Remembrances of Encounter Critical

My first exposure to Encounter Critical was in 1983 in Easton, Pennsylvania. I was attending the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Arts at the time and was home for the weekend, mainly to do some roleplaying with my gaming buddies. We’d heard that there was a group playing a D&D marathon at a J’s Steaks and Subs to raise money for some charity or another, so we dropped by. We thought it was pretty amazing that a restaurant was going to allow a game group to hog up their tables and play D&D from Friday night to Sunday night. we also thought it was kind of a sucker way to raise money for charity, because these guys would likely be up all weekend chucking dice in one of their parents’ basements anyway, and they were asking strangers to donate money as if they were making some sort of sacrifice in the name of the charity.

Anyway, to get back to my point, when we got there one of the guys was running Encounter Critical. He claimed that he used to live in Wisconsin and had been in the Boy Scouts with Jim Ireland, and that’s where he’d learned to play. Half the guys there were in awe that this guy had played first-hand with an actual game designer. A couple of other guys swore that he was full of crap because they’d known him since the second grade and had never been further west than Aquashicola, let alone Racine, Wisconsin. The guy did seem to be full of himself, but he wasn’t the first gamemaster I’d met that had ego problems and he’d be far from the last. I looked over his shoulder and saw the books lying there and only remember that there were a lot of tables that looked like they’d been put together on a typewriter. I was in awe of tables and charts at the time, and for some reason I thought that game designers were all good at math because I really thought all those tables had some logical, underlying algorithm that I just didn’t understand. I remember people were playing Klingons and wookiees along with elves and drawrves, which seemed kinda weird and kinda cool at the same time.

I never got to play Encounter Critical. A few years ago I saw a copy for sale on eBay, but it was going for a ridiculous price. I learned there was a scan floating around on file sharing sites, but by then I’d abandoned file sharing because I was afraid the RIAA was going to kick in my door and sue me into bankruptcy. I’m thankful that S. John Ross is now hosting a pretty decent scan of the game on his website. I’ve downloaded it, and will be running it at some future game day.