Games Night
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.
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