Batflunkie Confessor

I hear you about finding a group to play with. I've been playing since '81 and my wife since '82, and I used to freelance in the industry. Most of or friends who game have moved away over the years, or had kids, and don't have time to game anymore. And we haven't been able to get a game going in over a year, and none of our attempts to put a group together in the past five years have lasted only a few sessions before people's schedules (my own included) have undermined them. But tabletop rpgs, especially D&D fifth edition, are in a resurgence in popularity and are more popular now than even in their 80s heyday. It's become chic to play them, and there are a lot of online groups who play via videochat apps (SKYPE etc.) or through online tabletop subscription services. There's also a lot of game sessions available to stream or watch, many including celebrity participants who are into gaming. I posted about one on the DC streaming service that had a group playing the old 80s Mayfair DC rpg called All Star Games in the movie/tv section, as the first session is available for free on youtube. It's a decent way to show someone new how gaming works, or to check out how people play. I've never been into watching people game on Twitch (video games or tabletops), but All star Games was hella fun to watch and has started to change my mind on that.

I don't really have the equipment to video chat here (I don't have a cam or a device I can use), but the possibility of doing a virtual gaming session with some of the folks here at some point is intriguing. Scheduling however, is always the nightmare, and the more people included, the more of a nightmare it becomes.

-M

edit to add: here's the link to the All Star Games thread/post

-M

I've never liked table-top battle games like D&D. Too drawn out, too many rules, too danged boring. I'd rather play Monopoly or Risk or Trivial Pursuit if I'm feeling social or a good video game (assuming I can find one I can play in spite of my limited mobility) if I'm not. Guess I'm old-fashioned that way.

Cei-U!
I summon a rousing game of Candyland!

There is stuff out there like Hero Quest and Munchkin which aim to simplify the D&D experience. But yeah I agree, while I like the idea of tabletop games, they do seem needlessly complex. And this is coming from someone who loves the Yugioh card game

We play mainly games from the last 20 years. The kids love King of Tokyo, Smash Up!, Takenoko, Blokus, and My Litle Scythe. The grown-ups play Dominion, Carcasonne, Wingspan, Settlers of Catan, Power Grid, and Ticket to Ride. Chess, Checkers, Battleship, and Connect Four are not unknown. I used to play a ton of Heroscape and Magic:The Gathering with my now-teen son.

Thinking of Mort Drucker, may he rest in peace, got me to thinking of Mad Magazine and the impact it had on my world and world-view. I wasn't alone in feeling that impact. Plenty of our great artists have cited Mad as an influence. Without Mad, The Simpsons likely doesn't exist. Roger Ebert, Weird Al, Terry Gilliam, Patti Smith, Tom Hayden and a host of others have cited Mad as informing their work.

Mad, and Drucker by extension, hasn't led me to change the world artistically or politically. But for a kid from small-town Idaho, Mad Magazine was a world changer. If the U.S. was pretty homogeneous when I was growing up, Idaho turned that up to 11. Small-town Idaho boosted the signal a bit more. For most of my childhood there were three TV stations and one of them was snowy. PBS was a rumor that one could vaguely discern if the atmospheric conditions were ideal and the winds were blowing appropriately from Pocatello. The theater consisted of Saturday matinees of Walt Disney movies if you could convince someone to drive you to the movies because it was 10 miles either way. I think, if I dig deep into my brain I can remember going to the movies as a family, at night, two or three times.

Mad opened up a different world. One I didn't always understand. One that showed me things didn't make sense until years later when my world wasn't so insular. But the way was prepped in black and white by the Usual Gang of Idiots. Again, getting back to Drucker, most movies, if they were seen at all, were seen well after their release, edited for television, on small screens. But Mad and Drucker showed them to me well before that. And in many cases, decades before home video would allow me to see the films that I'd read about as a kid. I can never watch The Sting, a movie that I love, and not see Nixon and Agnew on the cover of Mad #171 or view the film without the lens of Drucker and Arnie Kogan distilling it to its essence. I read “The Odd Father” long before I ever saw “The Godfather.” Both are equally beloved by me.

I learned far more about politics from Mad Magazine than I ever learned at home. There was this hip irreverent look at what was happening in the country that stuck with me. When you come from “love it or leave it” country it's both jarring and liberating to see the elites castigated. My journey to where I am politically took a long and winding road. But one of the stops along the way was Mad Magazine. And much of what I digested there forty-five years ago still stays with me.

The world outside my window growing up looked largely like me. Mad gave me a window on a wide world. And ever facet of that world was subject to the unblinking light of satire. It was a heady thing for a youngster. Maybe it helped prepare me for today when it frequently feels like I live in a world that is Mad Magazine feature.

So thanks again Mr. Drucker. And to all the Usual Gang of Idiots. Thanks for showing me a world that I couldn't otherwise see. And thanks for poking fun at it so I could be in on the joke.

I got to looking at the movie parodies (seems Angelo Torres did more of the TV parodies) that Drucker did and it struck me that I didn't see the majority of those movies until years later.  Some I saw on TV (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure) but for most of them it wasn't until I was an adult and the advent of home video.  But I really felt like I was keyed in to what was happening in the world because of that magazine.