The Creation of the Canyonside Games: A History-Part 2 of 10

The Creation of  Canyonside, Part 2

Please enjoy part two of the history of the Canyonside games.

1995‐9

These were the years I went to Gen Con around professional school. I did not run any games but instead played in several games that influenced the Canyonside game.

The firs was a great game with my friend Ben that used only a single d6 to determine the event outcomes. There were between 20 and 30 of us standing around in a circle playing in a highly improvised Justice Inc. game with no character sheet and reinforced my idea that more than 10 people could easily be run in a roleplaying game if the game mechanics were simple enough. My friend, Ben, upon listening to me extolling the awesome simplicity of the single d6-based mechanic after this game ad nauseum, when I was debating scrapping the d100 mechanic of HiBRiD version 1.0 one night, told me "just keep the d20...because a d20...it just looks cool".

I also played in a tournament with my friend Terry where my character was cursed 20 minutes in, and ruined our team's chances at advancing to the tournament finals. I spent 3 hours distracting the players from their mission and had a ball doing it. While  the 2 children in our group were a bit disappointed (I would never do something like this today),  everyone else, including the kids' dad, shook my hand and congratulated me on a well-played curse and laughed at my character's crazy antics in which my character made himself invisble and went running around laughing like a hyena and distracting the players from their goals. This was where I realized that meta gaming could be so much fun and began writing game aspects actually based on it for my pregenerated characters, such as Catchphrase and Heroic Appearance. 

These years were big for the game system in general. After remembering Ben's comments, I finally scrapped all of the rest of my d100-based rules, converting them to the current "roll-a-d20/always-add/higher-numbers-are-always-better" system that currently defines the HiBRiD system v2.0. 

These years were also when the kernel for my favorite NPC, Johnny Parkour, came into existence. By combining the Justice, Inc. character I had played, named Johnny Faaaaaaantastic with the antics of the cursed character so over the top that I mentioned above, I unknowingly created him as my standard NPC template for every Canyonside game I ever ran. After adding a heavy accent and the Catchphrases "Dees eez too crayzee for me", and "I'm going to go to de club" that I based on a coworker of mine back when I worked for Chicago's Computer Wonderland, this was the Johnny Parkour that came to be loved/annoyed at every Canyonside game over the years. I would also use him to test the speed and action rules, and he eventually became the character creation example for the Player's Spielbuch.

These would also be the last years I would ever play a roleplaying game as a player.