Gen X – The Last Men

Gather your lonely eyes to your bright screen, young-one. Read in your solitary life, how we of the old world used to roam the lands without cell phones or any other means of communicating at a distance, and engaged in rituals you know nothing about.

You associate the acronym RPG with computer generated games you play by yourself, on a screen, perhaps at best talking over the internet with a few other strangers. Political correctness now being s draconian that the mere calling of another player a “faggot” will get you banned from the server in many cases. You have been robbed of your history, because it is always year zero in your dystopian world, and as you stuff more carcinogen-laced, nutrient-free, soy-based, fat-free, but lard-inducing pretend-food into your sickly, inflamed body, you are unaware of the origins of RPGs: Role-Playing Games.

They started all long, long, ago, in a land far, far away. And the grandfather of them all was Dungeons & Dragons. Back then, personal computers did not really exist yet, these were the early 1980s, and neither did mobile telephones. I first heard of these games as if they were some sort of illegal thing that only one kid that was year older than my friend and I had, and that you could not use alone. Nevertheless we went to his home and asked if we could take part, and he said yes.

So we gathered in his lounge, about 5 or six of us, my friend, my brother, the boy we had gone to who owned the books, and a couple of other guys, neither of whom we had met before. We were told to roll some six-sided dice in order to create the “stats” the attributes our characters would have. But even before we did this, we marvelled at the gems before us, because along with normal dice we had all seen before, were a bunch of see-through dice inscribed with numbers, but they were unusually shaped and looked like nothing we had ever seen before.

A tiny three-sided pyramid was a D-Four, a four-sided dice! A dodecahedron shaped one with pentagonal faces was a twelve-sided dice, a pointed one onto ends was a D-8 and there were a pair of D-10s of different colours, which when rolled together could generate a D-100; one die being the tens, and the other the units. And then of course, the one die that ruled them all: The D-Twenty. Where a result of 1 was a critical failure, and a result of 20 a critical success. And if you rolled two twenties in a row you then got to roll on the special critical success table with a D-100 and some of the results were awesome, like a decapitation of the master you were fighting instantly.

You needed to calculate what your armour class was, and depending on that, you would be more or less difficult to hit by the monsters, the referee, who presented the scenario and acted for all the monsters and NPCs (non-player characters) would recount the story and present you with situations the group had to deal with. The various classes were fighters, which could also have sub-classes like knights, paladins, and Rangers, and later, also the evil Anti-Paladin, you could be a magic user, who were weak and could not wear armour nor wield anything other than a staff or a dagger or maybe one other weak weapon, but if they survived long enough would eventually gain powerful spells like invisibility and fireball and so on, or be a cleric who could wear armour and use quite decent weapons, as well as cast spells granted to them by their deities, that were usually of a healing nature. No one wanted to be a druid because aside the no armour they also had crappy nature-spells and no one wanted to be a bard, because who wants to be some long-haired prancing faggot in tights who plays a banjo and sings when you could wield a bastard sword, be an expert dagger thrower and wear chain mail and a +2 shield that was also +4 protection versus Dragon breath? Thieves and assassins were untrustworthy but sometimes needed and Rangers were the coolest of all, because we had all read the Lord of the Rings. Paladins were supposed to be cool, but really were seen by most of us as real puritanical pains in the ass that wouldn’t let you flirt with the hot princess you just rescued before you delivered her, a bit disheveled, back to the king; though we did all take exception to the dwarf raping her dead body when the rescue didn’t go as well, and without even discussing it, every player attacked the now naked dwarf while he was molesting the corpse of the princess.

Yes, such were the things that sometimes happened between surviving pit traps and many other types of traps once that infamous book to traps came out, or the new monsters that were in the fiend folio and so on.

Then Traveller came out and now your character could die while you were generating him, even before he had started playing at all. If he did survive, he then had to contend with aliens, space pirates, crappy laser guns that needed a backpack if you were not from a high enough tech level, faulty hyperspace drives that would deposit you into unchartered space with no way back, leaky space suits, absolutely deadly space battles that would wreck your space-ship, and imperial customs searches that would tend to end up with your crew becoming fugitives or prisoners on some god-forsaken asteroid mining radioactive isotopes while you tried to find a way to escape.

And after that Top Secret was out, and you tried your best to take part in some secret agent stuff, though in our case that usually resulted in massive mayhem in downtown LA or whatever city we were supposed to be in, with police sirens, the military and the mafia all having running gun battles with disgustingly high civilian body counts, through shopping centres. Unless we were playing out The Thing in Antarctica with a few twists.

Some of us even played Killer, the very first Live Action Role Playing Game, that’s right, the real LARP. This was a game where each player got a dossier at random, which would be his or her “target” they would have to assassinate, and you could do this by say taping a little note to the bottom of their cup in school that said “poison” and if they drank from it without noticing the note, they were then “dead”. None of us had phones with cameras because they didn’t exist, but if you could take an actual photograph of them and have it developed, and you put a cross-hair which had to be strictly in the middle of the picture both vertically and horizontally, and the cross was on a vital area of the body, then you had successfully “sniped” them. Or you could shoot them with a water pistol and so on. Of course, doing this during class times could easily get you detention, but that just added a certain “frisson” to the game.

