Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (11 page)

The final pocket contained characters I created when I was in high school and devoted to bleak dystopian games like Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun. Their
Blade Runner
–style settings were the perfect places for nihilistic teenage boys to run rampant, and the futuristic weapons and gear echoed my growing interest in computers. My characters from this era tended to be high-tech savants or streetwise urban brawlers. There’s Leonard Collins, a scientist who goes by the code name of Doc; most of his skill points are allocated to genetics, engineering, and parazoology. Then Columbo, a detective; his list of gear includes a microrecorder and “stogies.” Lurch, a bodyguard, belongs to one of Shadowrun’s unique races; he’s a sasquatch, eight feet tall and strong enough to rip a man’s arm off. King Sun, a soldier of fortune, was named after an obscure rapper affiliated with Afrika Bambaataa’s Universal Zulu Nation; I’d deserve street cred for that reference if I hadn’t dropped it in the most uncool context possible. Then a computer hacker named Keystroke, and another named Technomancer. David Walters, a cop who fights with two pistols, John Woo–style. A soldier called Blackjack. A mercenary named Elvis.

My blade barrier protected me from getting bitten by the invisible attackers, but my companions were still easy targets. I watched Graeme scramble up a tree to get above the danger; Jhaden, swords at the ready, was still looking for something to fight.

The problem, of course, is that while Alex knew the enemy was out there, he couldn’t see them. He had to attack at random and hope he connected with something solid. “Jhaden’s going to swing his longsword here,” he said, pointing at an empty square on the battle mat, next to the mini that represented Jhaden. “This is plus-twelve to hit,” he said, rolling a die, “for a total of twenty.”

“Okay, that’s enough to hit,” Morgan said. “Now roll percentile dice.”

Alex picked up two ten-sided dice. “The red one is tens,” he said, tossing the dice on the table. They came up 7 and 5. “Seventy-five!”

“You hit nothing.”

“What?”

“You would have hit something if there was anything there.”

“Goddamn it!”

Brandon waves his hand. “Hey, guys? I can’t hear.” His voice had an unusual echo. He was smaller than usual, too. “Can you move the microphone closer?” Brandon moved to Los Angeles two weeks ago, but we wanted to keep him in the game, so he dialed into Alex’s computer using videoconferencing software. We saw him in a tiny window on the monitor and heard him through speakers; he watched us through a webcam pointed at the game table.

Alex moved over to the computer, grabbed the mouse, and adjusted a few controls. “Can you hear better now?”

Brandon’s lips moved, but no sound emerged.

Alex clicked at the controls. “Oops, sorry, man. I turned off your audio.”

Morgan laughed. “You can mute Brandon! Now, if only we could mute Phil . . .”

It was novel having Brandon virtually present at the table, but not a long-term solution. He couldn’t follow the action or participate fully, so it’s wasn’t a satisfying experience. Since wizards are such a critical part of any D&D party, we really needed one at the table, and that meant finding a new player to join our weekly game.

We’d had mixed luck with this sort of thing before. R. C. Robbins, who plays our group’s rogue, Graeme, joined the campaign well after it was under way, and he turned out to be a great addition. R. C. is thirty-six years old, married for four of those, and works as a business technology consultant for a big corporation based in Manhattan. He’s the kind of guy who always has some crazy story at hand, whether it’s about a confrontation he just had on the subway or a wild party he went to a decade ago. We tease him about it, but he’s a good guy and well liked.

Other additions didn’t go as well. Before R. C. came on board we recruited Jonathan, a local grad student, through a post on a website where interested players hook up with regular weekly games. Jonathan was welcomed into the group but immediately started ruffling feathers. He was obsessed with the rules of the game and seemed to view each session as an opportunity to demonstrate his mastery of obscure details rather than, as Brandon described it, “a chance to get together with friends and have fun . . . a break from the ‘real world’ where things like rules give me a headache.”

But the real issue was personality. Jonathan was just difficult to get along with. He was loud, he talked over people, he lectured,
he insulted anyone who disagreed with him, and yet he was easily offended. Even outside of the game he was a lot to take, frequently clogging our e-mail in-boxes with thousand-word essays on topics like the merits of using an off-hand weapon to defend against melee attacks instead of carrying a heavy shield.

