I got into tabletop gaming unintentionally. When I was about 9 or 10, I first became obssessed with Star Wars. I devoured the dozen or so expanded universe novels available on shelves at the time. The only Star Wars books left on the shelf at the local Waldenbooks that I hadn't yet read were the sourcebooks for the second edition of the West End Games D6 Star Wars RPG. The roleplaying aspect of it went way over my head, but it was a fount of information about the Star Wars universe, and I couldn't get enough of it.
I got my grandmother to take me to the comics and games shop near my house to buy the rulebook and attempted to make sense of the game, but it wasn't until I was a few years older that I made friends who were interested in gaming, so it would be a long time until I actually played a game.
The Magic: The Gathering bug bit me in middle school, which required many, many trips to the friendly local game store. When there would be a lull in the Magic action, I would peruse the roleplaying games, but what particularly interested me was the well-stocked selection of Games Workshop miniatures. Warhammer 40,000 became my game of choice for several years, but hanging out at the game store all the time I got involved in a few different rpgs: a couple of RIFTS games that ran for a while and lots of one-shots, usually 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
My friends and I wanted to play AD&D, but it was hard for 13 year-olds to come up with the money to buy the three books. Fortunately, there was another Dungeons & Dragons product on the shelf: a box with a red dragon on it. It had all of the rules we needed to play, dice, an adventure with a poster map, miniatures for heros and lots of standup counters for monsters (Acaeum.org tells me that this is the 18th printing of the Basic Set from 1996, which I think contained the Troy Denning version of the Basic Rules, intended to lead into the Rules Cyclopedia).
We "graduated" to AD&D when Christmas came and left the Basic Set behind, but deep in my heart, roleplaying will always be the summer when I was 13, staying up all night drinking cokes and slaying kobolds. Every battle we survived felt like a skin-of-our teeth victory over impossible odds. Every gold piece was a fortune, every magic sword Excalibur. When a friend came across the Moldvay box set a few years back, I was overwhelmed by the nostalgia. It wasn't exactly the book that had been my roleplaying primer, but the content was largely the same, the layout similar, and some artwork had been reused.
That sense of nostalgia can go pretty far, but when I sat down and reread the rules carefully, with the eyes of an experienced roleplayer instead of an awestruck postpreteen, I began to appreciate it anew, not as an artifact of my past, but as a well-written game in itself. The box sets were"Basic" (or, as the cover of the revision we had read, "Classic") not because they were dumbed down, but because they were easy to learn; not because they lacked anything but because they weren't burdened down with too many extras.
To bring this long experiment in self-indulgence to a close, I found a bunch of people online who rediscovered these facts or never forgot them, and now I'm writing this blog, good night.
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