Fresh Out The Toaster

Into the Deep End (Part 0)

Into the Deep End: From Cataphracts Newb to Referee

Ongoing series about the life of a gamer in way over his head from Cody Bechberger/ HelloYesToast

Background: Over/Under and the Before Times

I want to start this series off by stating that I'm a gamer, but I am definitely not a capital g Gamer. I got my first Gameboy for my seventh birthday (pinkish red Gameboy colour, thank you) along with a copy of PokĆ©mon Red and Tetris. I got my first home console sometime around 2001 when we got a GameCube, and graduated to ā€œmatureā€ gaming sometime around 2009 when we got an Xbox 360. Astute readers will notice I've just blazed through quite an important time in the growth of gaming without mentioning a significant pillar of the hobby: PC gaming. PC gaming, and really online gaming in general was not something that I understood to be significant until I was almost out of high school. I knew people who played WoW in the early days and I was around in the Halo 3 and Modern Warfare 2 times but stayed away because of subpar Internet and stories of toxicity. Gaming for me was sitting on a couch, possibly with friends, to experience a story or enjoy a little competition.

Dice
(Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

This changed slightly when I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons back in 2005. We were 13 and my friend got into D&D because his older sister and her friends were into it. So he decided he was going to DM and we were going to play. The same friend got us into Magic: The Gathering the year before because of his sister so we were kinda used to following his lead for finding cool stuff to do. I got the whole thing from my parents, "you'll end up in a cultā€, ā€œkids have died playing thisā€, ā€œyou're going to end up fighting dragons in the sewersā€. I would be damned if the art wasn't cool as hell and no way was I being left out. So I spent $50 on a Players Handbook for D&D 3.5e and was immediately confused to all hell. However, my friends and I stumbled through it. I think we only played three times total but I was immediately struck by a few things:

  1. There can be fun in paperwork
    While I don't think I could admit that at 13, there was something that felt cool about the character sheet. Imaging who my character was was. What they could do, all the cool shit they had. It took a bit to understand, my teenage boy brain needed to be rewritten, but it seemed simple once I understood it. And when I got to update the sheet? Oh brother, that felt so fucking good.\
  2. Playing for long stretches is exhausting
    Like I said, we only played a few sessions, but they were long. We would play for a full Saturday, typically around 8 hours, and I don't think I could remember my name by the end of it.\
  3. It felt different... And it scared the shit out of me
    Look, I was 13. I was a teenager now but I sat there watching a 15 year old flapping his arms pretending to be a bat shopkeeper. How was I to engage with that? I already knew I couldn't act to save my life and what if I did something dumb and they laughed at me? My teenage boy brain could not handle it and feel safe so it disengaged immediately. I would come to understand this was an attempt at collaborative storytelling that I was not ready for.

So I dropped D&D. We went to different high schools anyway, stopped hanging out, like it usually happens. I kept playing games through high school and into university. Before my last year I decided to get into board games as well. Specifically, my friends and I got into Twilight Imperium 3e, playing for about 12 hours 4 times over our last year, and this was it. It was my greatest gaming experience so far and my introduction to tactical wargaming. It had everything: too many rules, terrifying battles, political drama, and it felt properly epic. So epic, we would need a day with breaks to calm the fuck down. But above all that, it was just really fun to be that engaged with my friends around a table for that long, sharing a ridiculous experience.

ā€¦And then COVID happened a few years later. When I graduated in 2016 I tried to get into meatier war games usually by GMT. Stuff like Twilight Struggle and the COIN series. They were really good but never quite scratched that itch. The pandemic meant no more gaming though, so I did what a lot of people did and picked up TTRPGs to hopefully get back some social time. I had been asked a few times before to play D&D again and I always thought back to that moment of fear and disconnection. So I turned them down. This time though it felt like there was nothing else really, and I was going to have to beā€¦the Dungeon Master. While that felt like a terrifying prospect I quickly realized it was so much fun to be able to create and run this world for my friends to mess around in. Like most of us in the TTRPG space I didn't stay with D&D 5e for very long. Podcasts like The Vintage RPG Podcast and YouTube channels like Questing Beast, Matthew Colville, and Seth Skorkowsky exposed me to tons of new games and systems. My next stop was going to be Delta Green. After that, I started hoarding whatever books or modules I could find because I realized that this is what I wanted. Those experiences were back. We started playing Dungeon Crawl Classics and my friends and I decided to start streaming as an excuse to play those games I bought.

I backed Mothership 1e after buying all the books for 0e and when it showed up we played Another Bug Hunt. We enjoyed that so much that we then turned around and played Dead Planet. Needless to say, it was an amazing system that felt really good to play and easy to run. I enjoyed it so much that I backed Wages of Sin and waited for the Prospero's Dream box campaign. Then I saw notes for some weird thing they wanted to try to promote itā€¦

headshot_worm

(We are Worm profile picture from @d20plusmodifier.bsky.social)

For those not chronically online or for anyone recently waking up from a coma; Over/Under was a weird mass fever dream that a bunch of us had from the middle of October to the middle of November. Which resulted in a minimum of a month's long depression. A lot has already been written about the game so I'm not going to waste the time on that here, but a quick highlight of my career in the game follows:

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("Horse" racing flyer from @inkstained-art.bsky.social)

From there, we just kept rolling. The ā€œhorseā€ races were a ton of fun, and I will do a write up on that whole adventure at some point. Outside of that I met a ton of amazing people that I got to just hang out and tell stories with. The nature of the collaborative storytelling varied but it was all a wonderful dream to have been a part of. It culminated in the final race of the season where there was a train robbery and a space dragon. Kyle Ferrin had his character give me his ā€œhorseā€ (we're best friends now. Kyle, please return my calls). It was fantastic, igniting a creative spark that I had never felt so strongly.

And then it was over. The threads locked and a few days later the cool down threads locked. The server now sits as a time capsule of this month long adventure. We all looked at each other and asked the obvious question: what next? One of the recovery servers that I joined started talking about Cataphracts, and the couple of games that were starting up soon. I was hesitant initially. I knew Over/Under was based on Cataphracts and that Sam Sorensen had created both, but I found the war game in O/U hard to parse at times. I ended up avoiding it for most of the time. Someone talked to me about one that had wizards and shit and my brain immediately got excited. And it was full of people from Over/Under! My friends (and Kyle)! So I signed up, read the rules, and prepared myself for what was supposed to be a more relaxing come down from O/Uā€¦