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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 1660613" data-attributes="member: 63">The first guy I ever played D&D with was my best friend in middle school, Nathan Haiduk.  We hung out a lot until 10th grade, when I started to realize how racist he was, and soon thereafter he transferred to a different school, started showing up to class drunk, and eventually dropped out.  He was a complete genius in math and science, and he was able to do technical writing with ease.  Maybe things were too easy for him.  Maybe he was troubled that his father was having an affair and that his mother always paid more attention to his 4-year old brother with Down Syndrome.  Maybe it was just drugs, ruining someone else's life because the poor guy needed a buzz all the time.I've run into Nathan a couple times over the past few years.  I'd come home from college for Christmas or the summer, and we might hang out for a night or two.  I ran the first section of the mines of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil for him and some of his friends, and we always enjoy each other's company.  Except that I can't stand that he jokes about black people, and that he always wears a sheen of alcohol-tinged sweat, and that I'm disappointed that he gave up what would've been an easy life as a scholar to instead struggle as a construction worker putting on vinyl siding in 100 degree heat, trying to save up enough money so he'll feel confident when he quits his job and enrolls in the army.Today is his twenty-second birthday, and I don't know how to get in touch with him.  I'm sad that when I talk about him, my old friend, the first things I say are always about how sad it was that our friendship drifted apart.  He was an excellent powergamer, and he coined the phrase "tactical smoke break" back when we were 15 and he needed to go outside in the middle of a Battletech game.  Gaming with him, I first realized that I liked cinematic fights when another player cast his custom wall of advancing coldsnap spell at the fire giant Nathan's character was fighting, and Nathan asked if he could jump over the fifteen foot-high wall as it swept through his area.  Once, while waiting for a driver's ed class to start, we pitted his 16th level Minotaur Fighter against the entirety of the Greenbay Packers.  The Minotaur, in a fit of madness caused by dimensional hopping, killed them all, then proceeded to defeat ten thousand rioting fans.  This was decided as we chatted, rolling 13d20s at a time to see if any of the oncharging Packers fans could hit him in his AC -12 red dragon full plate.  Babb the Bold took a total of 12 damage in the fight, before he was finally rescued by the party's wizard before the SWAT team showed up.Nathan played at least three different characters named Babb, including the Minotaur Babb the Bold, and the multiclassed Babb the Multi-Fauceted (not faceted).  He was the only guy who ever beat the crap out of me, almost exactly 7 years ago, and after the fight I held ice to my eye while we watched some cheap porno a friend of ours had bought, then rounded out the night with 12 hours of gaming.  I went with him and his biology professor father to west Texas on a field trip, and Nathan and I sat on a rock in a brilliant, full moon night, and discussed God while joking about Hale-Bopp flying past in the distance.I just wanted to remind myself why I remembered him, and to say a prayer that he will find happiness in his life.</blockquote>

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