It was 1976, hair was migrating from long to big, Bohemian Rhapsody was playing on the radio, and I was starting 4th grade in a new school.
One thing occupies a 9 year old's mind like nothing else. Games. I particularly enjoyed chess, but something was... missing. I had met what would become a lifelong friend in my class. He and his older brother had an interest in a very particular kind of game: the wargame. I was introduced to Blitzkrieg, Panzer Leader, Tobruk, Squad Leader, and many, many more. We played days, nights and weekends, to my mother's dismay.
Finally, I was starting to enjoy real games, far more complex than mere chess. That same year, however, a momentous event occured. My best friend's brother had a bunch of his buddies, also wargamers. He came back from California with a strange box. It said Dungeons and Dragons, and had a picture of a dragon atop a treasure hoard, some kind of soldier was aiming a bow at it and a funny guy with a pointy hat, stars and moons and all, was "doing some freaky magic stuff". It was written by a guy with a weird name, Gary Gee-gacks or something.
I had just read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and my head was still filled with the wonderful places and creatures Tolkien had so beautifully described. Not least was Smaug, the old dragon in The Hobbit, and definitely Gandalf.
I was intrigued.
I had just turned 10 years old, but the older boys wouldn't be caught dead playing a game with boys 2 years younger, some were 5 years older than us (the horror!). So my best friend and I cast a baleful eye at them as they were rolling funny looking dice and scribbling on paper in another corner of his parent's basement, while we tried to enjoy a quick game of Victory in the Pacific. They even commandeered the ping-pong table with its nice large playing area while we were left with a dinky little table with almost no space for the board and counters! That we felt left out is an understatement.
Eventually, with appropriate amounts of whining, they finally invited us to play. Jumping up and down with glee, we asked what we had to do.
- "Okay, I'm the Dungeon Master", one of the older guys says to me
- "Uh, what's that?"
- "You do what I tell you. Just shut up, and roll these three dice six times"
Okay, the dice looked normal enough. Where did those weird dice go to? Anyway, I roll the three dice.
- "Okay, uh, three time six", I say incertainly
- "Huh. That's good. Now roll this die twice", he says, as he scribbles down Str: 18 on a sheet of paper
Now this one was really freaky! It had, like, 10 sides to it! I'd never seen anything so strange. So, tentatively, I roll it on the table.
- "Uh, 9"
- "Huh. Roll it again"
- "Again?"
- "You deaf?"
- "Uh, 9 again. Is that good?"
All the older boys burst into laughter, leaving me dumbfounded.
- "Haha! Yes, it's good. It'll make a good fighter. Now shut up, and roll 3d6 again"
- "Three Dissects?"
- "Just roll the dice", he sighs
And so on, until I marveled at my first character. Until then, the wargames I had played didn't allow for creating custom units, and this one was randomly generated to boot! The wonder! And I even got to give it a name!
After we filled out the other details (I chose dwarf as a race, as I was still thinking about Gimli and Thorin), and the DM explained some of the rules, I started to feel uneasy.
- "So, how do you win? What are the victory conditions?", I asked
- "Win? You don't 'win' at this game"
- "Hunh?"
- "You play a character, you become the character while you play. You act like he would act. You talk like he would talk, were he real. That's why it's called Role Playing. The character gains experience by achieving goals and killing monsters and accumulating treasure. With experience he becomes more rich and powerful."
- "But when does it end?"
- "Until I decide it ends, or your character dies.", he says patiently
- "You mean, he can die?", I squeak
- "Well, yeah, you know, like destroyed units in wargames"
I looked at the sheet of paper with a sudden sense of realization. This wasn't some kind of "unit" in a wargame, it was the description of a person. True, it wasn't real, but remembering LoTR and how lifelike the characters were, I felt a sudden sense of responsibility to this gathering of statistics scratched on a piece of paper. It, no he, had a name, for God's sake! Nervousness aside, I blundered through my first game of D&D, and nothing would ever be the same...
Eventually, the inevitable happened. My character died.
I was devastated.
I mean, I was really into it. From the start, we played our characters as if they were real: voices, mannerisms, personality conflicts between characters, the works. For me, my character was alive. Even if I realized at all times that he was just a figment of my imagination, it was a heavy emotional blow. I bawled and cried, I just couldn't believe it. I begged the DM to make him alive again, but he sadly but firmly said "the rules are the rules, you should know that". Indeed, I did.
The older boys did not laugh this time, as I ran straight home...
(Author's Note 1: Jack Chick, if you ever dare use this as one of your "examples", I swear I will lodge my foot so far up your butt that it will give new meaning to "where the sun don't shine")
(Author's Note 2: I realized about a decade and a half later why tamagochi became so popular... but I digress)
Eventually I came to realize, like many kids losing a favored pet, that grief is something that can be overcome, whether the source be real or imaginary. It was a valuable lesson that would serve me the rest of my life.
