library:blog:about_my_start_in_ttrpg [ttrpg]

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====== About My Start in TTRPG ======

Hello everyone, I am DumplingIsNice. I am a Hobbit who had been stuck in his cave.

====== ‎‎‎‎ ======

My TTRPG journey began with my high school Anime & Manga afternoon club. The seniors of the club organised an activity of some sort – we make up a character to roleplay in a fictional world. “Like acting out your own anime-like story” the friendly senior said. Instead of a dungeoneering party of adventures, we were a classroom of students attending an academy. And true to the spirit of the “academy stories” of Japanese anime culture, our characters would get into shenanigans, fight monsters and students alike in torment style arcs. Looking back, the game system was probably something made up by the club leader and we were his little play testers. There isn’t much I could remember now save for a piece of rugged, stained and teared up character sheet archived in a folder.

As a junior, roleplaying with seniors who racked sick beards, who drops lewd jokes as we roleplay as our made-up characters in an anime-esc setting was a time I looked forward to dearly every week. Those youthful afternoons were a piece of cherished memory impressed deeply in my first contact with TTRPG. In fact, my very internet avatar I use till this day was the portrait I drew for my very first TTRPG character.

Then comes the years when I was a high school senior, two years before graduation. The club have long ceased their activities in TTRPG since the previous leader left. Out of the blue, in our graphic modelling class, one of my mates asked: “Hey – Wanna try playing DND?”… I immediately purchased the latest starter set of DND 5e, “The Lost Mines of Phandalin” and off we go. This was the first time I acted as a GM, and the game crashed and burned rather quickly. I was lucky to have friends willing to give me second chances, and successfully ran my second campaign under 5e with our own writings of scenarios, dungeons and story. From then on, my times spent with TTRPGs only increased.

After graduation, I had a friend who kept our shared passion for TTRPG long after we have scattered to the four winds. We would meet up regularly and contemplate on the very amazing thing that is TTRPG. We would bounce ideas off of each other, write our own systems and jump up and down in the kitchen off of our hypes. And through some curious development, discussing philosophy of TTRPG and TTRPG design. Despite DND 5e’s dormant and emergent popularity at the time, we deeply loathed the game system. Like a bunch of TTRPG hippies (reject mainstream, return to origin) we delve headfirst into any TTRPG system that isn’t DND or Pathfinder.

On my end, I confess my content denial of an Anime junkie. And naturally I came to discover properly published Japanese TTRPG (JTTRPG). Through the aid of helpful compatriots of the internet I was able to access many JTTRPG material despite being a weeb who know nothing of Japanese. Yet the culture of JTTRPG fascinates me, deriving similar origins (in DND 3.5, CoC etc.) but developed in a different direction. Whilst heavily influences by Anime and video game culture, it was an interesting tie to their relevant media in the thematic of game systems. The impact is still felt today as I occasionally revisit it.

It was from the Black Hack that I entered the OSR scene, or technically, it was the first time I realized that OSR existed. Before, I simply had the recognition that OSR is synonymous to old-school DND – people playing older editions of DND. Oh boy.

Now, I ended up indulging myself in the OSR scene. Years of content accumulated through history, an unspeakable trove of blogs yet to be discovered. The blogsphere alone was like an ancient dungeon, with each post linking each other like a net of passageways. Sometimes, miraculously completing a loop back to the blog I started in. The treasures of wisdom I found from my predecessors in this hobby was something I regretted to not have discovered sooner.

Now, the other thing I regretted was not starting my own blog sooner. All of the ideas I discussed with my best friend in the kitchen were shamefully lost to the grindstone of time. Now I deem to document our ideas we discuss today, to emerge from our labs and ready to face the debilitating criticisms that comes with the internet. But more so, to challenge our thinking process by putting our ideas to words and leave a record we may compare ourselves to years later.

At this point, this game system is a weird mix between OSR, Japanese TTRPG and my own feverish concoction of homemade rulings.