Guns in the Neighbourhood

If we're going to go back to the beginning, let's really go back.

This is the neighborhood in which I grew up, from the age of 4 on:

Though this really isn't "home."  These houses are way bigger than they were when I was between 8 and 11.  In the 1980s, most of the owners were enjoying the boom economy in Calgary and they jumped forward to expand and build upon the original size of the home.  Many of these were rebuilt twice.  The one with the pool in the upper left hand was knocked down entirely and rebuilt from scratch.  If the reader wants to know the original size, there are three houses on the bottom row that have bluish roofs.  The middle blue roof, the small one, that is the original size of every house in the picture.

As well, there was a lot less foliage.  The neighborhood was built about 1967, when my parents bought their house, and like all new neighborhoods they were mostly lawn.

I died many, many times on this map.  Many times.

Starting around 7 or 8, and up until getting into Junior High, one favorite game from our youth was "Guns."  We played a lot of it.  That is what this post is about.  And for that, the above map is not too helpful, so I've created one of my own.

I've restored the houses to their original sizes, and added names.  I've reduced the amount of greenery to about what it was between 1971 and 1975.  The blue line defined the settled upon boundaries that we used for years, in part defined by terrain but also ~ of course ~ defined by the friendliness of the neighbors.  The Armstrong backyard, for example, was almost all garden, with a fence around it, but we could run along the edge of it on top of the 4 ft. (1.4 m) high wall that ran alongside the Donaldsons.  The yards belonging to the Martin, Malloy and James houses were way high above the grassy alley at the back, six to eight feet (2+ m), so they were inaccessible.  Paul Martin was a kid my age that lived up there, but he never played with us but a few times, so we left his house out.  The Collinses never seemed to be home, so we just used their backyard, and Teri Shea was a friend.

The Cacek woman was a harridan, who did not like us in her yard, but as long as we didn't go too close to the actual house, she'd just yell at us; so we used the far end of her yard freely without worry.  The Dmytryshyn's lived next to the Cacek's but our boundary went to the kitty walk on the east.  Bannerman Drive made the south boundary.  Virtually everyone across Bannerman Drive was unfriendly.  Neighbourhoods, eh?

The best feature must be that grassy alley.  We were lucky in that.  The alley had been closed off and seeded by the city, and was only used for city vehicles.  This made a terrific greenspace for play, without traffic, that gave us a freedom that a lot of neighbourhoods didn't have.  I've often mused on the good fortune of that.

Okay, the game.  Any number could play, though it wasn't much fun with less than four.  We had a dozen playing on several occasions ~ outsiders, cousins, school friends and so on.  There were arguments, but most of us who played all the time had agreed on the rules and outsiders did not get a voice about them.  Hey, this laid the basis for how I managed rules for D&D, so it matters.

You did not need a gun.  Your finger would do, but we preferred an actual toy weapon.  You could not take a weapon from a person (they'd just use their finger anyway, and weapons were property).  If someone pointed a gun at you, looking at you, the shot hit.  Always.  There were no misses.  You could not shoot through bushes or fences, you had to lift your head and your arm over obstacles to shoot.  You had to put your arm and your head around a corner to shoot.  You could shoot while running.  Two people often shot each other at the same time.  You had to make noise when you shot someone, so that persons hiding could hear you doing it.

When you were shot, you "died."  That is, you fell and laid still for at least 20 seconds.  The "at least" is important.  You were not required to get up after 20 seconds.  A dead person could not be shot again.  After 20 seconds, you could "come alive" again ... any time, so it was a good idea to get a long way from a dead person.  As a dead person, you waited until someone hanging around wasn't looking at you, then you rolled over and shot them.  At the very least, you probably both succeeded in shooting each other.

The trick was to find cover while dying.  Therefore, the goal was to die as spectacularly as possible.  This did not mean to grab your chest and stagger into cover, but to throw your body in the direction you wanted to die in and roll until you ran out of momentum.  Jumping off the cliff by the Armstrong's house was great, or rolling down any of the slopes (they all slope towards Bannerman Drive, by the way), falling over a fence, into trees and shrubbery, etc.

Moving was important.  You had to know the best places to climb the fences, where they were shorter and easiest to hop over.  In some places, the fences were nearly six feet high (2 m) ... remember, we were only nine.  The back of the Donaldsons was a short chain link fence, so it was a good way to get from the back yard to the alley.  The Brimsmeade's yard was death; it was easy to get trapped in there if you went in, so it was rarely used except to hide in.  If someone hid there, however, we mostly just ignored them.  A person had to move around if they wanted the best experience.

