Games Night

Fifteen months after the first lockdown, the Dungeon Master has finally been able to reunite at least some members of the Dungeons & Dragons group.  I had been curious about role-playing games since 2015, when PDB11 first introduced me to the webcomic Darths & Droids, which re-imagines Star Wars as a role-playing game.  Even though I had never had anyone to play role-playing games with, I was so intrigued by this as a way of retelling a story that I wrote a fanfic giving These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer the same treatment.

However, it wasn’t until late 2019 that I finally got a chance to try this out for real, when the Dungeon Master walked into Shepton Community Bookshop and we got chatting and agreed to keep in touch.   She mentioned that she might find room for me in one of the role-playing campaigns she was running, and in February 2020, I met my fellow-adventurers in a tavern.

Specifically, we met in the Horseshoe Inn, which was so old-school that it only served alcohol and Coke (no hot drinks like tea or coffee) and only accepted cash.  I ordered a Coke, and the Dungeon Master introduced me to my fellow players.  Although I gradually learned their real names, I will refer to them here by their gaming alter egos: the bronze dragonborn (like a humanoid dragon) warrior Kriv, white dragonborn warlock Kos, half-elf ranger Rothgar, and gnome wizard Bobbynock.

Since the campaign had already run through many adventures, the Dungeon Master had given me a character to play who fitted into the setting, Beira the paladin, who has a demonic ring frozen to her finger which is trying to control her mind.  I had thought about what a brave paladin would do in a situation like this, and did it as soon as we started playing.

Beira’s solution wasn’t the one the DM had expected, and derailed her carefully plotted scenario of demonic possession, which felt quite satisfying.  This, to me, is the great advantage of table-top role-playing games over any other medium – including computer games, or choose-your-own-adventure books – in that literally anything can happen.  The group of adventurers still had problems as a result of Beira’s actions, of course – just different problems from the ones the DM had intended.  This, incidentally, is a running theme in Darths and Droids, the comic which first made me curious about role-playing games.

As Beira got to know her new companions and tried to make sense of what was going on, I even wrote a diary of the adventure as Beira understood it. 

After a few weeks, the DM offered Beira a job as a temple healer, to give me a chance to bring in a character I had created.  I wouldn’t have minded switching characters – but I felt that Beira would feel it her duty to continue sharing the dangers of the adventuring party until she died.  She might get killed fairly soon, as she insists on running into danger to rescue NPCs (Non-Player Characters, frequently unimportant to the plot – but from Beira’s point of view, they’re simply people), and probably isn’t popular enough with her fellow adventurers that they would bother to resurrect her.

And then came lockdown, and everything was put on hold.  But now, at last, we’re meeting up again.  Bobbynock has been busy getting married, so we can’t continue with the campaign just yet, so in the meantime, the rest of us have met up for board games. 

The first time, PDB11 and I brought along a card-trading game called Bohnanza, in which everyone plays a bean farmer.  It is a simple game, and more fun than it sounds, but needs three or more players, which means we haven’t been able to play it much during lockdown.

Our favourite game when it’s just the two of us is Scrabble, as we are both word geeks.  We usually play with several different dictionaries on the table, and even a copy of Skeat’s Etymology, and the game frequently pauses to read out, for example, Skeat’s family tree of the relationship between the words ‘trousers’ and ‘torture’, or between ‘denizen’ and ‘entrails’.

Everyone enjoyed Bohnanza, but Kriv complained that it lacked miniatures.  So, the next week, the DM brought along a board game called Dinosaur Island, in which everyone plays the owner of a dinosaur theme park.  This does have miniatures, although not particularly exciting ones: all dinosaurs are represented by pink silhouettes of triceratopses, all workers and customers by little silhouettes of humans, and so on.

The rules looked complicated, and I’d had a tiring day and didn’t feel in a good frame of mind for learning anything new.  I had a look at the rules manual to see if I could make sense of it, but my brain was refusing to take it in.  The DM, who was an old hand at this game, along with Kriv who had played it once before, and Kos who was new to it but more willing to pitch in, all just wanted to start playing, and were frustrated at my delaying them by wanting to read through the manual. 

I sat and watched for a while, and then excused myself and went home.  I was relieved that I had managed to get through the evening without losing my temper or crying.

Why had I panicked?  Yes, the setting made the stakes higher than Bohnanza – you don’t have to worry about beans getting loose and eating people – but the stakes are high in role-playing games, with armies of orcs and zombies running around, and I had pitched in as Beira without knowing what I was doing.  But that game hadn’t depended so much on the rules as just imagining what a character like Beira would do.

PDB11 said that as far as he could see, Dinosaur Island was a game which looked more complicated than it needed to be for the amount of fun involved.  I considered just excusing myself on nights when we played it – but I didn’t want to chicken out (even if chickens are the direct descendants of dinosaurs).  Also, I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to see my friends.

The next week, I asked the DM whether we could meet half an hour early, so that she could talk me through Dinosaur Island.  In the event, we spent most of the half-hour catching up on our personal lives, then had a brief discussion about the game, and then played, but I asked to go very slowly, so that the DM could explain to me what we were doing at each stage.  It wasn’t actually difficult, and I did fairly well.  I just needed to be calm enough to listen, and think, and learn.  This probably applies to most of the things I find difficult.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Fly?