Today, while visiting a local used book store, I was thrilled to find a copy of the first edition of DragonQuest. I played DragonQuest extensively, but I'd never seen a copy of the 1st edition, and to find a copy in Buckhannon, WV was just neat.

I got to run another short Labyrinth Lord session for the kids.

We had a little bit of time to play, but not all our usual players were available, so we rolled up Swords & Wizardry characters, and started down into the Tomb of the Iron God.

I got to run another Labyrinth Lord session for the kids.

I got to run another Labyrinth Lord session for the kids.

I got to run another Labyrinth Lord session for the kids.

I got to run another Labyrinth Lord session for the kids.

Jesse's Run flooded over the road in three places, so I wasn't able to get to work, and the kids weren't able to go to school, so in the afternoon the kids came over and we played Labyrinth Lord.

L.B. was in town visiting the other side of her family, so I got to take her to dinner Sunday. Since she would be playing in the Labyrinth Lord game with the rest of the kids when she was here this summer, I thought we could create her characters during lunch. She thought that was a great idea. She did wonder if people would mind us playing D&D in the restaurant, but I told her nobody would mind — everybody in the restaurant would be talking anyway, and all we'd be doing is talking and rolling dice.

I was pretty scatterbrained that morning, and had managed to forget my dice, but we stopped at Dollar Tree on the way to the restaurant and picked up some cheap d6s. While we were waiting to be seated she started rolling up her characters, and finished rolling them up after we'd been seated and while we were waiting to be served. I'd also managed to forget a pencil, but did have a pen, so instead of writing directly on the character sheets we wrote on some 3×5 cards I had. She'd already decided she wanted one to be a sorceress and one to be a halfling, so we figured out which scores should go to which character [1] and then rolled 4d6 for the characters' starting money, since we didn't have d8s. After that we worked through buying equipment for her halfling, mostly while waiting for our food. Once the food arrived, though, not much else happened but eating. :-) She did have a name for her magic-user/sorceress, Alice the Sorceress, and we decided she'd pick a name for her halfling later, perhaps the next time she's at my house. (I‘ve got some books that would be useful for inspiration for halfling names.)

Anyway, after lunch when I dropped her off I gave her some character sheets and told her I'd e-mail her the information about the characters — that way we'd both have the information — and that we'd buy equipment for Alice the Sorceress later. After I dropped her off I stopped by the office and sent the e-mail.

• Double Adventure 1: Shadows & Annic Nova, by Marc W. Miller; copyright © 1980 by Game Designers' Workshop; 7th printing; Product #312. Art on page 19 by Liz Danforth.

  It is interesting to see how these adventures differ from current adventure design. Both of these adventures present a location with details about its contents, and give a way that a group of player characters might get involved. One of the adventures gives a page of historical background of the location for the GM, although the background doesn't directly affect play. The other gives no history at all, other than what can be gleaned from observing the location.

  The trend in commercial RPG adventure design has been to deliver more and more detail for the GM, culminating in the current D&D adventure format that attempts to provide, on a two-page spread, absolutely everything that a DM has to have to run a tactical encounter, from the tactical map to the exact details of each and every NPC involved, so that the DM doesn't have to look anything up. Moreover, in many modules, perhaps starting with the Dragonlance modules in the 1980s, there is a story supplied, which the player characters are expected, more or less, to follow and figure out, and some more-or-less obvious goal.

  Shadows & Annic Nova certainly don't supply a pre-built story — any story will be generated by the referee and players at the gaming table, with possibly some pre-game activity by the referee while reading the adventure beforehand. And there are no obvious goals, just situations to explore.

  I actually find this rather liberating, compared to the more detailed adventures that are more common today. There is something about the things that aren't there in Shadows & Annic Nova that fires up my imagination and draws me into the situation. It's probably the same sort of thing that makes me see the original Greyhawk folio as more interesting that the later Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.

  I mention Liz Danforth in the info about the book above because ever since I ran across her art in 5th edition Tunnels & Trolls I've enjoyed it immensely.

I like the physical design of the Classic Traveller books. The 8½×5½ stapled booklet is just the right size, physically, to read easily and carry around, and it opens and lays flat, for easy reference. As far as the information content, the physical constraints of the format provides enough physical space to present a comprehensible amount of information, without enough the temptation to pad the content with irrelevancies.

