Making The Game Your Own

A Personal View on "How to Play The Game."

I am a firm believer in making the game your own. Each person who assumes the role of referee is entrusted with a special privilege - the creation of a fantastic make-believe world to be experienced by their players. The players get to return the favor by engaging with the game, and by attempting to add enjoyment through dialogue and the actions of their characters. It's a fairly common scenario today, but this wasn't always the case.

I recall the struggles (at least some of them) I experienced while learning to play this new type of game. I came to The Original Fantasy Role-Playing Game in 1977 as an adult with years of experience at playing all sorts of games, including organized sports. I recall feeling that I had a pretty fair grasp of what "play" was all about. That is until I encountered the three little brown books in the white box and a handful of its similar format supplements. 

"What do I do with this?" I recall asking myself this very questions, then I asked others. (I was not fortunate enough to know anyone who understood the game much better than I did, however.) Reading and re-reading not only the little books, but any articles or related publications that I could find at the time, I slowly began to make a bit of sense out of the "game". Being a fan of the fantastic and supernatural tales that had so obviously inspired the authors of this new "adventure game" I kept at it, until at some point I decided all the details needed to play this game in a logical manner were simply not present in those little brown books. I concluded that in order to play, I would need to start making some stuff up. I even surmised that may have been the author's intent. So I gathered some friends with similar interests and we started playing, even though we were making stuff up as we went. 

Once I settled upon this approach, I quickly found that I liked "making stuff up". In fact, this seemed to be the entire point of the game - making up the characters, making up monsters and dungeons and wilderness adventures and other stuff, it all seemed so obvious and therefore making up the rules went hand-in-hand with this imaginative creative approach.

Forty-five years later I am even more convinced that "making stuff up" is entirely the point of this hobby. To strictly play another's game, consulting the tome of rules for everything, following every word of the adventure path written by another, and adding nothing of my own is simply boring - at least to me. Rules, setting material, published adventure modules, they are all suggestions and inspiration sources to be used by me (or any other referee for that matter) to combine together with liberal amounts of my own ideas to create the game I would like to play while offering it to others interested and trusting enough to join me.