Conrad
For more than 30 years my wife and I have been going to the same comic book
store in Worcester.
Back in the 80’s there was a guy who hung around there all the time named
Conrad. He was very big into playing D&D. I’m not knocking D&D in any
way. I played then, I play now, I think it is all good fun as long as no
one takes it too seriously.
Conrad did take it too seriously.
He would follow people around the store telling them of his D&D adventures.
He played a chaotic evil assassin and liked killing other people in his
player group and justifying it as it was “in character”.
I never met anyone else in his gaming group, so I have no idea if this was
considered acceptable or not.
One day I stopped by the shop and the owner had a very strange look on his
face.
I asked him what was wrong and he told me he had just had Conrad arrested.
Apparently he came into the store with a gun and told the owner he was on
the way to go kill his gaming group because they had killed off his
character in the game.
The owner asked him to tell him more about that while hitting the alarm
button for the store. Apparently it took the police close to an hour to
arrive and the whole time the owner kept Conrad talking and hoping that
none of his gaming group came in.
When the police did show up, the owner told them what was going on, and
they took Conrad away.
The owner told me that it had been the hardest thing he had ever done to
sit there with someone he knew had a gun and was set on killing people
while acting normal and keeping him there until the police showed up.
I’m glad he did and didn’t say it was someone else’s problem.
I still go to the store. I haven’t seen Conrad since and it’s been close
to 30 years.
Hopefully he got some help.