We played more and more, and characters lived and died. There is still, even today, that slight pang of loss when something, someone, you have nurtured finally comes to pass. And you move on. If anything, it gave me a new appreciation of life, any form of life.
We played weekdays, we played weeknights, we played weekends, we played during our vacations, we had long "marathons". We played, and gathered at the wee hours of the morning at the nearby McDonald's or around a pizza to discuss the day's game. My mother, by then, was resigned. At least I wasn't in some back alley doing drugs.
We played until the ping-pong table finally died as well, in a great resounding crash. R.I.P. You were the best gaming accessory ever! Of course, now we had to find space for 8 players...
Since I was the youngest in the group (my best friend had a few months on me), the others were amused when I had to go home by 9 pm. They would play until very late (or early, depending on the point of view), but I had to go home. I would plead with my mother on the phone, for an extra hour, nay! an extra half-hour of playing. "Please! Please! Have pity!", I would squeak.
Even now, 26 years later, my friends taunt me by imitating my then-high-pitched voice. Sets me back a quarter century, every time.
Over the years, some of my friends left town for their studies, or their work. Myself, I joined the military and moved around a fair bit. Even then, we still played, although less often. We would come back to our home town, or the whole gang whould move to where one of us was, just to play. Now, that's dedication...
We would also play other role-playing games, like Gamma World, Traveller, Boot Hill, Top Secret, GURPS and countless more. But while these waxed and waned, D&D remained.
Actually, D&D became our excuse to stay in touch with each other. More years passed, and some of us started families, some stopped playing and new players came on board. But we continued to regularly play, and we would write modules for tournaments.
Today, three of us remain from the original 1977 group, including my DM. The other players have between 10 and 23 years of experience. And one is in a remote city, we play regularly with him every two weeks via NetMeeting.
Our dedication to the game, and to each other, continues.
I have played D&D for near three-quarters of my life. Another edition of D&D is now here, and like the others, will eventually come to pass. I look forward to many more editions, and hope that on my death bed I can look back at nine tenths of my life imagining wonderful things in the company of my friends.
A special thanks to Gary Gygax, his colleagues, and all the others following in their footsteps, for allowing me to travel to many, many worlds.
Andargor
EDIT: Corrected some facts.
EDIT2: Updated the number of years...
EDIT3: Same.
One thing occupies a 9 year old's mind like nothing else. Games. I particularly enjoyed chess, but something was... missing. I had met what would become a lifelong friend in my class. He and his older brother had an interest in a very particular kind of game: the wargame. I was introduced to Blitzkrieg, Panzer Leader, Tobruk, Squad Leader, and many, many more. We played days, nights and weekends, to my mother's dismay.
Finally, I was starting to enjoy real games, far more complex than mere chess. That same year, however, a momentous event occured. My best friend's brother had a bunch of his buddies, also wargamers. He came back from California with a strange box. It said Dungeons and Dragons, and had a picture of a dragon atop a treasure hoard, some kind of soldier was aiming a bow at it and a funny guy with a pointy hat, stars and moons and all, was "doing some freaky magic stuff". It was written by a guy with a weird name, Gary Gee-gacks or something.
I had just read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and my head was still filled with the wonderful places and creatures Tolkien had so beautifully described. Not least was Smaug, the old dragon in The Hobbit, and definitely Gandalf.
I was intrigued.
I had just turned 10 years old, but the older boys wouldn't be caught dead playing a game with boys 2 years younger, some were 5 years older than us (the horror!). So my best friend and I cast a baleful eye at them as they were rolling funny looking dice and scribbling on paper in another corner of his parent's basement, while we tried to enjoy a quick game of Victory in the Pacific. They even commandeered the ping-pong table with its nice large playing area while we were left with a dinky little table with almost no space for the board and counters! That we felt left out is an understatement.
Eventually, with appropriate amounts of whining, they finally invited us to play. Jumping up and down with glee, we asked what we had to do.
- "Okay, I'm the Dungeon Master", one of the older guys says to me
- "Uh, what's that?"
- "You do what I tell you. Just shut up, and roll these three dice six times"
Okay, the dice looked normal enough. Where did those weird dice go to? Anyway, I roll the three dice.
- "Okay, uh, three time six", I say incertainly
- "Huh. That's good. Now roll this die twice", he says, as he scribbles down Str: 18 on a sheet of paper
Now this one was really freaky! It had, like, 10 sides to it! I'd never seen anything so strange. So, tentatively, I roll it on the table.
- "Uh, 9"
- "Huh. Roll it again"
- "Again?"
- "You deaf?"
- "Uh, 9 again. Is that good?"