And frankly, he was kind of creepy, with a strange, often misogynistic sense of humor. Once he e-mailed everyone in the group to ask our opinion on whether a wizard could reassign people’s gender using the Polymorph spell:
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“I’m wondering if I could set up a spell casting side business during down time between adventures. I’d bet rich men would pay big bucks to experience multiple orgasms.”

Jonathan meant well, and we wanted to integrate him into the group. But his behavior at our weekly games was disruptive, and none of us were interested in spending what little free time we had being annoyed. When friendly attempts to talk to him about it went nowhere, the rest of the group started to discuss telling Jonathan he was no longer welcome.

It hurt to even consider such a thing. Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be a safe haven for people like Jonathan. Many of us gravitated to the hobby precisely because we had difficulty integrating into traditional social groups. We were the nerdy kids, the outcasts, and we found a welcome at the game table. Dismissing someone from a D&D group because they’re too socially awkward seemed like hypocrisy at best, a rejection of everything we are supposed to stand for at worst. High sacrilege.

Besides, we all understood Jonathan too well. A lack of social grace and argumentative behavior are not uncommon traits among
my people. Jonathan seemed to suffer from a terminal case of what’s sometimes known as Arrogant Nerd syndrome, a disorder where smart people hide their insecurities and fear through intellectual bullying, and seek to preempt condemnation by judging other people first and finding them inferior.

Thankfully, Jonathan quit coming to games on his own when his schoolwork demanded more attention, so we never had to make a decision about booting him. But now we’re acutely aware of what can go wrong with the introduction of a new player and a little gun-shy about recruiting.

It doesn’t help that sometimes even people you really like can become problem players. One of my friends from college, Jamie Polichak, is a terrifically smart guy who delights in wrecking role-playing campaigns. “In gaming, many people play a kind of idealized version of what they would like to be in real life,” he says. “I was the albatross around their necks. Excessively vicious, entirely useless, or completely insane.”

In one game, he played a cleric of Cthulhu, a malevolent alien god first introduced in an H. P. Lovecraft horror story. Jamie decided the cleric suffered from multiple personality disorder and that one of his personalities actually believed he
was
Cthulhu. He would summon himself and try to eat the other characters’ faces.

Another time he played a fighter who refused to reveal his character class to the other players or to enter battle directly. “He insisted he was a chef and was adventuring to raise money to build his restaurant,” Jamie says.

At one point, Jamie’s friends banned him from playing the
Star Wars
role-playing game because he wanted to play two particularly annoying characters: a one-armed Wookiee who could speak and understand only his own native language, and an intelligent robot built into the Wookiee’s prosthetic arm, who acted as translator.
“They did not get along with each other,” Jamie says, “thus bringing up the question: An angry Wookiee will rip the arms off of a person, but will he rip off his own arm?”

Jamie was also banned from playing the gothic horror role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. “No chimpanzee vampires allowed.”

Some people approach conflict as a chance to wreak havoc. I think of it as a puzzle to be solved. For instance: How do you fight creatures that you cannot see?

As a cleric, my greatest asset is my magical ability. So as soon as I realized we were under attack, I ran down a mental checklist of spells I was prepared to cast, looking for something to give us an advantage. Dispel Magic cancels out spells that have been cast by another wizard or cleric, so it would have made our attackers visible if they had been hidden by an Invisibility spell. But I figured our attackers were some kind of wild magical animals and their invisibility was an innate ability, like a chameleon’s color-changing skin. The True Seeing spell would work, since it allows someone to see through any kind of invisibility. But I can cast it on only one person, and I have to touch them to make it work. With our party so scattered, I’d just end up casting it on myself and then have to watch helplessly as a pack of animals chewed up my friends. A Darkness spell would even out the odds, since our attackers wouldn’t be able to see us either. Of course, being animals, they could still smell and hear us, so they would just eat us in the dark.

And that was the key. Our enemy couldn’t be seen, but they could be smelled and heard. Human senses aren’t strong enough to do the job, but if I cast the Summon Monster spell, I could cause a magical animal to pop into existence and command it to find our attackers for me.

