Do you remember the first time? / I don't remember the worst time

It was February 1996. I was in the rather awkward position of having been invited to my friend Lani's birthday night out, and meeting her at my good friend Eli's house, who was her very recent ex. By about a week.
Eli shared his house with a guy called Camo. Both were (are) colossal geeks. Oh, they tried to hide it - Camo was a professional dancer and Eli was a Jujitsu champ and anti-establishment punk - but more than a five minute conversation with them and you knew they were nerds.
At the time I was friends with Eli for the punk rock and camaraderie. I didn't really know about RPGs.

All that changed on that fateful night. A night that Eli's brother Angus describes as 'the birth of a monster'.

It was snowing when I arrived at Eli's house. A good deep thick settling of snow that wasn't going anywhere fast. It was pretty much a certainty that I wouldn't be catching the bus home to my village in the sticks that night. I was snowed in in Leeds.
Awesome! A night out and a solid gold reason not to go home. Something every teenager dreams of.

The snow kept falling though, and soon we got the call from Lani saying that everyone was staying in.
Ok. What to do?
Eli and Camo fellback to their default position.
"So, what are we playing?"
"I could run a Cyberpunk cops game..." Said Camo. "Nook, you playing?"
I said yes. I didn't really have a choice. Play, sit and watch or take my chances in the blizzard. I'm sure this is how the KGB converted Western spies into double agents.

As mentioned, the game was Cyberpunk - a dark high tech future game dominated by mega corporations and street gangs.
We started creating our characters. Somehow I generated skill and ability scores and worked out the basic numbers. I had, and still have, no idea what they meant or did. It was a strange and arcane experience, reminiscent of the time I bunked a whole term of maths GCSE lessons then had no idea what was going on for the rest of the year.
Once we'd statted up our characters it was time to start buying stuff. And, my god, was there stuff to buy. Camo and Eli started to eagerly devour three separate books of equipment, picking out guns, armour, sunglasses, cyber-appendages, portable computers, tattoos, gadgets... I floundered and was given the advice "it's not so much about utility, it's about cool shit."
I bought my cop some portable electronic bongos, to positive head nods "I think he's getting it"
I most definitely was not.

Play started. We patrolled the mean streets of Night City. No crime was apparent, so I started playing my bongos. Turns out I was shit at it. I felt cheated.
Next I decided that my cop needed to drain his lizard. I hadn't grasped the agency I had to affect the story, so fell back on the mundane.
The Camo responded by making the bar I chose to take a leak a mob run speakeasy. Some stuff happened. My cop was ejected from the establishment.
I still didn't really know what I should be doing. I kind of stood there.
Camo took another tack, and radioed in a mission for us - protect a corporate limo as it traveled through the city.
Less sandbox, more mission based. Ok, I can get behind that.
We followed the limo on our cool cop bikes, keeping our eyes on the road ahead for any danger or ambush.
We didn't look up, though, which I now understand to be a cardinal error.
A rain of explosive fire fell on the street ahead and behind us, penning the limo into a tight spot.
From the rooftop above the world's least subtle sniper loaded a bullet in his chamber and took aim.
Another thing I now understand is that in a ranged fight, tactics, cover and concealment are key elements that help ensure success or, at the very least survival.
Eli's cop took cover behind the armoured limo and opened fire. The sniper was unfairly hidden, with a 12" concrete parapet as cover. Eli missed.
So I climbed on top of the limo, to get a better shot, and started aiming with my standard police issue pistol.
The good news is that I hit. My shot went through the concrete, through the snipers armour, and did him 1 point of damage. I was elated. A few more shots like that, and he'd be down.
Then he blew my arm off.
What The Fuck?! My character's actual arm! I was assured that he'd survive, and could get a cyborg replacement that would be better than the original and would only erode my sanity and morality slightly.

I remember my mind racing afterwards as I thought about everything you could do with this Roleplay thing. I thought about superheroes, gods, knights, sci-fi, everything I'd been interested in so far in my life could be filtered through this new medium.

Throwing away all pretense, here's some dice packaged up like the drug they are...

Building a geek / My five games

To steal an idea from Character Generation, here are the five RPGs that made me the colossal geek I am today...

Cyberpunk 2020
I've no idea what edition it was, and I've barely played it since, but Cyberpunk was the first RPG I played. I got snowed in at a friends house one February night, and a Cyberpunk cops one shot was the only entertainment on offer.
I had no idea what I was doing. It made no sense. I tried to 'make a cop'. This was acceptable. I bought a pair of bongo drums and was suddenly told 'now you're getting it'.
I wasn't sure that I was.
I still have no idea what happened. I can presume that a law was broken, and we started shooting. I could handle shooting. I understood 'kill him before he kills you'.
What I didn't understand was that I couldn't shoot through the solid concrete wall that I was using as cover. Before having at least two limbs blown off, I did manage to shoot through the wall, through a car door and through his armour. I did the smallest possible amount of damage the system allowed. It's entirely possible the GM just fudged that to give the newbie a break.
Then I got detonated.

From that point I was hooked.
I didn't quite understand what had just happened, but I did grasp the concept that this RPG thing allowed you to do literally anything you could imagine.
Mind. Blown.

Ars Magica
I played a few more games with this group - Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia - but the one that stuck was Ars Magica. Again, I totally didn't get it. I may have only 'gotten it' sometime in the last two years (16 years and two editions later), but it fired me up some more.
Three different classes of characters under my control.
Magic!
Mid fantasy setting.
Stuff I could learn about without buying the book (Latin, history, folklore, however this did turn out to be my ArM undoing. I worried too much about authenticity).
My first characters were based on Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin, a Merinita magus, Hobbes, Moorish were-tiger companion, and Spiff, a daring grog.
Yeah, I didn't get it. There's a theme running through this.
But I loved Ars Magica. I was enraged that the Tremere were a vampire clan in V:tM. I hated that the Order of Hermes was reduced to just one of nine Traditions in M:tAs.
Yet I've never successfully played it or run it. I always get bogged down in historical accuracy and my fear of the finer points of the rules.
I hope to change that.

Vampire: the Masquerade revised
It's with V:tM rev that I became a GM. I hated the game I was playing, basically because the Storyteller was focussing entirely upon the story, at the expense of the rules and player expectations.
Rules were only ever used to tell us we couldn't do something, not to tell us how we could do something. They were applied inconsistently and unfairly.
It really pissed me off.
So I bought the Revised Edition and a shed load of supplements and set out to show him how a game of Vampire should be run.
Not that I did a brilliant job. I did ok, for a novice Storyteller. I got better.
I think.

Song of Steel LARP club
Ok, not a table top RPG, a Live-Action one instead. I played the pilot game in February 1998 (i think it was then) and finally left in early 2003. In the five years I was there I spent three on the Plot team, writing and running adventures, two months as Club Secretary (I was shit, and quit) and a year as Head of the Rules Team. It was the rules position that broke me, and I was totally burned out after it.
Positives, though. I spent three years exploring various adventure ideas, and towards the end had a good idea of what I was good at, what worked and what didn't, through trial and error. Which means I fucked up a lot, but learnt a little from each mistake. My major error was over reaching, and the best adventures I ran were simple, low resource ones.

World of Darkness Storytelling System
This is what I'm best at. When White Wolf rebooted, I completely ditched all of my old Storyteller games and fully embraced the new WoD.
Yes, I regret giving my 100+ books to charity, mostly because the shop that got them probably didn't know what they had, because it was a rash decision, because there were some gems that I should have kept.
But I totally get nWoD. It's second nature to me. I don't have to think about the rules or the setting, I just kind of default to it. It frees me up to enjoy the game and what the players are doing.