The Beginning

 In 1987, "Moving Silently, Checking For Traps" was our mantra as we played Dungeons & Dragons. We uttered those words so much, it was abbreviated as "MSCFT". It was how we proceeded through each other's dungeons. We felt that if we didn't specifically announce that we were doing so, the DM would assume we were not. Eventually, we decided that it would be best to assume the opposite: Whenever we were exploring a dungeon, MSCFT was a given, and the DM would just call for the appropriate rolls at the appropriate times.

We didn't have the Internet back then. The best source we had for meta analysis of play were the articles in our incomplete Dragon Magazine collection. We had to figure this stuff out on our own.

I remember earlier, in 1986, the fist guy in our class to show up with a D&D module had told me: "My older brother didn't know if he was allowed to do this thing in the game, so he wrote a letter to the author, and the author wrote back and said it was okay." I remember thinking that was a bit odd. Who cares what the author thinks about how you play the game? You bought it, it's yours now.

Some things were easier to figure out than others.

The first TTRPG I played wasn't Dungeons & Dragons. It was again a year earlier in 1984. I was reading "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, and I had just beaten the game, Questron, on my Commodore 64. I was always making games for me and my two brothers to play. I made a game based on Questron, and this home made game was our first table top RPG. 

I notice now that most people start as players, and take years to feel like they have enough experience to DM. I have a hard time relating to that. I started this hobby not just as a DM, but as a game designer.

After that first kid brought his D&D module to school a year later, I started working with published rules. Even then, I was restricted to a compromise between whatever incomplete systems were sold piecemeal on a small shelf in the back of Waldenbooks, and my meager allowance. The comic book store only sold comic books. Disparate systems were fused together. The concept of playing a game RAW among my friends was alien, and laughable. It was universally understood that playing the part of Rules Lawyer was unacceptable as a result. 

The DM was the game designer. You didn't have to write him a letter to see if what you wanted to do was okay.