… than me.

I gotta talk about the D&D session I had last week with my brother and brother-in-law.  First off, I was really nervous because, as I have posted before, these guys love to make fun and tease and mock.  And here I was, letting them into my inner sanctum of nerdery (a real word?) and exposing them to my newly-made nerd friends.

It all started when we were out a PF Chang’s for dinner, and we ran into one of my gaming buddies.  We talked to Jay and his wife for a bit, and came back to the table.  They all wanted to know who our friend was, and so we told them he plays D&D with us.  “He doesn’t look like a D&D nerd”, my brother-in-law Mark said.  Scott, my brother, said he was offended that we had gone off and made a gaming group without including them, and they both wanted to play.  Mark, legendary for being Scott’s crony and “me-too” guy, said he wanted to play also.

I put them off for months, successfully fending off their (mainly Scott’s) repeated requests at joining in.  Then, when the family met my friends James and Terry at my Halloween party, Scott started talking to them about it and got James to agree to host an introductory session.

I scheduled an evening where everyone was available, sent out an e-vite (always a required part), and actually got everyone to agree.  Well, actually Mark initially said “no”, but Scott blackmailed him into it by making his participation a condition of letting my niece Briaunna (Scott’s daughter) fly out to Boston to watch my other niece Danielle (Mark and my sister Stephanie’s daughter) graduate from pastry chef school.

My worst fears had been realized.  I told myself “we’ll just do the one night, they won’t like it, and then I can go back to business as usual”.

How shocked and surprised I was, then, to find that not only did they enjoy themselves and had fun, but they actually want to play it again!

Mark came into my house and said “I want to play a paladin” (I didn’t know he even knew what a paladin was… come to find out he heard it from one of his fellow nerd friends).  Luckily enough, I had a dwarf paladin all rolled up for him.

When Scott showed up, he brought the quick-play rules I had gottent to him earlier in the week, and wanted to play the Human Wizard, whom he called “Snarfblat” (A little Mermaid reference… don’t ask).  He decided to play a wizard, because apparently they “get all the chicks”.

James played Dungeon Master and prepared an adventure.  We all sat down and played a very basic, straightforward dungeon.  As the story went, we were adventurers sent to the village of Lilcrest to address a recent infestation of a dragon(!) south of the town.  We journeyed a small way outside of the village, and found some stone stairs descending into the darkness…

Since Mark was our default defender, he ended up getting “kicked in the crotch” (as he put it), by being the guy who engaged in melee.  Scott’s wizard Snarfblat stayed behind the lines, throwing spell after spell, really dishing out the damage.  Terry played a really great Leader, as always, with his halfling cleric healing people and making sure we all didn’t die.  I brought my Elven Ranger Swift into the mix with his mad archery skills, and the air sang with arrow after arrow.

We killed goblins and huge rats, battled the black dragon and withstood his acid breath and forced him to flee, and cleared out the small lair where they had been hiding out and planning their next evil attack on the village.  The heroes were successful, and gained the accolades and praise of the entire hamelt of Lilcrest!

So… what I thought was going to be a blow-off night might just now turn into a full-blown campaign!  Scott has already said he’s in for another session, and Mark has also said he is in.  I’m already looking at multi-classing my Ranger with some Rogue skills for detecting traps and unlocking chests.

My wife had Stephanie and my sister-in-law Melyssa over for a girl’s movie night while the boys were downstairs playing.  My sister got a real kick out of the two of them emerging from the downstairs, arguing over who did more damage to the dragon, and which powers were more effective.  Scott’s wife Melyssa even had to lean over to him and ask him to “stop talking like that”.

We have created a couple more D&D nerds – Huzzah!

1) The Incredible Hulk Movie: As those who know me are aware, I love the big Green guy. He’s one of my all-time favorite super-heroes (and I loves me some Super-Heroes), and so I am totally jazzed about this movie coming out. I’ve already been obsessively scouring the internet watching all the advance clips and trailers I can (many of them more than once), and I’ve been to Target and bought all the Hulk-related merchandise I think my wife will let me get away with.

Will the movie suck? Honestly, I don’t know. I think the fanboy discussion forums are already full of postulations and theories on this issue. Do I really care? Nope. I’m going to be in the line on opening night to see it, dragging my wife along with me, and I will happily pay my nine bucks to watch ol’ Jade drawers beat the crap out of… anything that gets in his way.

‘Nuff Said!

2) 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons: I’m an old school nerd. Table-top Role-Playing Games is still for me a great time. Although kids these days (and I feel SO VERY OLD saying it like that) prefer to have their rules doled out in computer simulated rules engines. I still enjoy dice and maps and pre-painted miniature figures to live out my fantasy life as a wizard, warrior, dwarf or what-have-you.

There’s only one problem: My regular gaming group is back in Colorado, with all the remnants of my old life. I haven’t gotten the balls to start a in-the-flesh gaming group here yet. Part of me wants to brave the unwashed denizens of the comic shop in Provo, but I wither under their date-less stares, being self-demoted to part-time RPG hobbyist.

But that hasn’t stopped me from pre-ordering the core books on Amazon.com to be delivered to my doorstep early next week. It hasn’t prevented me from creating my very own campaign world, complete with centuries-old histories, complex religions and secret societies. And it hasn’t stopped me from boring my poor wife to tears with the details of it all.

Even though I wish I could co-erce my teenage nephews into experimenting with some good old P-n-P gaming, I am resigned to the fact that, for now at least, my D&D fantasies will have to be resigned to that of internal daydreams.