Welcome back to my 40-year retrospective as a gamer.
If the early years were defined by beautiful chaos, 1993 was the pivot. At that time, my gaming schedule was highly irregular. We’d get together whenever we could, play whatever game was popular at the time (with mainstays like Rifts and AD&D 2nd Edition), and rarely play longer than a few sessions before moving on and rolling up new characters.
I quickly realized I wasn’t enjoying this scattered approach.
I sat down and seriously considered what I loved most about tabletop role-playing games. I knew I preferred being the Game Master. I loved long-form campaign play where characters grow and weave a massive story together. I wanted a regular schedule—weekly, if possible—and to stick to one system to facilitate long-term play, rather than constantly chasing the hot new game.
Playing in a world of my own creation was key to this. Running a homebrew campaign was a form of creative expression that kept me deeply invested. I figured that if I set a firm date and time and stuck with it, people would show up. I also hoped it would naturally pare down the increasingly large, rotating crew of players I was managing.
The Metro Comics Crew
By 1993, I had been working at Metro Comics for two years. It was my part-time job while I went to college. Metro Comics in San Patricio Plaza is a comic and game store (and yes, it is still there!). Back then, they had a great game selection, carrying the big-name releases of the day: lots of TSR, White Wolf, Palladium, and a few smaller indie games.
Through Metro Comics, I made many new friends, and my close-knit table grew. Gamers I met through my work at the store—like Luis Alvarado, José Fernando, and Pierre Anthony—pulled up chairs alongside my high school classmates. (Fun fact: José is still a regular in my current weekly gaming group, 32 years later!)
Luis Miranda, Pierre Anthony, and Misael
We also connected with friends of friends who played at the University of Puerto Rico. Because I’ve always had trouble saying “no” to people who want to play, I typically ran TTRPGs for groups of eight or more. To this day, I consider six players a “regular-sized” group; anything smaller feels too small.
When I decided to put my new long-term campaign plan into practice, I invited the players I thought would best mesh with the style: a mix of high school friends, longtime players, and the Metro crew. It took a bit of shifting, but we found our rhythm. In no time, we established a core of six or seven long-term players, with a few others who came and went as real life demanded.
The Games We Played
The changes were a massive success. Over the next 13 years, I ran 12 distinct campaigns. Three of those were multi-year epics (averaging 2 years), with 8 shorter campaigns interspersed, ranging from 6 months to 1 year. We played all of these from beginning to end. (The only exception was a 9-month play-by-email campaign that fizzled out when work ate up my free time).
What did we play? Mostly D&D. While the rest of the world went all-in on the World of Darkness in the 90s, I stuck hard to D&D and fantasy. We played a lot of AD&D 2nd Edition, and when D&D 3rd Edition came out, we eventually made the change.
We also dabbled in variations of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, the Silver Age Sentinels system, and its Tri-Stat dX versions. Alternity was a short but incredibly important game for me during this era. I also kept going back to Palladium to try and make the system work for us; aside from Heroes Unlimited, I was growing weary of Rifts and their other titles.
Gaming in a Bubble
Because my group was so large—mostly friends and friends of friends—my gaming circle became incredibly insular. I left college, started working, got married, and essentially played in my own little bubble.
I was completely disconnected from the larger Puerto Rican gaming community. When Dragon magazine stopped publishing, and no new AD&D 2nd Edition books were coming out, I noticed, but it didn’t affect my table. We just kept playing with the books we had.
I wasn’t a recluse; I was online, but my internet use was focused elsewhere. I started my Master’s degree and wasn’t heavily involved in wider fandoms, TTRPG forums, or gaming news. I was perfectly content just creating maps, writing lore, and running my homebrew world.
Mind you, gaming was still a massive pillar of my life. The night before my first wedding in 1998, what did I do? I played a TTRPG session all about friendship with my regular players.
But life inevitably brings changes. This era saw me finish college, start a professional career, get married, and eventually go through separation and divorce.
After my divorce, things shifted again. I found myself with more free time, so I started playing with a more varied group of people, expanded my circle of regular gamers, and slowly began to reconnect with the wider gaming community around me.
Then, in 2006, some friends mentioned they were heading to Gen Con the following year and invited me to tag along. I said yes.
But that is the beginning of a whole new era, and the subject of my next post.
The Stats (1993–2006)
- Total Campaigns: 12
- Years Active: 14 (Consecutive play from 1993 to 2006)
- MVP Systems: AD&D 2nd Edition & D&D 3rd Edition / 3.5
How were these year sfor you? Did you ever go through a phase where you played in a “gaming bubble,” completely disconnected from the wider community or what was happening online? And during the 90s, were you a D&D loyalist like me, or did you get swept up in the World of Darkness craze?
