63
By December, I could tell there was something up. A number of my
friends, Pete and Luke most obviously, were keeping something secret
from me. They would talk about it quietly at the cafeteria and then
claimed to have no idea what they had been talking about when I'd
show-up and ask. Secret get-togethers would be happening with Pete's
upperclassman friend, now graduated and just living at home.
Eventually, it came out: They had started a D&D group.
Before the age of multiplayer online games, there was Dungeons &
Dragons to fill the evenings and weekends of avid hearts. If the 'Go
Fish' playing card game were a typical board game, then Dungeons &
Dragons would be 'Baccarat'. Okay, I've never really played
'Baccarat' but I'm assuming it's involved.
Rather than a board, Dungeons & Dragons uses books, many books.
In Nineteen Eighty One, the typical set of books to play totaled
around thirty dollars. To have the complete set including all of the
various monster manuals and such you were looking at over one hundred
dollars. Once you had these books, then you needed the actual games.
The books set up the structure of how the game was played and what
could be in it, but then the game folders themselves had an adventure
your players could go on. At the time these puppies, I think, went
from seven dollars to just under twenty dollars a piece. Oh yes,
dice! I forgot to mention the dice. Unlike most other
dice-based games using six sided dice for all purposes, this game
used dice ranging from four sides to twenty sides. A cheap set would
put you back under ten dollars, a good set twenty to thirty...
Okay, now are we ready to play?
Luke, Pete and friend were with a couple of the upperclassman's
friends and they were apparently having a great time of it,
especially on Saturday nights. Once I found out, I wanted in.
But nope, the group was too full and the upperclassman back to
rolling his eyes with the prospect of me being around. But the word
was out and now Van and Jonathan wanted in too. So by the start of
Nineteen Eighty-Two, the upperclassman agreed to start a second group
on Sundays at Jonathan's house.
Unlike other games where each player had an equal placement and the
game flowed forward from there, Dungeons & Dragons required a
'Dungeon Master' through whom the actions of the other players
filtered and, the new play to be had, revealed. We started
out by spending the first day creating our 'characters' based on high
fantasy archetypes, there were so many skills and playing roles to
chose from. Did you want to be a magician or a fighter? Did you
want to be a human or an elf? There are opportunities and drawbacks
to each choice and you needed to find the balance that suited you and
fit within your initial allowance of skill points. Always wanting to
do everything, I discovered the role of 'Bard', effectively a human
role which combined a little bit of many of the other player types, I
named him after a Dark Shadows television character.
During this warm-up period, Jonathan, Van and myself were fervently
ordering the various initial books needed to play the game from the
local book shop or making trips to the capital city to hopefully find
them on the shelf. While we could use other people's dice, there was
a karma sort of thing about it, and so we'd make trips to the
big mall outside the capital city where there was one store with a
wide selection of dice and colors, even little dice bags and little
playing figures. While playing figures weren't necessary and you
could use a pencil eraser to represent yourself during game play, a
little pewter guy that appealed to your sense of who your character
was truly helped with the immersive quality of play.
With the upperclassman as our guide, we entered our first dungeon the
following week. Using graph paper we would be given clues of where
our group had entered, say a ten foot by twenty foot room. A
description of the place would be read to us out of the game folder
and we would have to figure out what the heck we were going to do.
Sometimes it was obvious as you enter a room with monsters and then
we'd set out our playing figurines in a space representing the place
we were at, the Dungeon Master would show where the monster was,
using a token of his own, then one by one we'd say what we'd do and
roll dice to see if our player could do it. If so, good, if
not, at least there were other members of the team with a chance.
And the monster would get his strike. With luck, the monster would
be dead at the end of several of these 'attack rounds' and your
players alive enough that you could heal them when possible, or nurse
them along until you found more supplies.
But more fun for me, were the rooms we'd enter that you didn't know
what was going on. We'd get a description of the room: Was there a
clue to a trap in that description? Was there something valuable that
we were over looking? As these questions came to us, we'd ask the
Dungeon Master and he may or may not tell us more details based on
what he felt we could or couldn't see. Sometimes these disclosures
had a level of chance to them and dice would be rolled. Was the
door to the next room trapped? A roll of dice, sometimes 'yes',
sometimes 'no', and sometimes you couldn't tell. A sense of
anticipation would come over us as we would creep around the next
corner... And sometimes one of our characters would die. If
no one had the magic to bring them back, then the affected player
would have to race to create a new character on the side while the
rest of the group continued playing. Once assembled and affirmed by
the Dungeon Master, the group of characters would 'bump into' this
new character already somewhere within the dungeon and they'd join
the group after some dubious ribbing by the rest of the group as to
whether or not this new fellow could be trusted.
What appealed to me so much with this game was the sense of
camaraderie and teamwork necessary amongst the players to get through
a full 'Dungeon' over the course of a few weekends; sometimes with
evenings spanning into the wee hours of the next day. Where I was
feeling progressively alone and abandoned in my real life, this game
afforded me the sense that I was not alone, at least for a few hours
each week. That connectedness at this dark period of my life, I
really believe, saved me from falling into oblivion from the spiral I
had been living in during the Fall and early Winter.
After our first Sunday adventure, the upperclassman had found some
promise in me and asked if I'd become the new Dungeon Master for the
Sunday group. It turned out, once becoming a Dungeon Master one was
so busy managing the flow of the game that you couldn't really play
it yourself any more. Sure, you could have your own character in
with the group, but since you already knew everything that was going
to happen you really couldn't discover it for yourself. Your
player became relegated to the role of an extra sword for the group
when a fight broke out. Given his desire to play and complaints
about not being able to participate, I agreed with one condition:
That I could join the Saturday night group as a player. Agreed.
Being a Dungeon Master really suited me, not only did it give me that
sense of being respected that I had enjoyed in the previous year, but
it also gave me reason to pull out my cache of funny voices and
devious twists of mind. While I had come to parrot the voices of
puppets and cartoon characters in childhood, using such voices on a
day to day basis got one strange looks. But applying them in the
role of Dungeon Master added to the atmosphere of what the players
were encountering. My creative mind helped to add moments of humor
to the less challenging points of an unfolding game, yet also let me
see opportunities to add to the atmosphere as the characters walked
through the map and notice, say, a thread laying on the floor.
Was it a trap? Was it a clue? Or had a monster
recently darned his socks? Even if it was just a monster having
darned his sock, did it give a clue as to what type or size of
monster they'd see around the next corner?
The upperclassman seemed to enjoy these little twists I'd toss into
the maps he was already familiar with and he soon welcomed me as a --
lower tier -- friend. Going to his house to be tutored on the
details of being a Dungeon Master was like going to the fount of
wisdom. His bedroom was couched in the peak of his home's roof,
resulting in a sloped ceiling; entering his room was like walking
into a temple... But it was just his bedroom and he made it clear
that he was tolerating me because he really wanted to play for
his own fun on Sundays.
The Saturday and Sunday Dungeon & Dragons games lasted for the
rest of the school year, providing me a place to gather with friends
and feel a sense of connectedness and purpose that was otherwise
lacking in my life at the time. Sometimes, when a different playing
location was needed, we'd go to my otherwise empty and unused house.
Though ultimately, as I was using these games to escape my own
circumstances, I would prefer the games to be at other locations
whenever possible.
Once the end of the school year came, the upperclassman left to join
the army and the moment was gone. While I tried several times in the
following years to recreate a Dungeon & Dragons group, they
always seemed a pale imitation and never achieved that same level of
cohesiveness and belonging as I had found in that first group during
a dark period of my life.
impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop
No comments:
Post a Comment