My Life: Crotchety D&D Gamers

My college life will be discussed more thoroughly in a later blog. I'm avoiding it for now, for various reasons, including that I'm trying to avoid the more "downer" blogs for now. Suffice to say that I don't have as many interesting or pleasant college stories as I would like, but I'll start with one of the better ones. One thing that fascinated me as a kid was the Dungeons and Dragons game. But no matter how hard I tried, I never could get into it in junior high and high school. I tried running games, but my friends were ambivalent, and otherwise you didn't have many options at that age, especially when high school was a more preppy environment.

But that's what college is for. Well, college is for a lot of things, but if you're a geek, that's one of them. Even then, it took me a while. If you're looking to spend a lot of time in college gaming and watching anime, a Jesuit university is not necessarily the best choice. Eventually, though, I made my way to one of the nearby friendly local gaming stores by bus, and signed up for a one-shot game one of the local players wanted to test before trying to get it professionally published. The game went fairly well, and after the player told me he was starting a new campaign, I jumped at the chance, even if it meant taking a bus every Saturday.

They were a ragtag bunch, that first group. Most were older than me, and most were at least somewhat successful professionally and romantically. Most were also heavier drinkers, among...other things we won't get into. They also mostly smoked like chimneys, which was hell on my lungs after 6-8 hours in the room with them. But it was my first game, and my first gaming group. That was always magical. When it wasn't hell.

An interesting thing about gamers is that, if you find ones who played earlier editions, they sort of sound like your stereotypical grandpa cliché. You know, walking five miles to school, in the snow, uphill both ways, etc. Except in this case it's more "In my day, if you failed a saving throw versus fireball, you had to roll to see if every one of your magic items survived! And once you hit zero hit points, you were dead, end of story! And if you were an elf, you multiclassed and you were awesome until seventh level, and then you were useless! And mages accomplished nothing for the first four levels, which they take twice as along as everyone else to get past! And we liked it!"

And so on. And being with this group was no different. In fact, it was probably worse, because the DM made us work for everything. It was a brutal campaign. In the two and a half years that I played in it, my character died four times before the campaign finale. And in said campaign finale, the entire universe was destroyed and EVERYONE died. And we liked it!

Well, honestly, I didn't always like it. Sometimes the game was too punishing. I didn't like the parts that were unfair, or losing elements of the character that I personalized to destruction or the various rules and edition changes. But it was a trial by fire. I went from being clueless about the game, at a practical level at least, to being, if not an expert, at least knowledgeable. And I have the memories. I remember the silly things, like when my plans involving illusions went horribly wrong or the jokes made at my wizard's, who had a Dexterity of 6 on a good day, expense. I remember my brilliant plans, like when I killed the parasitic worms inside my shooting myself with my own lightning bolt. And I'll never forget the elaborate scheme I made where we had to sneak into the massive army of the main campaign villain, steal his magical artifact and the very horse he rode in on, and escape via magical airship. And it worked! And only three people died!

So, what have I learned from all this? Well, I learned that no matter how hard it seems, no matter the hazings and the frustrations, if you truly want to learn something, if it's something you really enjoy, you will learn it. As I look more into both learning to become a game designer and to eventually take on that job myself, you can't possibly have a better realization than that. What I would give to one day say, "Yeah, I worked as a game designer. I had to work 80 hours during crunch time, eat so much pizza it oozed out of my pores, and stare unblinking at layouts and screens and brainstorming sessions for hours at a time. And I liked it!"