I put down my character sheet, picked up a copy of the
Player’s Handbook
that was lying on the game table, and flipped to the 108-page-
long section that describes all the basic D&D spells in detail. There are actually nine different Summon Monster spells, each one available to progressively higher-level characters and each with its own table listing summonable monsters that the spell caster must choose from. At level one, you can summon tiny stuff like a rat or a raven; at level two, a poisonous viper or an eagle. The most powerful version of the spell that Weslocke can manage is Summon Monster VI, so I jumped to that list. A rhinoceros would have been pretty badass, but I needed something that could sense invisible creatures. Polar bears were an option. Do they have a strong sense of smell?

I put down the
Player’s Handbook,
yoinked a copy of the
Monster Manual
out from under Morgan’s notes, and flipped through the pages. Chapter 2: “Animals” . . . Bear, Polar . . . 68 hit points . . . claw attack for 1d8+8 damage . . . special qualities include low-light vision and scent. I jumped to the back of the book and consulted the glossary. “Scent” means that creatures can sniff out hidden foes, but it would take the bear a few rounds to zero in on a single target. If there was a whole pack of invisible dogs, they’d tear us to pieces while Yogi was just sniffing at dirt.

I returned to the
Player’s Handbook
and reviewed the long spell description for Summon Monster VI. “
This spell functions like Summon Monster I,” it said, “except that you can summon one creature from the 6th-level list, 1d3 creatures of the same kind from the 5th-level list, or 1d4+1 creatures of the same kind from a lower level list.” Five relatively weak creatures might not kill the invisible dogs, but if they could find them all, the boys and I could step in to finish the deed. So it was back to the creature tables, and the
Monster Manual
again, before I finally solved the puzzle.

“I’m going to cast Summon Monster Six,” I announced. “But instead of summoning one monster from the Summon Monster Six
list, I’m going to summon a whole pack of yeth hounds.
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They’re going to fan out and use their scent ability to find the invisible creatures.”

“That’s smart,” Morgan said. I tried not to blush.

The plan worked perfectly. The yeth hounds quickly zoned in on the invisible enemies, and we targeted our own attacks where we saw them scratching and biting.

A little later, Ganubi finally stopped running away in panic. He turned and ran back toward camp, but by the time he returned, we had just finished off the final invisible foe.

I wonder how he’ll tell this story.

D&D players treasure their characters’ successes and tell stories about them like a new parent brags about their baby. Ask Alex, and he might tell you about the time he fought and killed Si, a vampire who was our primary antagonist in the early days of Morgan’s campaign. It was our first big victory and gave us hope that we could eventually free our fellow humans from the pens. In contrast, my favorite Jhaden story is slightly less heroic. We were trying to pass through an underground complex full of angry, man-sized ants when Jhaden came up with a plan: He killed one of the insects, glued its legs and antennae to his body, smeared himself with its guts, and tried to bluff his way past the creatures in the hope that they’d think he was just another ant. It didn’t work.

Phil might remember the time we were hiding in another vampire’s cellar, planning an ambush; when the villain started down the
stairs, Ganubi surprised us all by jumping out of the shadows and singing “Happy Birthday.” The vampire bought it and walked, smiling, right into the middle of a trap.

Mike Mornard told me about a character he played in the Greyhawk campaign who was a balrog—a kind of demon most recognizable to nongeeks as the creature Gandalf fights on a bridge in
The Fellowship of the Ring.
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“We had to distract this wizard in his tower,” Mornard says. “So I asked Rob [Kuntz] if it was possible for a balrog to make a little jet of flame come out the tip of his finger. He looked at me. ‘Okay, sure.’ So I got a hat with a little card in it that said ‘PRESS,’ and I got a wooden box, attached a can to it, glued in a piece of glass, and knocked on the wizard’s door. When he answered, I told him that I was doing a feature article for
Balrog Times Magazine
; held up the box; said, ‘Watch the birdie!’; and then stuck my finger up and made a little puff of flame.” The flattered wizard spent the rest of the night showing off his workshop, answering questions, and posing for pictures.