I don't game through extreme pain. Good show, though
My hardcore story concerns one of my players. I am the 40-year-old-plus DM Emertius for a small game club. All the players are in their early 20s, virtually all of them gaming at my table since they were mid-teens, over five years for some of them. All of them are reaching the point in their lives where, like their old 1st level heroes, they leave town to seek their fortunes.
My tale concerns one of them, a young man who first sat at my table at the relatively advanced age of sixteen. This player is perhaps the most fervantly Christian of all of my players (in a group of freethinkers, atheists, a Wiccan, a Catholic, a Mormon and two Luthertans) but he always played the manipulating backstabbing Neutral bordering on Evil wizard who tried, but failed to use the CGs of the party as tools and fools.
Anyway, said player is one helluva guy. He'd be the first to volunteer to drive any one of us to game, weather it was a local trip for chips / soda (or later, beer) or to a con 100 miles away. A real prince of a human being. A bit more than a year ago, he relocated from Northern Cali to, of all places, South Carolina, to find work. He found it, all right . . . and the group missed it's wizard, whose alignment issues were explained once by the group's CG Cleric as "He's not evil, he's misunderstood."
Now, with the Adulthood Disapora in full swing, he emails me and asks when next game is. I run game maybe three or four times a year, the result of a hard fought compromise with my non-gaming-because-it's-not-productive wife. Three or four games a year are 12-16 hour epic runs crammed into cons are all I can manage. Of course, I am boggled. He's all the way across the country and I do not expect him to be there . . . but this young man flies here, at considerable expense, for a whole weekend of gaming.
TaLK ABOUT HARDCORE...TALK ABOUT FLATTERED..
A lot happens in my world each session when we play so infrequently . . . and my group is really good at collectively out-thinking me in encounters. coming up with unorthodox solutions to the challenges I pose. Youth and skill DOES overcome old age, trechery and DM Powers. He's put a lot into the game, and the roleplay is great, bur he was unahppy because of the relative ease with which they defeat my combat encounters.
The next time we play these characters, I will have encounters worthy of his spells.
) .
