Rolling the final D20
Just in case you haven't heard the news, as many of you have noted, Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died, unfortunately just before the upcoming release of the latest version of D&D.
My first reaction, I'm ashamed to admit, was to think that he missed his save roll.
But then I flashed back to my first ever Dungeons and Dragons game, years and years ago. We won't specify the exact number of years, but I was 11, and in Project Idea summer school. My mother and I had bargained: if I took a two week typing course and learned to type, I could then take two weeks of whatever I wanted. I chose Creative Writing for one week, and Gaming for the second.
The typing class, frankly, was a waste of time; I never learned to type until years later, with the help of Typing Tutor and its Letter Invaders game. (See? Even then I was a gamer.) I don't remember the Creative Writing class. But I do remember the Gaming class.
I'd assumed that we'd spend the week playing board games, which worked for me. But instead, a teenage kid came up to us, bent his head in a conspiratorial fashion, and whispered, "Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?"
We looked at one another and shook our heads no. We'd never even heard of it.
"Well then," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Wanna try?"
And so began the first major gaming experience of my life.
Mind you, we knew nothing about the game. Nothing at all. Sure, I'd read a small bit of fantasy by then -- books about witches, the Oz books, the Narnia books -- but my major fantasy reading was still to come (fantasy books, for the most part, lacked my obsession with robots and dinosaurs.) And that was it. We had no idea what the creatures we encountered were, or what we were supposed to be doing. ("Can I hit it on the head?" "Slimy? Will I get slime on my sword?" "We had to buy food? What was with the food? We have to eat this? GROSS!") and so on.
I played a cleric, Sister Rebecca. Not that I knew what a cleric was -- I was only a cleric because, by the luck of the dice, Wisdom had been my highest score. (This was back in the good old Basic edition days, folks, when you played what you rolled and you were happy with it, damn it. None of this rolling and then assigning scores to your attributes stuff, no sirree. We took what we were given and ran with it.) It meant, I found out, that I had a mace and could smash things. (This perhaps explains my ongoing reactions to organized religion today.) Once I hit second level, I could also heal things. (Ah, yes, the other side of basic D&D, where the cleric only gained spells on second level.) Not that I knew what to heal. We had two thieves, an elf (under basic rules, the awesome class, since it was the only one that could both fight and and do magic, but on the other hand, it was also the one that needed the most experience points to level up), a fighter, a dwarf, and one magic users that released her magic missile spell and then asked, "Can I do anything?" "Can I do anything now?" We had to distinguish between Disney dwarfs and D&D dwarves since the dwarf didn't want to sing. We found out what kobolds and goblins are. We found out that magic users will die. We learned the importance of listening at closed doors, and why elves should not simply jump into pools because they are green, and that skeletons can fall to the floor in a tumble of bones if you hit them hard enough -- but that is just the sort of thing that brings something even worse along.
It was wonderful. It was magical. I've probably been in better and greater games since; I like to think that I've run a few good games here and there. But something about that first game still lingers with me, that game where I entered a totally unknown place, with totally unknown tools, with a handful of strange looking dice, and had to find out what I could do and what I could be.
Thanks, Gary Gygax.
My first reaction, I'm ashamed to admit, was to think that he missed his save roll.
But then I flashed back to my first ever Dungeons and Dragons game, years and years ago. We won't specify the exact number of years, but I was 11, and in Project Idea summer school. My mother and I had bargained: if I took a two week typing course and learned to type, I could then take two weeks of whatever I wanted. I chose Creative Writing for one week, and Gaming for the second.
The typing class, frankly, was a waste of time; I never learned to type until years later, with the help of Typing Tutor and its Letter Invaders game. (See? Even then I was a gamer.) I don't remember the Creative Writing class. But I do remember the Gaming class.
I'd assumed that we'd spend the week playing board games, which worked for me. But instead, a teenage kid came up to us, bent his head in a conspiratorial fashion, and whispered, "Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?"
We looked at one another and shook our heads no. We'd never even heard of it.
"Well then," he said, rubbing his hands together. "Wanna try?"
And so began the first major gaming experience of my life.
Mind you, we knew nothing about the game. Nothing at all. Sure, I'd read a small bit of fantasy by then -- books about witches, the Oz books, the Narnia books -- but my major fantasy reading was still to come (fantasy books, for the most part, lacked my obsession with robots and dinosaurs.) And that was it. We had no idea what the creatures we encountered were, or what we were supposed to be doing. ("Can I hit it on the head?" "Slimy? Will I get slime on my sword?" "We had to buy food? What was with the food? We have to eat this? GROSS!") and so on.
I played a cleric, Sister Rebecca. Not that I knew what a cleric was -- I was only a cleric because, by the luck of the dice, Wisdom had been my highest score. (This was back in the good old Basic edition days, folks, when you played what you rolled and you were happy with it, damn it. None of this rolling and then assigning scores to your attributes stuff, no sirree. We took what we were given and ran with it.) It meant, I found out, that I had a mace and could smash things. (This perhaps explains my ongoing reactions to organized religion today.) Once I hit second level, I could also heal things. (Ah, yes, the other side of basic D&D, where the cleric only gained spells on second level.) Not that I knew what to heal. We had two thieves, an elf (under basic rules, the awesome class, since it was the only one that could both fight and and do magic, but on the other hand, it was also the one that needed the most experience points to level up), a fighter, a dwarf, and one magic users that released her magic missile spell and then asked, "Can I do anything?" "Can I do anything now?" We had to distinguish between Disney dwarfs and D&D dwarves since the dwarf didn't want to sing. We found out what kobolds and goblins are. We found out that magic users will die. We learned the importance of listening at closed doors, and why elves should not simply jump into pools because they are green, and that skeletons can fall to the floor in a tumble of bones if you hit them hard enough -- but that is just the sort of thing that brings something even worse along.
It was wonderful. It was magical. I've probably been in better and greater games since; I like to think that I've run a few good games here and there. But something about that first game still lingers with me, that game where I entered a totally unknown place, with totally unknown tools, with a handful of strange looking dice, and had to find out what I could do and what I could be.
Thanks, Gary Gygax.