Ever found yourself twiddling your thumbs idly and asking yourself 'I wonder what it'd be like to be a fly on the wall during a 1980s RPG play session?'. Following on from that, perhaps you'd ask 'I wonder what it'd be like to hear such a thing done badly by a bunch of 14 to 17 year old geeks...?' Well, question yourself no longer.
One of my first posts in the blogsphere described the people I played RPGs with when first introduced to it all back in the early '80s. Various gaming sessions were going on involving me or these guys, and every once in a while we'd tape the whole mess as it unfolded. Much of the time, our playing style and the banter that ensued left much to be desired. The sessions where we actually got something done and were less frivolous in our approach never seemed to end up on tape.
Awhile back I put some snippets on-line so that these guys (all now sort of grown up) could hear them. They're extracts from around 7 hours' worth of taped sessions featuring RPGs such as AD&D, Star Frontiers, Living Steel and Tales of the Floating Vagabond. Vagabond was always run as a drinking game - not that you can really tell, because we don't sound any more incoherent than usual.
Anyway, the clips can be heard on Soundcloud. Award yourself some brownie points for (a) not being offended by the
expletives/stupid comments/offences against the art of role-playing, and
(b) being able to understand anything we're saying due to our Somerset
accents. Here's a brief outline of what each one features:
The Village of... er... - in which our heroes try to gain access to a village (which may or may not have a name/walls/ramparts/etc), quibble over descriptive details, and probably talk too much about half-orcs...
Cheese - in which our heroes completely fail to engage with the plot due to the distractions of food and an inebriated elf...
Rob Dies - in which our heroes dare to question the authority of the referee (yours truly) after Rob's character is killed. Mind you, Rob tended to lose a character during every session. And, of course, I'm right and they're wrong...
The Cantina Song - in which a classic Star Wars tune is ruined by people pretending to be characters from the film, and from Scooby Doo...
The Big Gun - in which our heroes really are probably past the point of being able to operate heavy machinery...
The sound quality is a bit patchy - but then again, so is our role-playing.
