Spring and... D&D?
Spring is in the air… the time when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of Dungeons and Dragons.

Okay, so I can be cliché and geeky at the same time. But it’s more of that whole sense-memory thing (like listening to some very memory-filled music while coding. It was in the spring of 1981 when I discovered the game. Some of the kids were playing it at school. The controversy surrounding the game was growing, making it feel a little illicit, and certainly driving its popularity through the roof.

I’d had the opportunity to thumb through some of the books, and I was completely propelled into a different world. The pictures and pedantic text evoked thoughts of fantastic adventures on alien worlds, heavy metal music in the background and sword-wielding heroes hewing their way through monstrous foes. I’d recently read the Narnia and Prydain series (as well as lots of science fiction), so the visions were fresh and compelling.

My parents got me the brand-new “Red Box” Basic set for my birthday on April 2, 1981. I played for the first time that afternoon, with a couple of friends from school. I didn’t understand the rules, but I had a blast. I played a hapless rogue who got poisoned by a giant spider – rescued at the last minute by another player (and a bit of rules fudging by the DM).

That first spring and summer was magical. I was a D&D Junkie. Since there were far more people who wanted to play than people who wanted to run the game, I ended up being tapped to be the “Dungeon Master” more often than not. As the weather was warm, we’d sometimes play on the back porch overlooking a ravine (Maryland is beautiful in the spring and summer). It was a great time.

The wild thing was that even then, though D&D was the excuse that brought friends together on a particular day, we usually only spent a part of the day playing the game. We’d play for an hour or two, take a break, go do something else for a while, and maybe (or maybe not) get back to playing the game. We didn’t really have a “campaign” that we continued from session to session – we’d play through part of a module, and then the next time we got together someone else would be DMing, and we’d have the same characters playing through something else entirely.

The funny thing is, after that first year I didn’t play nearly as much as I wanted to. Throughout most of high school I played maybe four or five times a year. I went off to college, and met a couple of girls who played D&D the weekend after I moved in, right before classes started. That Monday (Labor day), they woke me up with a phone call.

“Do you want to play D&D today?” one girl (Holly) asked me over the phone. I was still groggy and in bed.

“Uh, sure. Who’s DMing?” I asked.

“We were hoping you would.”

I stammered, wiping the sleep from my eyes. “Uh, sure, I guess so. I don’t have anything ready. What time?”

“We’re in the lobby of your dorm right now. We brought friends. As soon as you are ready.”

Gah!!!! Well, the rest, as they say, is history. I played more D&D that first year of college than perhaps the entire six years previous to that. One of the “friends” that Holly and her roommate brought that day ended up my best man at my wedding. Another guy that was there that first day ended up being a long-term friend, and actually hired me to come work for him last October. A very pretty girl that I had met before joined our gaming group the following semester (at my invitation). A few years later we were married.

And we still have our gaming group that plays almost every week. And our kids are starting to play now, too. It’s Geeks: The Next Generation. But what it ultimately STILL comes down to is having an excuse to spend time with good friends. And it’s still a great way to spend a nice, warm Saturday evening.

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:25 AM (Permalink)