Some guys spent their teenage years scoring touchdowns and dating loose cheerleaders. Others spent theirs doing drugs and otherwise being edgy and flipping the bird to “the man.” I, however, wasted mine in basements pretending to be an elf. No, not a prancing little Keebler elf, but a manly, fey Tolkien-esque elf. You know, the kind that look like European supermodels with scimitars. Instead of studying for my SAT’s, I studied my Monster Manual, desperate to codify and memorize all the best ways to defeat, say, Green Slime. Gary Gyax, the creator of D&D was my co-pilot, and I’d written up a complete response to every error in Jack Chicks’ anti-D&D comic strip “Dark Dungeons.” I was, and still am, the penultimate geek. I can tell you the “true” authorial inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons, the facts of the infamous “Steam Tunnel” affair in the 80s, and I know what THAC0 is and how it works.
But how did I end up on this great throne of nerd-dom as this shining king of pointless trivia? It all began with my 6th grade teacher making us watch The Hobbit. Though inaccurate to the book in many ways (it is, of course, standard geek practice that I make such things clear), I didn’t know that at the time, and was immediately enchanted with the idea of dwarves, trolls, magical treasures, and ancient torch-lit halls of stone. Fantasy became my drug, and I was always jonesing for a hit. It was the perfect escape from my home life, a dark place where alcohol and a bi-polar stepmother dwelled, who tore me down emotionally every day. In fantasy worlds, you could pick up a sword and deal with your problem. In fantasy worlds, you could be a hero.
I began to buy Magic; the Gathering cards, and stole some of my brother’s Alpha release stuff, Magic cards that nowadays score a pretty penny on the internet. I played Zelda until my fingers bled. I practically died of joy when Lord of the Rings; the Fellowship of the Ring came out. And then, one day, I found D&D, totally destroying any chance I might have had at living a normal high school life and making friends that didn’t wear “Rogues Do It From Behind” t-shirts. From then on would I get odd looks from people in school hallways who overheard me use words like, “antediluvian,” “vorpal,” and “necromancer” in normal, everyday conversations.
My downfall was made complete on the last day of my 9th grade year of high school. I had discovered to my amazement that we had a Magic; the Gathering club, which was far more interesting than chess club (chess didn’t have swords or wizards) or anime club, which I was beginning to hate due to our president forcing us to watch the same boring cartoon every single meeting, because she thought it was “kawai,” or something. I scurried to the designated room when the last bell sounded, my meaty paws clinging to the plastic box that held my super rad black/red zombie burn deck.
After playing a few games of Magic, the group was about to disperse for a pizza party at the president’s house, where we would eat nerd-quantities of pizza (in other words, lots) and play video games. Offhandedly I asked if any of them played D&D, a game I kept hearing about. About five of them stopped dead.
“D&D?” Eric, the guy with the speech impediment, asked.
“Uh, yes. Dungeons & Dragons,” I asserted, worried that maybe these guys were all Jack Chick fans, and thought that D&D was some satanic indoctrination game that had real magic.
“Oh heck yes we play D&D,” Kevin, the huge bearded catholic guy, responded.
Thirty minutes later we were in Kevin’s basement, rolling dice and flipping through rulebooks. I was handed a set of plastic geometric shapes and a rulebook depicting a muscle-bound barbarian breaking down a door while an elderly sorcerer made devil horns with his hands that shot green lasers.
“What the heck are these little plastic things? They look like dice,” I asked, confused as all get-out.
“They are. That pyramid one is a deefore,” Kevin answered. He was going to be the Dungeon Master, and run the game for the rest of us. Essentially he was the director of our sword swinging, spell slinging improve-with-dice group.
“Deefore?”
“Four sided die. A normal six-sider is a d6, so a four-sider is a d4. You’ve got a d4, a few d6’s, d8, d10, d12 and d20 there. So, what kind of character do you want to play? Look here at the book. You can be a warrior, thief, priest or wizard, and there are subclasses of each type.”
I flipped through the book. My fingers danced across the pages, electrified with pure, undiluted geek energy. I was living the nerd dream. I was going to play Dungeons & Dragons. After five minutes of examining the various archetypes at hand, I made my decision.
“I want to play a wizard.”
“Nuh-uh!” cried Wan Di, the overweight kid with the Frodo Lives t-shirt. “I want to play the party’s wizard!”
Steve, the guy who brought his girlfriend, made a half-hearted attempt at joining in why I shouldn’t play a wizard, but his girlfriend quickly brought him back to why she wasn’t happy at the moment.
“Don’t play a wizard,” interjected the scrawny kid with glasses, Matt. “They’re totally lame at 1st level, you only get one spell and you can only cast it once per narrative-day. Also you suck at fighting, have only four Hit Points, can’t wear armor, and have no weapon proficiencies.”
“But Gandalf has a sword,” I muttered, crestfallen.
