The first tabletop game I was ever present for was a game of 4th edition D&D, some time in middle school. Organized play, and with total strangers, but they let me sit down for a bit of it and gave me a pre-generated character. I didn't know much about what I was doing but the experience was memorable enough (I was playing a dragonborn sorcerer, we were fighting some servants(?) of vecna(?), I made a joke about joining them if they had dental... the deep social anxiety I had at the time made the experience stressful enough to get it deep in there, in my memory).

Next, there was Pathfinder society. It was ok... I guess. GMs were inconsistent, and I spent my time making builds and fantasizing about what I could accomplish with those builds. The objective of showing up to games was to get to the higher levels of those builds, but I always had this different character I wanted to play so they were spread thin...

Then, there was OSR! Specifically, the OD&D LBBs with a fourth book, the "Planet Eris" house rules. This was a distinct swerve in the progression. The guys I played with, I just found because they had a sign in a hobby shop that said something along the lines of... "OD&D PALACE OF THE VAMPIRE QUEEN SAT/SUN 12PM". It was really liberating to not be thinking about builds, to not have all that metagame stuff going on, but it was still formative. Not a zenith or anything, just a moment of great incline.

Then, there was nothing. The well dried up, so to speak, for a while.

Next, out of highschool, there was 5e! Hunger is the best spice, and I was overjoyed to keep playing but... something had developed; I was beginning to want to tell stories of my own, or at least leave my mark on the fictional world. Everyone I played with had been a stranger I only knew from my brief time at the table; never had they been friends. I had been a DM for games of organized play in Pathfinder and 5e, and I had very "ideas guy" ambitions to have a game of my own. Such things barely manifested, only an odd attempted session here, or an attempt there... but the fire had begun to burn.

I got tired of taking the bus, or walking and hoofing all my heavy books someplace, so that was the end of that. No more of such things. I got a car, but still I remained quit of tabletop.

A friend of mine online finally cracked me into his GURPS game, played with roll20. Now this, I had to see. We had almost spreadsheets open for detailing our equipment; my options to "build" were almost beyond my imaginary limits! I wasn't using some level track, and it wasn't about searching a maze for pieces of cheese like a rat. I could just be that yeoman with a longbow, or that Russian contractor with an AKM and a bad attitude. In fact, it was pure chaos. My buddy had spent too long pointing his m4a1 at the Hammerite Templar, and caught a warhammer to the neck for his trouble, leaving him a crippled and dying man as I avenged him with a spray of .50 caliber from the Humvee's M2. This shit had me juiced; I actually knew the people I was playing with... and because I knew them, my anxieties (which had been improving steadily over the years) were low enough that I could actually negotiate and discuss the fictional scenario, the rules, the game with them.

That it was the GURP system wasn't really that critical, though the system sure is wild and fun when you dive into the deep end and embrace the chaotic results of violent combat with its more detailed subsystems. It was playing it with friends I knew pretty well that really turned tabletop around for me.

Next, I was back on 5th edition again with some friends and acquaintances; but it was different this time. I was more aggressive in taking initiative and advocating for my character. I was cutting down trees to score heavy blows on ignorant, golem-like undead; I was running a pawn shop in a suite connected to my friends morgue and we were making out like kings. Nothing to do with 5th edition specifically, everything to do with that game at that right time with those right people.

There was a regrettable and painful lesson learned in imitating the form without the underlying work, when I looked to run an OSR game for those people. The rules were first OD&D, then Planet Eris' house rules, then they were this, or they were that, then they were a house hack... It was like a car designed by someone who had ridden in one a couple times, never driven themselves, and who didn't know an oil change from a coolant exchange. It had no gas, It didn't run, and everyone along for the ride got disappointed and got out. At the time it was humiliating and confusing, and little was understood... but that would change.

The group morphed and shifted over time, and the campaigns themselves shifted to match the tastes of the now co-GMs working on them. Calls were either accepted or fairly negotiated, and themes were explored that weren't even imaginable in the days of Pathfinder Society. Hordes of Gnolls led by agents of their pure evil, Dwarven adventurers in a guild that seemed more like an organized criminal enterprise, with a profoundly deep reach across the world's taverns.

LANCER came in around this time, a weekly or sometimes even twice a week treat. It was a curious swing into pure by-the-book-ness, a very training wheels like experience with a community that seemed to have it dialed in.

The COMMUNITY, was a big thing here. Never before did I actually receive wisdom on these things, I simply made shit up. In fact, I received a little bit more than just how to run a standard amount of fights for my Starsiege-themed LANCER campaign, I got an interesting perspective on how those people saw design, and intent... and in a way, grew as contemptuous as I grew fond.

I got an appreciation for designers intent, and the way a game was meant to be played, but I also found myself struggling against it at times, and really actually engaging with the base assumptions. After a year of this, I spun around once again to OSR stuff, but armed with a new principle: what I needed to have a game that didn't suck, what I hadn't recognized, was that the game needed:

CONTENT AND CONTEXT; the sand in the sandbox, and the molds and the water and the scoops and the toys, the four walls enclosing it... Without any of these things, you're truly just playing pretend and making the same boring shit up.

A GAME IN MOTION; the rules are not the game, they're just a facilitator for the game. The objective is to get the game up and going, to move at speed, to be engaged in that content and context. Quibbling over how many sandcastles one can have, how many marbles can be launched, the order in which army men are deployed... these things aren't really important, they're just there to get your juices flowing and excited and can only be respected for how useful they are.

MINDS THINKING ALIKE; for the content and context to be right, for the rules to be optimal, the people have to be on the same page. The more people are meeting minds to figure out what happens next, the more they stay invested. It was true in LANCER, it was true in Wolves Upon the Coast -- speaking of...

OSR stuff, take 3. First there was being a player with strangers, which was relatively cool in a sophomoric way. Then there was running it, a disaster. Now, there came really getting elbow deep in it with a open mind and lots of cross-training.

We've run Mothership, we've run Wolves, I've even taken a stab at playing with strangers in Basic/Expert and other such miscellany and now it's like the dark lens has been taken away, and I can see things clearly... or at least, the lens has been given a good cleaning. The rules and resources are becoming more useful not because they're so much different, but because they're being used to their utmost now.