From the Archives: Gamer Geek Me--Why I Love Paper and Dice Games

Veronica sez: one from the Archives, written by Author Jax Garren for your enjoyment! Her latest 2015 release is STRIPPED WITH THE VAMPIRE.

I play RPGS--not the World of Warcraft kind, the sit-around-a-table-and-roll-dice kind. Like that one with the dragons and the dungeon-crawling, although I don't play that one very often. The basic idea behind P'n'D RPGs is that everyone agrees on a setting then one person creates a plot and the other players create characters. Together you sit around a table and tell the story, using dice rolls or some other form of chance to determine the success or failure of specific actions. Typically each character has a different specialty appropriate to the setting, like piloting, thieving, conning, doctoring, fighting, etc., and the group works together to achieve a common goal. On the geek hierarchy this apparently puts me somewhere between people who can quote Isaac Asimov and erotic furries.

I was in college when I started playing. A group of friends from the Madrigal Choir I sang with (I think I just slid further down the hierarchy) invited my bestie and I to join them for an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons campaign set in Ravenloft, a medieval vampire setting. (Yes, I know what THAC0 stands for. If you do, too--without looking it up--comment and tell me!) The GM* asked us to describe ourselves, and I asked him what the fashion of the world was like. He looked at me blankly, and I persisted, "Well, is it normal to have tattoos? Colored hair? How long? How many piercings are average? You asked me to describe myself." He turned to the rest of the table and barked out a laugh--he had, and still has, this amazingly rich bass voice. "Well, gentlemen, the ladies have joined us." And then he proceeded to give me a very serious rundown of the fashion of the place and era. I later found out he was incredibly pleased somebody bothered to ask.

Right out of college, my bestie and I put a group together--4 women and my fiance--to have a weekly dinner and game night. We were pretty pleased with ourselves because even though we let guys in, we were a female-founded group. We ladies got to set the gaming tone (storytelling over beating up monsters for treasure, with a focus on trying different settings and systems as opposed to sticking with fantasy) and the food tone (cheese plate and wine followed by real food, which everyone takes turns bringing; we placed an early ban on Doritos and Mountain Dew). I started us off running a game set in the expanded Star Wars universe. Our favorite quote was when one of our friends got frustrated and announced to the table, "Shut up! I have diplomacy!" while stabbing at the statistic on her character sheet. 

I had no idea then that thirteen years later, that group would still be meeting. There've been people who've come and gone, but we've had the same 5 member core group for ten years, three of which--my bestie, my now-DH and I--have been meeting since the very first time we gathered around that cheap, just-post-college table in our old duplex.

Things look a little different. The quality of wine and food has improved. (Our last meal was slow-roasted pork shoulder with cracklings, mashed sweet potatoes and bacon-braised collards paired with Chianti and right bank Bordeaux; we have enough foodies in the group that we have a running joke "our gaming group eats better than your supper club.") We tend to talk things out more than the roll dice and frequently pick a rulebook for a setting we make up, instead of using the book's pre-generated material (though we do that, too!) Our children have to be babysat or put to bed before we can start, and early mornings for day jobs and older bones have to be accounted for in our ending time. 

But I wouldn't give that group up for the world. For a few hours on Monday nights, I get to be somewhere else imagining something wild--flinging magic, investigating a mystery, traveling through time, beating up badguys--and I get to do it while writing stories with some of my best friends. P'n'D gaming is writing, acting, reading, improving and interacting with friends all at once, and my life is infinitely better for being a gamer.

Have you ever gamed? Do you have a favorite system? 

*GM stands for "game master" and it's the person in charge of writing and running the plot. Yes, in Dungeons and Dragons the GM is technically called a Dungeon Master--just like in White Wolf s/he is a storyteller and in Eden System's Buffyverse s/he is called a director. I just call all of them the GM. Or "the person whose glass I keep filling with wine in hopes s/he'll be nice to my character."