… 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!

To anyone who knows me already knows, I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons since I was 12.  I started out like most kids that age, cracking open a 1st edition book in my friend’s basement and making a character on plain ruled paper.  Those days were still when D&D was considered “of-the-devil”, which of course made it all the more cool to play.

We wasted away afternoons and sleepless evenings plunging our little guys into caves and keeps, fighting orcs and dragons, plundering hoards and slaughtering evil minions.  It ignited our imaginations and occupied our little nerdy brains.

Growing up, that feeling remained.  I played through high school and into college, eventually grabbing hold of the Dungeon Master reigns, and escorting my friends through adventures I created.  It was like writing fiction, except that someone else can come in and change the rules of your story.  It was a lot of fun, to stay “on your feet” and have to overcome challenges thrown at you by players who don’t want to play to your script.

For the last 20 years, I have been playing with the same group in Colorado.  We got to know, not only each other’s gaming styles, but crafted our own language of Dungeons and Dragons, and established a rich history of previous campaigns and characters, and we all became very intimately familiar with our PC’s as much as our real-life friendship.

I was a little intimidated to bring my wife (then-girlfriend) into this conclave of nerd-ery.  Being such a tight-knit group, quoting Monty Python and a long lineage of in-jokes, I thought spending 4-6 hours around a table moving little miniature figures on a square grid would be the truest test of her commitment to me.  And like a true champion, she overcame those challenges and became a full-fledged member of our gang.

So, when I moved my family out here to Utah, it was no surprise one of the biggest things I had to sacrifice was playing with that group of folks.  We tried playing via webcam, but it wasn’t the same as being there.  We soon had to call it quits, and I was left without my main form of entertainment and distraction.

Then, last June, those bastards at Wizards of the Coast (the company that publishes D&D) come out with a whole new edition of the game.  With updated rules and streamlined game mechanics, it was a nerd’s wet dream.  The only problem was, I had no one to play with anymore.

For the next six weeks, I voraciously devoured the source books, reading through all new classes and races, and their powers and abilities.  I literally drove my wife crazy with my constant talking about it, and a little more than my own share of obsession. (yes, I can get a little obsessive sometimes)   She finally said, bless her heart “why don’t you go any play somewhere?”

I soon found a game of pick-up D&D (yes, they have those) down at a nearby hobby store, so down I went.  It was a definitely different experience from my regular gaming group, but it did serve to whet my whistle for more.  Since those games were on a Wednesday, it was difficult for me to leave a wife with two very, very young kids alone for 4 hours while I pranced off to play at being a wizard (or in my case, a Dragonborn Warlord).

So the quest for a new gaming group began.  I posted a message out on the hobby store’s forum, and within a couple of weeks, started getting some responses.  Initially I wasn’t that optimistic that I would get people that shared my image of the game (something a little more casual and not taken quite so seriously, but still grab the imagination and have fun), but as I started dialogue with the folks who responded, I began to get excited.

When we finally scheduled our first new gaming session, I was a little nervous.  After all, not only had I not gamed with these guys before, but I had never run a 4th edition session.  That first time went really well, the guys were really cool, and it seemed like everyone had fun and looked forward to the next session.

We’ve had four sessions now, and we are really starting to get into a groove.  The guys are really relaxed at the table, cracking jokes and commenting on the current in-game situation, and my wife is even having fun (even though she’s not playing her favorite class, the Druid).  So, even though it’s not the group of guys I’ve been playing with since college, it is still D&D, and it is still fun.

Now, my brother has expressed an interest in playing.  This is my older brother; the guy who gave me pinkbellies and played ten fruits on me as a kid (ten fruits is something you play “on” people, not “with” people).  WHen he initially said he wanted to play, it was safe to assume he was merely using this as an opportunity to make fun of this little brother.  But, once he met my friends at my Halloween party and they offered to run an intro adventure for him, I realized that he might actually be sincere.  So, while I’m a little afraid at someone breaching my little nerd universe, I am also excited at being able to share something that I really enjoy with someone in my family.

Who knows, he may just become another gaming nerd like me… or at least, he’ll have fun.