I also like visual appearance of these books: the black covers of the original books — with white text for the book title and subtitle, and red text and a thick red line for the game title and publisher — were stark, attractive, and stand out even today.

I gather, from comments from Steve Jackson Games, on the comic-book sized booklets they printed for the GURPS Traveller line in the early 2000s, that books of these form factors aren't cost effective for traditional RPG publishers any more. That's a pity.

• Traveller, by Marc Miller & Game Designers' Workshop, copyright 1977, 1981 by Game Designer's Workshop. Books 1–3, The Basic Books, Classic Traveller Reprint Series, copyright 2001 by Far Future Enterprises; a joint publication of Far Future Enterprises and QuikLink Interactive, ISBN 1-55878-218-4. “The Olympia Incident” by Martin J. Dougherty.

  This is a reprint of the 1981 second edition of Traveller, along with a little bit about the publishing history of Traveller, and a short story, “The Olympia Incident”, set in the Traveller universe.

When I was first getting into gaming, I remember going on a trip to Morgantown, WV with my brother and some of his friends from high school who were in the gaming group that I'd recently joined. We visited a couple of places that sold gaming materials, and one of the group, R.S. if I remember correctly, bought a copy of Traveller. I remember reading the books in his basement rec room and trying to make characters. Unfortunately, at that point the only RPGs that our group had seen were variants of D&D (T&T and DQ were still a couple years away), and I, at least, never really figured out Traveller and what you could do with it, and, again if I remember correctly, our group never did much with Traveller.

Something must have struck a cord, however, because over the years I bought several editions of the game, from Megatraveller to Traveller: the New Era (also known as T:NE), to GURPS Traveller, to Marc Miller's Traveller (also known as T4), and even including 2300AD, which was originally published as Traveller: 2300, even though the mechanics and setting were in no way related to the Traveller mechanics or setting. Many of this I probably picked up during a long period where I wasn't doing any gaming, and just reading game books. (This would almost certainly have been before the explosion of RPG stores on the net.) I probably picked Megatraveller up after it was out of print; my copy seems to have the (infamous) errata fixed. I may have picked up T:NE when it first came out. I know I picked up almost all of the GURPS Traveller books as they came out. I'm sure I picked up 2300AD off the discount rack. I remember being saddened when GDW closed their doors, although that was in part due to really enjoying their Space: 1889 line and Frank Chadwick's Cadillacs & Dinosaurs RPG, based on Mark Schultz's comic books, which I had read and enjoyed. I never got a chance to play any of GDW's games while they were still in operation, but have always wanted to play a game with Space: 1889's background. I never figured out what to do with Traveller, though. I came closest with GURPS Traveller, having enjoyed playing GURPS before my gaming hiatus. I enjoyed reading all the GURPS Traveller books, but I had no gaming group at that time.

Anyway, years later, after I'd gotten back to gaming regularly, in 2007, I had been reading about a number of people who had been playing Classic Traveller, which is what folks called the original system, with or without the Traveller Universe. They praised the game for its simplicity and completeness and for its relatively small size. I had know about the Far Future Enterprises Classic Traveller reprint line, but couldn't afford them when they first came out. I did, however, find a an inexpensive reprint of just Books 1–3, published jointly by Far Future Enterprises and QuikLink Interactive (also know as QLI/RPGRealms), and I ordered it in October 2007. After some problems with QLI's order system, I finally received my copy in November, 2007. It was a reprint of the 1981 2nd edition of Traveller, which apparently cleaned up the rules a little bit. I read it quickly, and my reaction was: “Huh. Why didn't we play the heck out of this back in high school? I could see playing this today and having a blast!” I liked the basic simplicity of the system, having moved away from complex systems like GURPS to systems that were much simpler, like Savage Worlds.

Sometime later I got Mongoose Publishing's new edition of Traveller,and though it was a reasonable version. Certainly it was closest of any system to the original, definitely since Megatraveller, and possibly since the original itself. And the fact Mongoose released it with several licenses that allowed free use of the system, and some use of the background made it more attractive. It prompted me to go back and read most of my other versions of Traveller, including the FFE/QLI reprint of Books 1–3. After looking at them all, it was Classic Traveller I wanted to play. Since then I've gathered some of the original Traveller publications, and a couple volumes of the FFE reprint volumes. (I wish they were all still in print.)