It was great that there were so many places where we could run without restrictions.  I can remember shooting someone in the alley from the Lefebvre's back yard, hoping the fence into my back yard, cutting down the slope and between my house and the Holts, running up the street to the Donaldson's, flying through their back yard and hopping the chain link fence at the back, catching the same person again from the other side.  I could do that run in less than a minute.  Ah, the energy of youth.

The most defensible place was the Shea's back yard.  This was a stepped yard that overlooked the Cacek's back yard, the Lefebvre back yard and into my back yard, at the same level of the Collins' yard.  Plus it had two low walls, pierced by stairs, with slopes, trees and a line of shrubs atop each wall.  The kitty walk, as shown, ran past the house and that was the far boundary of our war zone.

A defender or defenders could get up into the top corner there and shoot anyone in the wide field.  We had to get into the Collin's yard or hide in the upper right-hand corner of my yard and jump the fence, hoping to catch a defender as they poked their head up.

OR, we could simply storm the fort.  This always worked better with two people, but I got so I could storm even multiple people by myself, using the rules.  Observe:

Starting in the Cacek or Lefebvre back yard, you run headlong at the Shea's.  They kill you.  You die with great skill and at speed, rolling and tumbling until you stop.  You wait your time, then you jump up, not bothering to shoot, like a sprinter coming out of the blocks.  You die again, rolling and tumbling forward.

Your third death gets you to the slope below the alley.  After that's over, you leap up and onto the alley, dying again.  You have to pick your moments, waiting until they get uneasy watching your body just lie there.  Someone else appears and they try to shoot them, so you use that to jump up to the first stair.  You die again. But now you're close.  One more death and you're inside their camp.  Basically, the defender has to abandon the position by that point, because you're under the wall and behind the bush, so you're almost as defended as they are.  They have to poke out their heads to shoot you ~ whereupon you will shoot them.

I had so much fun playing this game.  It was infinite, there was no "win" or "lose," we got out of it as much as we put in, the game was completely our own and we didn't need equipment to play.

Perhaps, before age 11, I was tempering myself to be a Dungeon Master?

I know for certain that I was instrumental in working out a lot of the rules we played by.  The problem would come up, "What if?" ... and we would talk about it.  Someone would propose a solution, a boundary, an agreed-upon rule ~ and I have to admit, I was often the "someone."  I'm a smart fellow now, I was a smart kid.  I didn't force my rules on people; I suggested rules that seemed best for everyone, even then.

But honestly, I think we all did this, didn't we?  Didn't we all make up our own games?  Well, here I'm speaking to people over 35.  I know that a lot of younger people, particularly those younger than 22, never got to do anything like this.  This whole post has to seem like some sort of weird-ass mystery to them.  Kids?  Making up their own rules?  Playing guns?  Without anyone watching?  Actually ignoring an adult shouting to get off their yard?  We never got Mr. Collins' permission, and he was a mean old bugger.  He was just never home.  Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong were no friends, and Mrs. Brimsmeade could be a real bitch ~ but again, you'd disappear into her own trees and what was she going to do?

Having the freedom to play taught us how to make our own games.  I must admit, I'm well aware that some of the things I'm asking DMs to do on this blog just aren't possible, because the reader has no experience whatsoever with game play.  And the Adventurer's League reflects that.  I'm proposing that the reader "practice" and "rehearse," where I started doing that at the age of 7!  How unfair is that, when someone who's 22 right now has never actually done a single thing on their own?

I've been watching a lot of Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff and Lenore Skenazy, three voices who are addressing this crippling of children that's been ongoing for awhile now.  In particular, the 2014/15 shift that happened on campuses all over America.  I find it interesting that this same shift, with many of the same characteristics, took hold of D&D in 2014.  I don't think it is coincidence.  But I will leave the reader with some viewing material, hosted by Malcolm Gladwell (who scrambles to find arguments against it), that should be watched if you want some sense of why the Adventurer's League is so popular among young people.



As for me, I've been thinking about this post since late Monday night.  Took me a lot of yesterday to set up the maps.  I'm not sure what it means; perhaps spatially it also gave me some good concepts for describing battles and combat encounters.  Look at the map above: cliffs, slopes, trees, houses, low walls ... not to mention a host of hiding spaces that don't appear on the map, that would be hard to explain, since houses were made differently in the 1960s.

I hope this brings the reader some insight.  I'm still unclear on what it's telling me, but I'm sure that there are hard-wired principles of play built into this that helped me be a better DM today.