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I never wore a helmet.
Growing up, my grandparents owned an eighty acre farm in Champlin, Minnesota. Most of the work I did out there involved hauling trees out of the deep woods for firewood using our trusty three-wheelers. My uncle had an '82 Honda Big Red, and we had an '83 Honda ATC 110. In 1983, I was 9 years old. My brother and I rode those machines every single day we were at the farm.
As you did when you were a kid with vast amounts of unsupervised time, you gained mechanical and survival skills using the tools at hand. We would race through the woods as fast as those engines would push us down the dirt roads. We would blast through the mud, sometimes burying the machines up to the handlebars, forcing us to rig up tow lines to drag each other out of the quagmire.
Soon, we were jumping them off old piles of corn grain or launching off ramps we built ourselves. Sometimes we even jumped over each other while one of us lay flat on the dirt.
But my absolute favorite pastime was towing one another behind the wheelers on flimsy plastic roll-up sleds. We did this in the snow, and we did it in the dead of summer on the fine gravel laid out in front of the big machine shed. There were enough loose rocks that the sled would slide easily, and when we inevitably wiped out, we only suffered minor flesh wounds. The entire goal was to drive erratically enough to throw your brother off the sled. We would later graduate to doing the exact same thing to each other behind speedboats at fifty miles per hour.
I never wore a helmet. Even when we hauled our three-wheeler down to New Mexico and ran it hard on the local dirt bike tracks. I am absolutely certain I jumped that heavy machine thirty feet in the air, crashed it hard on its side, and my only genuine fear was that my dad would find out we took it without permission.
The modern obsession with safety and danger in our culture is completely insane. I see kids riding plastic tricycles on enclosed back porches wearing heavy crash helmets. Are we really that fragile?
That manufactured fear has infected how we play games.
In classic video games, you were issued a strictly limited number of lives. When you ran out, you lost the game. Today, you can just save your progress every single increment of play to avoid any consequence. In tabletop role-playing games, people are sitting around a kitchen table in a comfortable, climate-controlled living room, eating snacks, and throwing up safety cards when the imaginary game gets "too intense" for them.
First of all, who are these people? And second, why are they in my living room?
This sickness of safety in gameplay is bizarre. It is a game. It is a simulation. There is literally more physical danger involved in eating the junk food on the table than there is in playing the campaign. If you are genuinely worried about the other players in your group saying something that might offend your sensibilities, why did you invite them into your home in the first place?
Games are fundamentally meant to explore danger. They exist to simulate catastrophe and allow us to engage in deadly combat that we hopefully never have to witness in our actual lifetimes.
Dangerous games prepare you for real danger. They train you to think on your feet, process chaotic variables, and see a situation for exactly what it is.
One evening, after a marathon session of D&D, a couple of my buddies stopped at a local gas station in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was late. One guy went to the bathroom, and the other went to the counter to buy some food. While my buddy was standing at the register paying, a man walked up quietly behind him.
My buddy instantly sensed something was wrong. His situational awareness spiked. He immediately pivoted and started talking directly to the guy, breaking the element of surprise. Luckily, our other friend walked out of the bathroom at that exact moment, and the sheer shift in numbers de-escalated the room. They walked out to the car. As they pulled away, they looked back through the glass and watched the man who had sneaked up behind them pull a massive knife on the cashier.
They had just walked out of an active ambush.
Is that directly related to the insane amount of tactical tabletop games we played? Maybe. But I know for a fact we had actively simulated that exact scenario, and thousands of others far more deadly, every single week at the table.
Stop wearing a helmet. Stop coddling your players. Play your games as dangerously as possible.
If you are ready to strip away the safety nets and run a campaign fueled by adrenaline and brutal consequence, you need a system built for the job. Step into the gritty, historically grounded world of PsychScape Historical.
You can secure the core rules directly on the Man of Ages website, or pick up your physical copy by searching PsychScape on Amazon.
Equip yourself, and happy gaming.
