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About Me (It's Always About Me)

Around 8 PCE (Personal Computer Era...which began in 1972, according to Wikipedia) I was still 15 years away from getting my first PC.

As a result, I played games...on a tabletop...with people; with people in the room with me! I know! It was a primitive time. But we survived. And some of us flourished; unchanged by the passage of time. It wasn't always easy, though.

Some games were readily available at G.C. Murphy Co., Ames, and *Zayre Department Stores. These were your typical mass-market appeal games of Monopoly, Easy Money, Parcheesi, Sorry, and etc.

But I always gravitated toward those games that required one to read magazine or book-length rules and, therefore, were most often found in one of several book stores, such as, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, and Borders (I didn't learn of Barnes & Noble until relatively recently).

Somewhere I still have my first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) Players Manual, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual. If I ever become famous, perhaps, they'll be worth something...what with all my highlighting and margin notes (and more than a few hand-colouring of the formerly black and white pictures).

Then, one day, I discovered hexmap wargames. Then, the next day, I discovered those who wrote the rules to hexmap wargames weren't the best writers in the world. In order to understand the intentions of the game designer, I had to play the games using various interpretations of the poorly written rules. When I saw one interpretation work "better" than the others; I would re-write the rule.

[Note: I quote "better" because my "better" probably isn't better than someone else's "better".]

[Note: Actually, I'm just saying that to sound humble. Most of the time my "better" is better than someone else's "better" because most peoples' "better" = "my rule makes it easier for me to win". You know the type. They're the one's most likely to come up with a "House Rule" (that they "forgot" to mention), mid-way through a game, that just happens to benefit their particular situation at the time.]

Anyway, like I was saying, by interpreting ambiguous or contradictory rules in a way that benefited the play of the game (not my winning of the game) took a lot of time and consideration. A skill that not only helped me understand gaming but led to a career in technical writing.

I won't say I'm a "great" writer (don't ask me identify the parts of a sentence, either) but I'm fairly sure I'm not a blithering idiot. In this respect, I hope I can be helpful to the BGDF community when it comes to what a rule "really" says and/or what impact it might have.

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blog | by Dr. Radut