Strange Games

I've been thinking about it recently, and all my early experiences in D&D were *super* weird. Some were great, others not so much. But all were very strange, and adversarial in surprising ways.

My first game ever was with Sebastian in 5th grade. It was a competitive, diceless game set in the dreamlands. The lord of the dreamlands came to each player character separately and offered each of us the object of our heart's desire if only we could be the first to best him in his realm of dreams. Sebastian ran the game one on one with freeform rules in merciless style, with players competing against one another. I wrote about it at greater length here. Definitely an auspicious weird start to gaming.

But it was the summer of my 6th grade that I fell head over heels in love with D&D. I did it with a kid named Natty. He was an unlikely partner. In retrospect, he reminds me a little of Tom Sawyer. There was an air of mischief about him, and something fickle and a little cruel. He was very athletic; I remember how into the government-required physical tests they put us through in public school he was: he trained constantly in regimens of push-ups and sit-ups to outperform the rest of us. Although his parents were bohemian types who lived in a dilapidated loft apartment on the edge of Tribeca, he was not a nerdy highbrow type.

Like me, Natty had been bitten by the bug. His older cousin in rural Pennsylvania, a senior in High School, let him play with his group of older friends when he visited them on family vacations. His first edition of D&D, which I remember vividly, was a hand-me-down old beat up blue Holmes book. From this legendary teenage DM, Natty picked up many old school habits, particularly location based adventures in a sandbox setting, and a general ethos of challenging the skill of the players. He even had inherited a single sheet of hex paper which we photocopied endlessly.

I was the person he found who had the same yearning for fantasy worlds. So that summer I slept over at his house as often as we could get away with it, usually twice a week, sometimes three times. We would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning by dousing our faces with ice cold water and then holding them over the air conditioner. In retrospect, most of it involved mapping a homebrew world that we mostly wouldn't use and writing a set of Fantasy Heartbreaker rules rather than actually playing. But it was still glorious. And when we did play, it was pure magic.

Later, maybe in the summer of 7th grade (1988), he was going to run Top Secret for me and a few other kids--he was a great DM, really world class. But he was in a foul mood that day and didn't want to, and so he declared I had to DM instead. So I ran a zero prep game of AD&D, which I had never done before (zero prep is still not my bag). It was pretty intimidating. To make things worse, Natty tried to ruin the game for the rest of us by making a chaotic evil megalomaniacal halfling thief based on the one-eyed little person rapper Bushwick Bill. Obviously, OBVIOUSLY, this was not enlightened politics, but it was a formative experience.

Bushwick Bill, apparently comparing himself to Chucky.

Despite--actually because of--Natty's best efforts to throw every possible monkey wrench into the game, it turned out to be the most fun session we'd ever played. By a lot. After an entirely gratuitous criminal spree, the party was on the run from the law, chasing some cursed treasure in a scenario I stole from the Temple of Terror Fighting Fantasy book. The adventure they were on proved perilous. So after the first session the players said: look this is so much goddamn fun, we're not going to get killed on this stupid adventure, so we're quitting that quest, and are going to do something else that better suits our fancy and has a lower probability of fatality.

This was the start of an amazing, player-driven, open campaign, played infrequently but over many years. The motives were always revenge, self-aggrandizement, and early domain play. As I remember, all the hooks involved various powers and potentates brushing up against them and casually insulting them and lording it over them as though they were nothings. This would enrage the halfling's amour-propre and the party would begin plotting revenge. It was all heists, and stealing noble titles, and murders, and being bandits who were trying to claw their way into being respectable lords and ladies. One of my favorite things about playing with this group was that they always made me, the DM, leave the room while they schemed and hatched their plans. They never wanted me to know what they were going to do in advance. They were in essence springing their plans on me. I took great pleasure in seeing how their many plots unfolded, often in the dark about what they were up to until the last minute. When they pulled it off, with some unanticipated twist, I burst out grinning. Anyone who tells you evil campaigns can't be fun is wrong: this one sure was.