The point is that when you played these games, sometimes for days with little sleep between at your friends homes or your own home, especially during the school holidays, you would come across, or invent, scenarios that were sometimes frustrating, but more often than not hilarious, fun and which would make you all laugh. The action all took place in each other’s imaginations, and today when I tried to play such games with people in their twenties even, very often I could see the atrophied brain cells struggling to image the scenes described to them. They would draw a weapon and fire it in the middle of a shopping mall like some kind of psychopath, without any thought of realism. Our running gun battles in downtown San Francisco were the culmination of large bank robberies gone disastrously bad, they weren’t how we started out when some NPC questioned us!

You can see the lack of interest or curiosity when you describe a zombie attacking them or a dragon poking its head out of a cave. They don’t even ask if it’s fast or slow zombies. No curiosity about how decomposed and mechanically viable the zombies are (because it matters, is it a realistic zombie, or is it more a magical type of zombie?) No question about the colour of the dragon’s head (red ones breathe fire, but black ones acid, and so on). It’s sad really.

But aside the laughter and friendship, which are both very important, you learnt so many other things, how to have some kind of team-work going, how to figure out ways to solve problems, and have a ‘there must be a way” attitude no matter what the problem facing you was. We got so good at this that my brother and I even derailed official adventure models that had been professionally produced to result in the players ending up arrested and captured because the fight they faced would otherwise be too impossible to win. Except, using the pre-generated characters from those same modules, so without any special or indeed any change to them, we would defeat the small army of enemies placed against us.

That attitude, with the camaraderie has actually served us all well in real life. When some intractable problem comes up on the farm, my first thought is not “Aw, I need to purchase something, or get a professional here, or…” My first thought is “right, there has to be a way around this”. It’s just instinctive. And sure, maybe some of it comes from growing up in Africa and being a hunter from young age, or in the case of my friend who helped e adapt a part of the tractor, it was because as a farmer’s son, with little money, he too had to invent his own entertainment and make his own go-carts, and little weird wooden toys, not to mention small but functional bombs using fire-crackers and match-heads.

But the point is that your being glued to that phone or PC or TV, and not interacting with other humans in real life of more or less your own age, regardless of if you are 13 or 23 or 33, or even, sadly, 43, is just not good for you. It really isn’t.

And I have no way of making you experience the reality of what I am telling you other than writing it here, far away from you, so you can read it, alone, on your little screen, far away from me, but please believe me, it’s worth doing. it’s worth the embarrassing, scary idea of asking a couple of your friends if they want to try playing a few games to see if it’s fine enough.

And you need to convince them to stick with it for a few games because none of you know how to do it and you may be so socially awkward at first you will be too shy to play properly and spell out well how your characters act, or if you are the referee you will be scared to sound foolish when you describe a weird scenario. But that’s all part of it. And trust me, it doesn’t make you a nerd to play such games with a few friends. Just ask Vin Diesel. Or me, or the friends I had growing up. In fact, if anything, exercising our imaginations made us better at talking to people, coming up with funny things to say on the spur of the moment, or realise that man, as anxious as you might be, if you don’t get off your ass and go ask that pretty girl if she’ll go out with you, nothing is gonna happen, so you do get up and you do go and ask. And usually they turn out to say yes, but even if they say no… ah well… in real life you would have faced off against a red dragon, and probably got your face melted off you even if you survived; so what’s a little rejection. Eh. There are plenty of prettier girls to ask out for coffee. Or maybe she’ll change her mind if you quickly change tack and say: “Oh good! Phew! You’re really pretty, but I can’t STAND coffee drinkers. Awful people. I’m glad we got that out of the way, so, how about a tea instead? glass of water? Sparkling maybe? What’s that? with a slice of lemon? Still no, how about a fruit juice, because I’d really rather not involve any alcohol in our first date, I mean, sorry, but I just want to be safe, girls who make me drink alcohol invariably want to take advantage of me and I just can’t even!” She might still say no, but she’s almost guaranteed to smile a little, and if she really doesn’t, and still says no, and maybe is even rude about it… hey, at least you uncovered her true nature and made your saving through against illusion/charm spell that her appearance was trying to foster on you. Good riddance!

Anyway, you don’t HAVE to play in the flesh, pen and paper role-playing games with real people, and no one can make you, but I really, truly, hope you do. You really don’t know what you are missing out on if you don’t.

And yes I will recommend the game I created, and the ready made adventure module for it in case you are not sure where to start, because it’s funny, easy to learn on and still relatively “realistic” and you can use it to play almost any kind of scenario, and you would benefit from my years of playing RPGs in it because the design of it is both simple yet can be as nuanced or complex as you are comfortable with if you want to get a bit deeper with it. And you can get the digital version then in the best old-style tradition, print the PDF at home, or pay a bit more and get the full colour paperback from Amazon (link to the Amazon version is in the description at the links above). But you don’t have to play this game specifically. I just hope you play one, Any one.