![]() He tinkered with the rules and ended up writing his own game, Imperial Star, which he finished around 1980. Plus, once the game began, the rules made it nearly impossible for the player’s character to die. There were aspects of the game that irked him. “You had this vast, sweeping empire with aliens in it and all this stuff,” he recalled, “and people had these spaceships, and they went all over the place and traded and fought.” He bought a copy of Traveller at a Bay Area hardware store shortly after it was released. “If I could’ve had a cape, I would have had a cape,” he told me, over video chat from his home in western Washington. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking “Star Wars” rogue played by Billy Dee Williams. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that “Star Wars” came out. “The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen,” an early D&D review noted. ![]() ![]() The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. ![]()
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