But let's continue. A really weird game I ran for too long as a kind of self-punishment started in 8th grade. My friend George had heard I played D&D. He wanted me to run D&D for him and a couple other friends from Junior High. George was an odd bird, with a racist, megalomaniacal father, who had made a small fortune in Taiwan working with the Moonies, exploiting their cult labor in his export business. George was, predictably, a little cracked, although wonderful in his brand of ostentatious madcap antics. But the long and the short of it was that I wasn't that into the idea of playing with him. When I accidentally double-booked our game, I just ghosted on the group, which had a number of other mutual friends in it.

George decided, as a kind of punishment for me (he was vengeful like that), that he would DM the game and have the party fight and kill an ancient red dragon. He somehow missed the rule that you can only get 1 level of experience from a single adventure, so the characters were all high-level as a result of the treasure haul, and he gave each of them precisely that combination of magical items from the 1E Dungeon Master's Guide that would make them nigh invincible, rings of wishes, and all the rest. This started a super-weird campaign, which I played partly out of guilt for my original sin, although there were admittedly some great people involved, including George. My challenge was to set up adventures and foes who might actually beat them. In a sense, I was trying to kill them in ways that were at least semi-fair, and I just kept failing because George was incredibly good at power-gaming. Much better than me, as it turned out.

I came closest to killing him once with the help of Peter, one of the other players. Peter had decided that George's power-tripping evil character (the group was evil again) was a frightening (and, more to the point, irritating) tyrant, and decided to kill him. He told me just how he wanted to do it in advance, planning it meticulously.  I set up the scene, making sure not to tip his hand in advance so that George wouldn't be clued in through my misstep. The look on George's face when this carefully planned treachery was revealed was incredible in an awful way; it went from disbelief to shock to lethal hilarity in about the span of a minute. It all came down to a SINGLE die roll. Peter's traitorous player character was a fighter, and really only had to hit George's magic-user once with his super special magical sword (maybe a sword of sharpness?), which required a roll of a 5 or higher on a d20. BUT HE MISSED. George's character killed him. Peter left and didn't come back, and this strangely antagonistic game went on without him.

At some point, we wrapped up the game and started playing an ordinary game of Dark Sun with 1st level characters. It was fun, partly because I loved Dark Sun, which I mashed up with a Ray Harryhausen, Golden Voyage of Sinbad thing. My heart wasn't quite in it, and as much as I enjoyed the setting, my DMing felt formulaic at times. (A lot of guarding caravans across the desert.) But it was how I got to know @flatvurm (Rob Abrazado), whom I've reconnected with through the Gauntlet recently, which was cool.

Before our group broke up, we all worked together one summer for George's father, alongside exploited Taiwanese immigrant labor and a gaggle of Moonies, during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. George's father was selling Olympic lapel pins that his factory in China produced.

That blue slug, with lightning bolts for eyebrows, was called "Izzy", which was short--I kid you not--for "What [the hell] is it?" It was the first digitally drawn mascot, unveiled to universal disbelief. As the olympic mascot, it was featured on every one of those lapel pins, reproduced for each different event, with a fencing foil, diving into a swimming pool, wrestling, etc. So the extended story of this self-flagellating campaign of frenemies ends with my players and I slaving alongside Moonies to feed the appetites of olympic lapel-pin collectors for a universally reviled blue slug mascot. Really, looking back at it, how else could it have ended? That trip to Atlanta was fated from the moment Peter failed his attack roll.

But there's an epilogue to that epilogue. In an even stranger twist of fate, Peter was a very serious foil fencer in real life. At that time, the US was not as strong at fencing as it is now, and the rule then was that the host nation automatically qualified in every team event. So this Atlanta Summer Olympics was a once in a lifetime opportunity for US fencers to compete in the Olympics. Peter took the year off college to train. He shot up in rank and managed to qualify for the US Olympic team when through some miracle he beat the Russian powerhouse Dmitry Chevtchenko at an international competition. (Chevtchenko went on to win the gold medal in men's foil that summer.) Having missed his fateful touch against George's character in the game, in real life George and I watched Peter duel with the world's greatest swordsmen at the Olympics. In the match we watched, Peter was up by a monumental five touches against a Chinese fencer (first to 15 touches wins). He only needed to roll a 5 or more to seal the deal and advance to the next round. What do you think happened?