I'm going to have to run a Classic Traveller game sometime soon.

This very short session followed on directly from Character Generation 3.

In this short session T.A. finished his two characters, M.A. created his second character, Jeffrey, a monk, and E.A. created her characters, Drusilla (Dru), a ranger, and Curufin, an elf. I helped E.A. by quickly equipping her characters when time was running short, while T.A. helped M.A.

T.A. and M.A. were bickering, so I said that they had to roleplay being best friends. Glen needed to borrow some money, and I said he could borrow it from Dooley, but that Dooley would charge 25% interest, compounded weekly.

In this short session M.A. completely generated one of his two characters, James, a cleric, and T.A. tried to finish his two characters, but didn't get completely there.

[This is a after-the-fact entry; I could have sworn I'd written something about this already, but if so I've lost it. Sigh. I'm not sure what date this actually happened, whether it was the same day as the zeroth session, or not.]

In this short session T.A. started generating his two characters, Glen, a wizard, and Dooley, a thief.

[This is a after-the-fact entry; I could have sworn I'd written something about this already, but if so I've lost it. I'm not sure what date and time this actually happened. Sigh. I think it was nap time for the youngest kids.]

I have decided I'm going to run some classic D&D modules this summer for the kids. I'd actually planned on using Rules Cyclopedia Dungeons & Dragons, but unfortunately I'd not yet bought the PDF for it when Wizards of the Coast took all their PDFs off the market, saying they were “saving the RPG industry from pirates.” Jerks. These days I pretty much have to have a PDF of a game I'm going to run, so, instead of RC D&D, we're playing Labyrinth Lord, a retro-clone of Basic/Expert D&D. This has some advantages over RC anyway: there is a free PDF, it's actually in print through Lulu, and several adventures have been published for it recently. I'd considered using Swords & Wizardry

I want to run B10 — Night's Dark Terror, which I think is one of the classic D&D modules, but I didn't want to start with it — it's a module for 2nd level characters, and I wanted to get a feel for how LL ran, since it has been over 20 years since I last ran a pre-3.5E D&D game. So, I'm going to start with a different module, and then either move the characters on to B10, or have them create new characters. I'm not sure if I'm going to run B2 — Keep on the Borderlands or one of the LL adventures yet.

I'm going to have the kids roll up two characters each, inspired by a OD&D (or is it BD&D — sometimes it's hard to tell) character sheet (landscape, double-sided) with two character sheets on it side-by-side.

I've printed up the character creation sections of LL and some LL reference sheets I found online, so each kid will their own booklet to use during character creation.

[This is a after-the-fact entry; I could have sworn I'd written something about this already, but if so I've lost it. Sigh.]

I've been hearing a lot of people saying, in effect, that 4E D&D admits what kind of game D&D has always been and tunes everything for that: butt-kicking tactical battle-mat kick-in-the-door, kill everything, and take it's stuff gamist play. [1] Right now I'm ignoring the later bit about what 4E does and how well it does it, and looking at the earlier bit's claims about “the kind of game D&D has always been”. I'm not convinced.

This post, right now, is sort of a placeholder. I intend to fill in my history with D&D and look at the various editions of D&D that I've got and see if they support the “the kind of game D&D has always been” remark.

As I've said elsewhere the release of 4E and the choruses of “It's not real D&D” actually got me interested me in looking back at what D&D really was, so I bought PDFs of Original D&D (from RPGNow) and its supplements and Chainmail and printed them all out and bound them in 8.5”x5” pamphlets, in more or less the original form factor. I've read Chainmail and the three pamphlets that made up the original D&D release (X, Y, Z) completely, and have scanned the others. (Oddly enough, I've still not got beyond scanning 4E.)

So, for grins and giggles, last time my local gaming group met I brought copies of the first three commercially published roleplaying games for show and tell: Original Dungeons and Dragons; Empire of the Petal Throne; and Tunnels and Trolls. (The order of the last two is debatable.)

The release of 4E and the choruses of “It's not real D&D” had actually interested me in looking back at what D&D really was, so I bought PDFs of Original D&D (from RPGNow) and its supplements and printed them all out and bound them in 8.5”x5” pamphlets, in more or less the original form factor.

