Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Jeremy the Character


My perusal of dusty old gaming papers continues. Back when I was a teenager, the gaming group I was in decided to have a little fun and write ourselves up as gaming characters. It was an interesting experiment to try to analyze one's own strengths and weaknesses and express them in the mechanics of a gaming system--in this case, the Hero system which assigns "normal humans" a certain number of points to spend on attributes and skills, with the option of earning more points through disadvantages.

Looking over the "Jeremy" character sheet, I apparently was of the opinion at the time that I was quite spry--I gave myself a Dexterity of 15, when the base human only has a 10. I guess I also considered myself quite the martial artist, as I spent most of my points on being skilled with various attacks--I even included "swords", "staffs", and "sais" (which was not completely unrealistic, as I did train with them) but for some reason I listed myself as familiar with "pistols" when I'd only gone shooting a few times. More oddities: why did I think I was good at "gambling"? Why did I think I was good at "computer programming" (has BASIC or DOS come back into fashion)? Did I really know just as much about "American History" as I did "Comic Books"? Probably not. On the other hand, I acknowledged that I was "Argumentative", a "Night Person", and had a "Hatred: Country Music", all of which persist to this day, so my self-assessment must not of been too far off.


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