I was introduced to Tabletop roleplaying at the turn of the millenium, in my childhood. My best friend's father was our Game Master, and he had been using some of the earliest iterations of Rolemaster in a homebrew game that fit in a massive, leather tome he made himself, which had two 2" rings full of pages, which he had been working on since before I was born.
As a player, I learned to appreciate the delight of choosing how to develop my character, and how over levels, characters become *mine*. Their skills are a collection of the player's ideas and reactions and needs and goals. That relationship between the character sheet and the player was something special, and it became sacred once the sheet got its first drink stain.
The GM was excellent at reading player moods and understanding player interests, and keeping the game engaging and fun whether we were in an 'adventure', or jerking around town. It became clear after many games that the fun was found not in the writing of the adventure but in the interactions the players get to participate in. More often than not, improvised BS with townspeople was more fun than hacking through kobolds near the Keep on the Borderlands.
After some time, friend's dad gave us the reigns and let us take a go at GMing. I had us in a port town, and while I've forgotten everything that happened, I'll never forget the aside conversation, wherein he explained to me how a combination of forces such as the sun heating the land and water creates breezes at different times of day, creating favorable times for ships to come into and leave port. While the specifics are lost on me to time, there are two key messages:
- As a GM, you have a big responsibility to represent the world around the players
- It doesn't have to be realistic, but it has to maintain the suspension of disbelief
Fast forward a few years to college, I met some fellows who had interest, and ended up assembling, with the caveat that one player was so adamant about it being World of Warcraft, that he insisted it be the official World of Warcraft tabletop game. I refused to run it, so he decided to take the helm with zero experience tabletop gaming. So after that half a session, we turned to my proposal of running HARP.
It was rough, as I was transitioning from Rolemaster to HARP, and the players were learning what the different shaped dice were and how to read the percentiles. But I had the fortune of the power of improvising, and made my decisions quickly to keep the flow of the game.
One of the party's very first encounters: They knew a group of kobolds were in a cavern, and they had the surprise on them. Party had this brilliant idea to set up two people on each end with a rope between them, have someone call out, and the two would pull the rope at the same time to trip the rushing kobolds. "I signal to him," the ranger said. I grinned as I responded, "What's your Signaling skill?" That moment triggered something for the party. The ranger pulled the unsuspecting halfling into the middle of the entryway, so the kobolds tripped over the poor little guy. Plan half-worked, at least, and the players enjoyed having consequence to their actions and mistakes. The campaign was a little flimsy, and a bit rushed with limiting our gaming to school, but we had fun. After graduating college, it would be years before I could find or assemble a stable group...