“That’s because Gandalf wasn’t a normal wizard, he was one of the Istari, a race of angelic beings who came to protect Middle Earth from… look, just don’t play a wizard if you want to live more than one round of combat.”
A gave a defiant look to my nerd-superiors. Shoulders back, I answered their years of experience with the stunning logic of an utter newbie.
“I want to play a wizard because I think they’re cool. Also I want to be an elf.”
I was met with the cold, hardened stares of older teenagers who knew what they were doing. They knew how to roll dice to make-believe that their thieves had successfully picked the pockets of high level paladins. They knew that to successfully damage a Lich you needed a sword that had a +1 or better enhancement modifier. I didn’t. I had no idea what was to come, I didn’t have any clue what lay ahead in the imaginary dungeons we would be delving in, moving through dark corridors and twisty passages all alike. I couldn’t possible fathom the mortal terrors I would feel as the target of a surprise attack from a Hook Horror. I had no clue that some types of golems were immune to magic spells. But damn it, I wanted to pretend to be a wizard.
Within the hour, I had a piece of paper detailing the abilities of my elven wizard, who I named Merlin 2. Merlin 2 met the world with snorts of derision and mutterings of scorn from my fellow players. This was a truly newbish act; naming a character for a game of D&D is incredibly important. The other players will be forced to spend their time referring to you by your characters’ name, and it really is hard to take the game seriously when, after having nearly died at the hands of a soul-devouring demon, and rescuing the multiverse from the beast’s foul plans, you have to refer to the pimply fat kid next to you as Sir Awesome of Win-town.
Kevin took a look at Merlin 2 for me, to make sure that he was properly done according to the rules.
“It says here that your Wisdom score is higher than your Intelligence.”
“Yeah, I wanted to be wise. Like Gandalf.”
“But wizards need a high Intelligence. It’s how they use their magic, through knowledge and memorization.”
“Yeah,” I responded, “but I want to be wise. Like Gandalf.”
“Why did you spend all your weapon proficiency points on num-chucks?”
“Because num-chucks are cool?”
“You’re a wizard. Leave the fighting to the fighters. Steve’s playing a fighter, and Eric’s rolling a paladin. Don’t worry about fighting. Except for Wan Di, he’s playing a thief, and he’s notorious for stealing stuff from other players and slitting their character’s throats while they sleep.”
“Fine,” I grumbled, taking back Merlin 2 and scratching out my precious, precious num-chucks and using the points I’d had to be effective with the lowly staff, most boring of all weapons.
Merlin 2 re-calibrated, we all settled down at the beat-up old pool table in bearded catholic guy’s basement, and picked out pewter miniatures to represent our characters. I took much longer than everyone else, as I couldn’t decide between the wizard with a staff or the wizard with no staff (who might later be equipped with some badass num-chucks).
Having chosen the little pewter guy with no staff, I started organizing my play space, setting my dice down on the table so that the highest number showed on top, so I could remember the difference between the d8 and the d10. I glanced around to see what everyone else was doing. Wan Di was looking through The Complete Book of Assassins for like the millionth time that night. Better watch out for him, I thought. Eric was sleeping. He did that a lot, I would find out later. Steve and his girlfriend were taking a break from arguing. She sat next to me, pouting fiercely. Wow, I thought to myself. It’s like she doesn’t want to be playing or something.
After a few moments, Kevin set up a big cardboard rectangle-shield with bad fantasy art on it, which had all kinds of tables and charts and numbers on his side to reference during the game.
“Ok. You’re all citizens of the Kingdom of Altheron, which is pretty big and just a generic fantasy kingdom. There have been rumors of a growing army of the undead to the East. Worse still, there are whispers that Vermiglash, the dracolich, has come back from the dead again.”
“What’s a dracolich?” I asked.
“It’s like a skeleton dragon that casts spells,” Kevin answered.
He narrated more stuff that I didn’t pay attention to. It’s like a video game, I though. Nobody pays attention during the opening cut-scene. When he wrapped up, we were informed that we had been recruited for the king’s army, and that the undead were invading. We set our pewter figurines up on the pool table, a mock battlefield of sorts, done so that we could have a better idea of who was where when a spell went off, or how far from that guy that one other guy was when he decided to attack.
And then the dracolich appeared. The other players cursed, wailed, rolled their eyes and gnashed their teeth. When it was their turns, they tried to run away.
Being a tactical genius, I ordered Merlin 2 to charge the enemy.
Merlin 2 was met with ensorcelled dragonfire.
“You take 32 points of damage,” Kevin announced after rolling a handful of dice.
“But I only had 4!” I cried.
“Well, then Merlin 2 is dead.”
I sat for a moment, quiet. The other players looked worriedly at me, unsure of what I was going to do.
“This game is awesome,” I laughed. “Gimme another character sheet.”
No comments:
Post a Comment