Day 11: Which Gamer Most affected the way I play?

Well, damn.  Another question which is not about me!  How can I bear the attention being shifted from me?  How the hell can I answer this question.  I have literally played with hundreds of gamer type folk in my 30 year gaming career.  I struggled to come up with a thing that people did that was amazing and now someone has to have affected the way I play?

The Gamer that most affected my play is…

Drum roll please.  The gamer that gets this award would have to be the gamer that got me into gaming.  It is also someone I have never played an RPG with which is highly amusing.  Let us cast our mind back three decades to the middle of the 1980’s and picture an impressionable young farm boy who had a big gap between him and his brother so spent most of his time by himself with his imagination.  Enter a cousin who, for some reason, was not a cousin I encountered often.  He teaches said farm boy to play Steve Jackson’s Car Wars and the next day seems to be studiously sitting down with a red book, a notebook and a map.  The farm boy asks what is this mystery and the cousin replies Dungeons and Dragons.

The cousin is populating the dungeon for a game he has planned with friends and explains enough for the farm boy to be intrigued and also offer up that he should put Storm Troopers in the Dungeon, perhaps not grasping the full concept straight from the description.  Intrigued enough though that later in the year a friend at school had the same red books and I volunteered as DM because;

I know all about that game

And that is how it started.  My cousin is John Barwick and I am fairly certain his gaming days died out way back then but he did get me into gaming.  It is funny how things get started, and the fact that I can remember all that he told me back then.  I can almost even picture the dungeon (graph paper, very square) and remember that it had a trap with a false floor etc.  It must have been a pretty low level adventure due to it using the red box D&D from the 80’s. So much of my understanding of the game and enjoyment of it has come from such a moment that may of been no consequence to others.  My brother never even batted an eyelid toward the game but here I am, 30 years on, reliving that moment as if it were yesterday.  So for that, thanks John for giving me a life of adventure.