking for different genres and game systems to try.  I got into Avalon Hill wargames at this time as well.  My friend and I had a friendly competition to see who could play the most complex games (the old AH games had a complexity rating from 1-10). 

I avoided buying a new fantasy game until some time in '84.  With $10 in my pocket, I went to the awesome, but sadly long gone, Fantasy Game Shop in Des Moines.  The only thing I could afford was the MERP rulebook, which was going for $7 or $8.  The ads for ICE in Dragon magazine had been enticing me for years, so I made the jump.  I was very wary of playing in such an established world, but loved the criticals and character creation.  It really appealed to the realist/wargamer in me.  I soon saved up the whopping $35 it took to buy the Rolemaster box set with the winged creatures fighting on the cover (still my favorite cover art).  This was right when RM was going through its first major revision. The box included the new Arms Law/Claw Law and Spell Law.  Character Law was not yet revised, so it still had the original blue cover version that didn’t include Campaign Law.  It took me several months of digesting the rules before I could actually play, but by ’87,  it was my main fantasy system.

I was also on the original mailing lists and was there for the first ICE web site.  Man, I used to get a ton of emails!  I wrapped up a long running RMSS Hyborian game a few years ago and haven’t really done much with RM since then.  I finally took the RMC plunge last November, and picked up all of the RMXs that appealed to me.  Little did I know how prescient that was!

[Lynx]

Just this year. I have been aware of ICE and its products since the late 80s when I got my rpg start with Champions; I got the ICE catalog when I ordered that game. Back then, I couldn't afford another system (especially one like Rolemaster that seemed intimidating rules-wise). But the descriptions for products like Shadow World and its supplements intrigued me. Heck, there was even a semi-successful meshing of Fantasy Hero and Shadow World stuff.
Anyway, I hit high school in the early 90s and rpg's fell to the wayside. When the 5th ed. of the Hero System came out, I got back into it. I dug out my old books, including a couple of ICE catalogs. At the time I did a quick search for ICE.com but nothing solid came up.
Years later, I came upon a Shadow World link in the Hero Games forums. I saw there was a new players' guide (perfect for newcomers!), did some browsing on the RPG Now site, bought RM Character Law and Arms Law, and am learning the RMC system.
Although it's kinda constricting compared to Hero, its got many aspects that I like that integrate well with the fantasy genre (descriptive crits, specific weapon to armor results,some randomness to character creation).
Alright, enough rambling. Now that I have most of the system down, I'm gonna go purchase the SW Players' Guide. 

[Karizma]

My introduction was a thickly homebrew of RM2 (I think, GM says RM original but I'm not so sure) in the mid-2000's.  I was in high school, and I'm just about to graduate college now (which is where I have been for those that may notice my absence.  I'm terrified of post-graduate life!).

Soon after getting into the RM/2 game I bought over a hundred dollars in RMSS/FRP material via ICE and amazon.  I started working on a lot of projects, but never got too far.  Eventually in college I bought HARP and found it to be excellent for newer players, and ran that for a bit (though the combat systems fall short of what I want).

Now that I'm not running any games, I am considering going back to FRP/SS to make my homebrew stew in.  It's such a lovely system.

[arakish]

My first exposure to ICE was with the very first publication of Arms Law back in 1980.  Or, was it first published in 1981?  Can't remember.  I saw Arms Law in a hobby store in Jacksonville FL (was stationed at Mayport).  Bought it and immediately fell in love with it.  It gave us something the D&D folks never have gotten into their brains: Critical Damage.

Then a year later, I bought the first RM set and never looked back to D&D.  I still find the RM system the best there is.

rmfr

[rafmeister]

The first ICE product I saw was the arms law charts released in 1980. A friend of mine tried to get us to play D&D using them. That did not go over very well. Later, I played one game at college (around 1983) using pre-generated characters.

I did not get into RM until 1990, when i got into a RM campaign set in middle earth.

[Ynglaur]

I picked up the 1st Edition of Tech Law back in '85 or '86.  I thought the "SF" on the cover meant "Star Frontiers", a short adventure of which I had recently played.  At first I was disappointed, but as I read it I thought, "This is cool!"  The critical results were hilarious ("Foe bursts into a bloody pulp.  You need a spatula.").  I later picked up Future Law 1st Edition, and then the 2nd Edition Boxed Set when it came out.  At one point I owned every Spacemaster product created (with the exception of Time Riders, if you can call it that).

I didn't get into Rolemaster until the early 90's, when I managed to grab RMSS...about a year before RMFRP came out (argh).

[intothatdarkness]

I started gaming with TSR's Top Secret (first edition, no less), and then added Boot Hill. D&D never really grabbed me. I was introduced to RM in 1985. The gaming group was a bit odd (you tended to die spectacularly when you hit 5th level...I think because they didn't know what to do with higher-level characters), but I loved the rules. Over time I've modded Top Secret into a RM-type system, actually redid almost all the character classes (RM through RMCIII) to fit my campaign environment (which was being considered for publication around the time of the demise of ICE during the Standard System era in the 1990s), and developed a gunpowder hit table and crit charts for Outlaw.

Never really got into SpaceMaster that much, although I do have some of the earlier books.

[markc]

 Nice I found my 1st Ed Top Secret the other day with my James Bond 007 RPG stuff. You have to love the Fame Points back then.
MDC