Sept. 11: Dungeons & Dragons
In Grade 7, I made the mistake of bringing a Dungeons & dragons
manual to reading period. I brought it because the book I'd been reading
before had been confiscated by the teacher. That book was Ian Fleming's
From Russia With Love. It got confiscated because the cover showed an
attractive woman in a fur coat lounging on a giant gun. That was a
little too suggestive for my Catholic junior high school.
Trust me - the Diamonds are Forever cover was even worse. You could see nipples.
That was bad, but this was perfectly fine:
One of my classmates was a big Dungeons & Dragons buff and, when he spied me reading that D&D instruction manual, latched on to me as his new best friend. We'd eat lunch together and he would prattle on about Malcon, a level 47 fighter who had a bastard sword of plus 8 and a thaco of -11 and who once met a goddess who granted him immunity to all poisons. All this made perfect sense to my friend and I'm sure it makes perfect sense to some of my readers, but I had no idea what he was going on about.
Even though I DID play Dungeons & Dragons. My best friend was a dungeon master and since he lived only three houses down, I was his number one player. I think I had eight characters and one of them, an elf named Castor, died after eating diseased yeti meat. But the other seven are still alive. I get postcards from them now and then.
The Dungeons & Dragons I played with my best friend was the basic D&D. My new buddy in Grade 7 urged me to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He said the basic version was for babies. One day, he showed me all his AD&D instruction manuals. They took up an entire shelf. I thought that was an awful lot of reading for someone who just wanted to spend a few hours every week pretending to be an elf.
I'm not just an elf, I'm an elf with a thaco of minus 13!!! get it straight!
My grade 7 buddy kept wanting me to come over to his house to play Dungeons & Dragons but I never got around to it. In Grade 8, he transferred to another school so that was the end of that.
-
Listen: I am a nerd. I have played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons before. I used to play it on the computer and I estimate I wasted about 150 hours of my life playing Neverwinter Nights. For some reason, whenever I play these games, I always choose a female avatar.
I'm totally not sure why.
-
Sometime after Grade 7, I discovered a role playing game called Top Secret, which allowed you to create interactive stories in the realm of espionage rather than sword and sorcery. I became the gamemaster and some pals and I created some characters and did a couple missions but it didn't last very long.
The strange thing is that I wasn't embarrassed to tell people I played Top Secret but I would have been if I told them I played D&D.
-
We got our D&D stuff from a store called Chess and Games Galore, which used to be located in Southcentre Mall in Calgary. I was in there once and I overheard the following conversation between two D&D players:
A: Timmy tell you about the game on Friday?
B: No.
A: Yeah it was just him and Jake. You know Jake has that master thief who's chaotic neutral...
B: Uh huh...
A: So they're exploring the dungeon and Jake suddenly pulls a knife on Timmy
B: Oh no. Timmy's sprite...
A: Yeah the sprite just whoops ass on Jake. Totally destroys him. And when Timmy searches Jake's body he finds this map...
B: Jake's storehouse?
A: Yeah. Found about five million gold pieces there...
It needs to be said that both these guys were in their 40s.
-
My friend, Michael, is a longtime participant in role-playing games. I don't know if he's into AD&D but I suspect not. I went to his apartment once to try gaming but it just wasn't my thing and I told Michael that and, being the gentleman that he is, accepted it.
Even so, Michael told me a role-playing story that I really enjoyed. It was about a time he and his girlfriend visited the Sentry Box, which is Calgary's premiere nerd store.*
There was a game going on and all the players looked up when the girlfriend entered and there was about five seconds of perfect silence.
"They just aren't used to having women present," Michael later said. "It was almost like a gift from the gods."
Whatever. I just want those nerds to know that there weren't a lot of chicks present when we were playing Top Secret either.
-
* By nerd store, I mean it sells Dungeons and Dragons stuff and provides a venue for gaming sessions (where lots of Doritos and Mountain Dew are consumed.)
Trust me - the Diamonds are Forever cover was even worse. You could see nipples.That was bad, but this was perfectly fine:
One of my classmates was a big Dungeons & Dragons buff and, when he spied me reading that D&D instruction manual, latched on to me as his new best friend. We'd eat lunch together and he would prattle on about Malcon, a level 47 fighter who had a bastard sword of plus 8 and a thaco of -11 and who once met a goddess who granted him immunity to all poisons. All this made perfect sense to my friend and I'm sure it makes perfect sense to some of my readers, but I had no idea what he was going on about.
Even though I DID play Dungeons & Dragons. My best friend was a dungeon master and since he lived only three houses down, I was his number one player. I think I had eight characters and one of them, an elf named Castor, died after eating diseased yeti meat. But the other seven are still alive. I get postcards from them now and then.
The Dungeons & Dragons I played with my best friend was the basic D&D. My new buddy in Grade 7 urged me to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He said the basic version was for babies. One day, he showed me all his AD&D instruction manuals. They took up an entire shelf. I thought that was an awful lot of reading for someone who just wanted to spend a few hours every week pretending to be an elf.
I'm not just an elf, I'm an elf with a thaco of minus 13!!! get it straight!My grade 7 buddy kept wanting me to come over to his house to play Dungeons & Dragons but I never got around to it. In Grade 8, he transferred to another school so that was the end of that.
-
Listen: I am a nerd. I have played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons before. I used to play it on the computer and I estimate I wasted about 150 hours of my life playing Neverwinter Nights. For some reason, whenever I play these games, I always choose a female avatar.
I'm totally not sure why.
-
Sometime after Grade 7, I discovered a role playing game called Top Secret, which allowed you to create interactive stories in the realm of espionage rather than sword and sorcery. I became the gamemaster and some pals and I created some characters and did a couple missions but it didn't last very long.
The strange thing is that I wasn't embarrassed to tell people I played Top Secret but I would have been if I told them I played D&D.
-
We got our D&D stuff from a store called Chess and Games Galore, which used to be located in Southcentre Mall in Calgary. I was in there once and I overheard the following conversation between two D&D players:
A: Timmy tell you about the game on Friday?
B: No.
A: Yeah it was just him and Jake. You know Jake has that master thief who's chaotic neutral...
B: Uh huh...
A: So they're exploring the dungeon and Jake suddenly pulls a knife on Timmy
B: Oh no. Timmy's sprite...
A: Yeah the sprite just whoops ass on Jake. Totally destroys him. And when Timmy searches Jake's body he finds this map...
B: Jake's storehouse?
A: Yeah. Found about five million gold pieces there...
It needs to be said that both these guys were in their 40s.
-
My friend, Michael, is a longtime participant in role-playing games. I don't know if he's into AD&D but I suspect not. I went to his apartment once to try gaming but it just wasn't my thing and I told Michael that and, being the gentleman that he is, accepted it.
Even so, Michael told me a role-playing story that I really enjoyed. It was about a time he and his girlfriend visited the Sentry Box, which is Calgary's premiere nerd store.*
There was a game going on and all the players looked up when the girlfriend entered and there was about five seconds of perfect silence.
"They just aren't used to having women present," Michael later said. "It was almost like a gift from the gods."
Whatever. I just want those nerds to know that there weren't a lot of chicks present when we were playing Top Secret either.
-
* By nerd store, I mean it sells Dungeons and Dragons stuff and provides a venue for gaming sessions (where lots of Doritos and Mountain Dew are consumed.)
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