All the older boys burst into laughter, leaving me dumbfounded.
- "Haha! Yes, it's good. It'll make a good fighter. Now shut up, and roll 3d6 again"
- "Three Dissects?"
- "Just roll the dice", he sighs
And so on, until I marveled at my first character. Until then, the wargames I had played didn't allow for creating custom units, and this one was randomly generated to boot! The wonder! And I even got to give it a name!
After we filled out the other details (I chose dwarf as a race, as I was still thinking about Gimli and Thorin), and the DM explained some of the rules, I started to feel uneasy.
- "So, how do you win? What are the victory conditions?", I asked
- "Win? You don't 'win' at this game"
- "Hunh?"
- "You play a character, you become the character while you play. You act like he would act. You talk like he would talk, were he real. That's why it's called Role Playing. The character gains experience by achieving goals and killing monsters and accumulating treasure. With experience he becomes more rich and powerful."
- "But when does it end?"
- "Until I decide it ends, or your character dies.", he says patiently
- "You mean, he can die?", I squeak
- "Well, yeah, you know, like destroyed units in wargames"
I looked at the sheet of paper with a sudden sense of realization. This wasn't some kind of "unit" in a wargame, it was the description of a person. True, it wasn't real, but remembering LoTR and how lifelike the characters were, I felt a sudden sense of responsibility to this gathering of statistics scratched on a piece of paper. It, no he, had a name, for God's sake! Nervousness aside, I blundered through my first game of D&D, and nothing would ever be the same...
Eventually, the inevitable happened. My character died.
I was devastated.
I mean, I was really into it. From the start, we played our characters as if they were real: voices, mannerisms, personality conflicts between characters, the works. For me, my character was alive. Even if I realized at all times that he was just a figment of my imagination, it was a heavy emotional blow. I bawled and cried, I just couldn't believe it. I begged the DM to make him alive again, but he sadly but firmly said "the rules are the rules, you should know that". Indeed, I did.
The older boys did not laugh this time, as I ran straight home...
(Author's Note 1: Jack Chick, if you ever dare use this as one of your "examples", I swear I will lodge my foot so far up your butt that it will give new meaning to "where the sun don't shine")
(Author's Note 2: I realized about a decade and a half later why tamagochi became so popular... but I digress)
Eventually I came to realize, like many kids losing a favored pet, that grief is something that can be overcome, whether the source be real or imaginary. It was a valuable lesson that would serve me the rest of my life.
We played more and more, and characters lived and died. There is still, even today, that slight pang of loss when something, someone, you have nurtured finally comes to pass. And you move on. If anything, it gave me a new appreciation of life, any form of life.
We played weekdays, we played weeknights, we played weekends, we played during our vacations, we had long "marathons". We played, and gathered at the wee hours of the morning at the nearby McDonald's or around a pizza to discuss the day's game. My mother, by then, was resigned. At least I wasn't in some back alley doing drugs.
We played until the ping-pong table finally died as well, in a great resounding crash. R.I.P. You were the best gaming accessory ever! Of course, now we had to find space for 8 players...
Since I was the youngest in the group (my best friend had a few months on me), the others were amused when I had to go home by 9 pm. They would play until very late (or early, depending on the point of view), but I had to go home. I would plead with my mother on the phone, for an extra hour, nay! an extra half-hour of playing. "Please! Please! Have pity!", I would squeak.
Even now, 26 years later, my friends taunt me by imitating my then-high-pitched voice. Sets me back a quarter century, every time.
Over the years, some of my friends left town for their studies, or their work. Myself, I joined the military and moved around a fair bit. Even then, we still played, although less often. We would come back to our home town, or the whole gang whould move to where one of us was, just to play. Now, that's dedication...
We would also play other role-playing games, like Gamma World, Traveller, Boot Hill, Top Secret, GURPS and countless more. But while these waxed and waned, D&D remained.
Actually, D&D became our excuse to stay in touch with each other. More years passed, and some of us started families, some stopped playing and new players came on board. But we continued to regularly play, and we would write modules for tournaments.
Today, three of us remain from the original 1977 group, including my DM. The other players have between 10 and 23 years of experience. And one is in a remote city, we play regularly with him every two weeks via NetMeeting.
Our dedication to the game, and to each other, continues.
I have played D&D for near three-quarters of my life. Another edition of D&D is now here, and like the others, will eventually come to pass. I look forward to many more editions, and hope that on my death bed I can look back at nine tenths of my life imagining wonderful things in the company of my friends.
A special thanks to Gary Gygax, his colleagues, and all the others following in their footsteps, for allowing me to travel to many, many worlds.
Andargor
EDIT: Corrected some facts.
EDIT2: Updated the number of years...
EDIT3: Same.
Last edited:
