I've been using characters to tell stories since I was a youngling. I remember clearly taking my box of action figures out to the front steps and having grand adventures between my heroes and the villains, usually cribbed from whatever movie or TV show I'd watched. I did this a lot as a kid, and remember clearly at one point my neighbor laughing at me. Well, my adult brain tells me in hindsight that he was laughing at the wonder of a child using his imagination and his toys (complete with voices and background music!) to entertain himself. It might have also been my "THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, MORPH" as Wolverine slashed away at my Terminator toys.
In middle school a friend and I had marble copybooks we'd just fill with shit-tier Mary-Sue fiction. We'd pass the books off between classes and at the end of the day and in our own way we were doing an offline play-by-post setting. He'd write a bunch of stuff, I'd add to it, so on and so forth. We filled a lot of books that way, and we had probably zero to one readable lines out of all of it.
Once I got into tabletop in high school, it was basically second-nature to me. I grew up making up stories for my toys and playing video games, so being able to do both at the same time was the best thing. That eventually branched to MMOs and here we are today.
I still have GI Joes and X-Men toys on my Amazon wishlist. Sometimes my friends will humor me, and I still have my boxed Archangel (my first X-Men toy!) on my bookshelf at home, right alongside my Duke and Flak Viper toys.
...I can't tell you, cannot stress enough, how tempting it is to open them up and play again. I've already got the superflexible Spider-Man from the late 80s and Iron Grenadier and Destro to play with.
In middle school a friend and I had marble copybooks we'd just fill with shit-tier Mary-Sue fiction. We'd pass the books off between classes and at the end of the day and in our own way we were doing an offline play-by-post setting. He'd write a bunch of stuff, I'd add to it, so on and so forth. We filled a lot of books that way, and we had probably zero to one readable lines out of all of it.
Once I got into tabletop in high school, it was basically second-nature to me. I grew up making up stories for my toys and playing video games, so being able to do both at the same time was the best thing. That eventually branched to MMOs and here we are today.
I still have GI Joes and X-Men toys on my Amazon wishlist. Sometimes my friends will humor me, and I still have my boxed Archangel (my first X-Men toy!) on my bookshelf at home, right alongside my Duke and Flak Viper toys.
...I can't tell you, cannot stress enough, how tempting it is to open them up and play again. I've already got the superflexible Spider-Man from the late 80s and Iron Grenadier and Destro to play with.
![[Image: yEROfKO.png]](http://i.imgur.com/yEROfKO.png)