Listening to the Whartson Hall Gamers playing Empire of the Petal Throne from the RPGMP3 Community Podcast rekindled my interesting in Tékumel, so I bought a PDF of it from RPGNow and printed it. (This really drove home how much bigger and better presented EPT was than OD&D. Also, how even less Politically Correct it was.)

And T&T had been in my thoughts since Ron Edwards' wrote a series of reports on his T&T game. I played T&T a bit in my youth, so I already had a copy of it, the 5th edition, so I let that stand in for the 1st edition, a not unreasonable bit of flexibility, since T&T seems to have changed much less over five editions than D&D did over 4.5 or so.

(Later: I can't imagine why I didn't bring my copy of FFE/QLI's republication of the original Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3 along, and have one of the first SF RPGs too!)

The first D&D game I owned was the Holmes blue-box edition of Basic D&D; the first D&D game I played was AD&D 1E. I was in junior high when I got the Holmes box set for Christmas from my parents. (If I am remembering correctly.) That summer I started playing D&D with a group of my brother's friends from high school, and I played with them until that group gradually dispersed, some when they left the state for college, and some when they left the state after college for jobs elsewhere. I had long been DMing by then. My younger brother joined the group at some point. He got Tunnels & Trolls as a Christmas present one year, from my uncle Chuckie, if I remember correctly. We played it several times, but it was a simpler game than AD&D and at the time seemed to offer less, though in a very entertaining way.

Gamma World, 1st edition, was probably the first RPG I bought, other than AD&D. (How did we buy the AD&D books?) We never played Gamma World, for some reason. Probably because I wasn't able to figure out the rules, or because it was too gonzo.

Need a footnote about missing out on the flexibility T&T saving roll system — not surprising, since I never saw any of the T&T solos that used it so extensively. Also, how that gave T&T gamist tactical play without complicated rules, unlike D&D 3e and 3.5e.

While still in junior high, or perhaps my first year in high school, I ran across DragonQuest. Although it was written in a “numbered rules” style that I was unfamiliar with (having never played wargames) that required me to read it closely several times through before I understood any of it, I was fascinated by it from the very first read. DQ's skills gave all characters interesting distinguishing abilities, where as in AD&D only thieves had similar such abilities (other classes depending on selection of spells to distinguish the magic using classes and magic items to distinguish the others.) The D100 based unified mechanic used by DQ was also very attractive, as was the more detailed combat system. The professional skills seemed less restrictive and therefore less of a mere game construct than the equivalent AD&D classes. The fact that every character could learn magic also seemed freeing.

The fact that the only DQ adventure that I was able to find at the time was Paul Jaquays' The Enchanted Wood was also a plus, because I found it to be head and shoulders above any other adventure I had seen at the time.

I can seen now that most of these things I liked about DQ were the things that added to greater detail in distinguishing characters, as well as what I called realism them, but today might more accurately call verisimilitude. I think a good part of it was that by this time AD&D had become its own genre and I wanted something less tied to those particular tropes. DQ seemed to simulate a wider variety of fantasy than AD&D.

I think it is safe to say that I was suffering from an anti-D&D backlash at this point.

At some point I bought a copy of Avalon Hill's Powers & Perils. (If my memory of buying this from the hobby store in downtown Clarksburg is correct, I must have bought this fairly early on in my gaming career.) At some other point I bought Iron Crown's Rolemaster. Both of these blew my mind with complexity. P&P's setting, however, was another glimpse at a non-AD&D fantasy universe.

A friend of mine bought Traveller early in our gaming careers. We tried making characters a couple of times, but were never able to figure out what we should do with them afterwards — I think we could never bridge the gap between dungeon crawling and monsters killing characters in AD&D and 40– and 50– year old ex military characters in Traveller. I don't think we had any Traveller adventures to help us along.

I ran a very successful DragonQuest campaign in my first year at college with three of the original group and a couple of other players, using Paul Jaquays' wonderful Enchanted Wood adventure setting.

Later in college I started a long-running campaign set in SPI's minimal Frontiers of Alusia setting using DragonQuest at the beginning.

My leaning to greater detail and verisimilitude lead me in time to GURPS, with a small detour along the way for 3rd edition RuneQuest.

I bought RuneQuest, 3rd edition (RQ3, the Deluxe Boxed Set) and Griffin Island (also a boxed set) in stores, somewhere. Like DragonQuest, I found them fascinating. Unlike DQ I never got my group to successfully play RQ. RQ3 and Griffin Island were a glimpse into a style of culture-based gaming that I had never encountered in my AD&D experience, but were complicated enough that my players hated character generation, and we never got much beyond that. I never saw any of the Glorantha materials until much, much later, post Internet. Griffin Island, though, even with the occasional incoherence in its Glorantha-less state, resonated with more depth than anything I had yet seen. (I never realized, until years later, that the Paul Jaquays whose DQ adventure The Enchanted Wood had so opened my eyes was also one of the authors of Griffin Island!)

GURPS for me was about even more finely grained definition of characters. Learning from problems my players had with RuneQuest character generation, I created GURPS versions of all their DragonQuest characters. Since, in the process of simulating all their DQ abilities with GURPS, I'd along the way upgraded their characters somewhat in power, everybody had fun and it all worked out. Already accustomed to a hex-based tactical combat system and role-under skills from DQ, it was an easy adjustment to GURPS, and the campaign continued successfully for many more sessions.

I think, however, that later I moved away from GURPS because making/updating characters was such a pain, even with the assistance of Bill Seuer's GURPS MAKECHAR program. (Let us just say that the main villain of the campaign, and evil wizard, ended up a 1000 point character.)

I ran a short Elric campaign after my Frontiers of Alusia campaign.

After that there was a hiatus in my gaming. I continued to buy and read RPG material, but didn't have a regular group.

WFRP — First encounted in WD? Then bought main rulebook. At first dismissive of the rules, but again fascinated by the picture of the old world and the high quality of some of the adventures. Again, the one time I tried running WFRP things didn't work out with my gaming group.

Most of my buying WFRP was during my hiatus.

I really only came to understand RuneQuest during my hiatus from gaming, in the 90s, when I started seriously to track down the RQ3 material I'd never know about, including the post RQ3 fanzines. I even found a copy of RQ2 in a game store in Austin, Texas, while there on travel for work.

After my hiatus from gaming, I was looking for simpler games. Fudge, BESM, and finally Savage Worlds.

Retro-gaming: interest in early classic AD&D modules we missed (which lead to Wilderlands and JG tegel manor then badabaskor, etc. then 3e/3.5e reprints) which lead to buying lots of PDF games including classic BD&D module b10 (superb!) leading to RC purchases, then other BD&D modules and AD&D modules, pondering running BD&D for B20, then buying thunder rift, mystara interest online maps, retro clones (never quite the D20 basis with old-school feel I thought I wanted) to original D&D interest (early unlicensed download), buy PDFs from rpgnow, pondering running OD&D, swords and wizardry, download retro modules for OD&D, philotomy, other current OD&D player/gm sites/campaigns, more JG and understanding which JG were OD&D, more pondering BD&D for B10 and other B/X modules.

parallel thread: tactile pleasures: card, bennies, status chips,

custom poker chips for wounds, shaken

RQ found ... earlier than GURPS, later? but only understood much later in 90s during my serious RQ buying days after ran long GURPS campaign (Call of Cthulhu/Elric helped understand/like Rq?) and bought RQ2. early GURPS gaming at college BAMF? compare to dates of Alusia becoming GURPS?

road building costs in JG Ready-Ref sheets! (PDF just as confusing as I remember printouts! Did Ray end up with them?)

Tékumel. Call of Cthulhu.

I've found that, for an abstract game that can take place just in your head, there can be a lot of tacticle fun to RPGs. Rolling dice and moving miniatures are the obvious ones, but there are others. Gaming tokens (glass “stones” ) are used by many games and gamers, either as a component of the system or informally by the gamers for marking various things. Some games, like Savage Worlds, use cards. Miniatures terrain, whether three-dimensional, printed tiles, or simply drawn or a battlemat, adds a lot, and not just to the visual aspects of the game. Cards that represent character states, like buff and condition cards for D&D, or the effects of spells, or cards that have monster or spell stats, are also neat and passing them around adds to the fun of the game. Drawing maps for the games, drawing a scene out on a battle map, and making handouts can all be tactile fun, and then handing out the maps and other handouts to players so they have the fun at looking at them and passing them around and pulling them out when they suddenly realize what they're really showing them.

All of these things can add a great deal of fun to RPGs.

The kids I game with get mentioned a lot. Right now they're my daughter and niece and nephews. I'm really lucky to have such a great bunch of kids around to play games.

L.B.

is my daughter.

My brother C.P.B. about an hour away, so his kids get to play regularly.

B.B.

is in his mid-teens and is the oldest of the bunch, which means I've been experimenting on him the longest. ( I hope it hasn't hurt too much. )

D.B.

is the middle brother.

M.B.

is the youngest child, well below reading age, and usually plays as part of a team with his dad or older brother.

My sister C.I.A.'s kids live on the family farm, next door to me, and along with my daughter get to play the most.

T.A.

is the oldest boy.

E.A.

is his younger sister.

M.A.

is their younger brother and is the youngest of my regular gamers. He can't read yet, but has fun playing anyway.

The new baby boy is C.A., and I'm already looking forward to when he joins the gaming group.

My brother N.A.B. lives far out of state, and so his kids only get to play on summer and winter vacations when they come and visit the family farm.

T.B.

is N.A.B.'s oldest son.

O.B.

is his younger brother, and has played Buggin' with us a couple times, and will play the other games more as he gets older.

I'm going to try online gaming with a map tool and either a chat inteface or a voice interface when the kids are a little bit older, so the ones that are farther away can get to play more often.

I've run a lot of games for the kids; Fudge Bunnies and Burrows, BESM Dungeon, Toon, Buggin', D&D, Savage Worlds, and perhaps others.

My brother who lives out of state usually comes in from out-of-state twice a year, once during the summer and once at Christmas. One of his sons is old enough to play Savage Worlds these days, and since I'd given him, along with rest of the kids who were old enough, their own copies of the Savage Worlds: Explorer's Edition I wanted to make sure we got to play some roleplaying games while they were in town, especially Savage Worlds.

Running for kids is a lot different than running for adults. One of the kids is in his middle teens, but the rest of them are under 11 and one is 6. They're very enthusiastic when they're interested, but if things slow down the younger ones (literally) wander off until things speed up again. They also have sometimes have a little difficulty switching between the neat stuff that is happening and the mechanical stuff we're using to make the neat stuff happen, which can make things take longer than it should. They all enjoy it, though, and it's definitely worth doing.

Sometime I'd like to make some character sheets specifically for the younger kids who don't read very much yet, with pictures of, for instance, their sword and the dice they need to roll to attack and do damage with it.

One of my nephews is very into a particular collectable card game, and we didn't get a chance to play it this summer. Maybe at the Winter gathering.

One of the things I'm trying to do this summer is to actually run and play more roleplaying games. I play every month or so with an adult group, though that has slowed down during the summer due to scheduling conflicts, and usually play once every month or two with my daughter and my niece and nephews, but I'd like to play or run more often.

I'd like to run a game for the kids every weekend, but I figure that will be difficult to achieve. We'll see. All but one of the kids is 11 or younger, and one who plays occasionally (depending on what game we're playing) is 6; the older one is in his mid-teens. I've been playing RPGs with them (and occasionally their parents) on and off for several years, starting with Fudge Bunnies & Burrows. Some of the kids have played when some of they were 5 years old or even younger; at that age I have the kids roll dice and handle all the rules work myself; it works great. When I run things I generally try to keep things age-appropriate for the youngest in the group. They've all played video games and are familiar with common fantasy and science fiction tropes from the games.

Over a couple of years we've played Big Eyes, Small Mouth (2nd Edition Revised) a lot, and Bugging', and D&D some, and Savage Worlds a lot. A couple of the older kids have run D&D and Savage Worlds adventures for me, one from a commercial module that was a present and another other using dungeons built with Legos and Lego figures as miniatures. We've played through BESM Dungeon and several Savage Worlds adventures (including some of the free adventures and some of the Savage Tales pdfs) and are working our way through a couple of D&D adventures.

It's hard to schedule time with all the kids together at the same time as I have free time, and there's no telling before hand when the next time we'll be able to play will be, so I tend to run adventures as short campaigns. I've never gotten to run a long campaign. BESM Dungeon and the currently running D&D adventure The Sunken Citadel (updated for 3.5E) have probably been the longest running games. I'd like to run Evernight or 50 Fathoms for them some time.

I'd also like to run more board games: I've still never played Settlers of Catan, despite having it for a couple of years.