Granted, Instapundit was making a point about Walter Cronkite's blinkered, elitist hypocrisy: but along the way Glenn referenced a two-part interview with the creator of roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax (Part I and Part II). D&D is a game people who spent their single-digit years in the 1980s heard about more than actually played, Saturday-morning cartoon show notwithstanding.
My introduction to the game, over the initially strong objections of my mother (who, before Snopes.com, had no way of dispelling the urban legend of D&D's fatal consequences), was sophomore year of high school. It was a standard, four-to-five player campaign with classmates in one fellow's basement bedroom. Good times were had, including a couple of all-nighters, simplistic as it was; our group played no more than five sessions over the course of an entire school year.
The next year I came into a group of friends — including my now-Albany-based buddy Ed — who enjoyed games. Our favorite pastimes were marching band and pep band events at school but after hours we'd enjoy frequent bouts with the card game Magic: The Gathering, and occasionally we'd try and start a roleplaying campaign. Everyone knew D&D. We were careful about how we played: the game had a certain reverance about it and we responded by almost always trying the latest epic fantasia somebody had dreamt up. Well-intentioned, those stories were never acted out in full, never to be returned to, our regular schedules quickly succumbing to the flurry of high school. So we tried one-off games in between the campaigns, rich with improvisation; games that, ironically, I can recall far better than our interpretations of Tolkien or Hickman. D&D could be bent to looser, make-it-up-as-you-go style. Some games, however, were better-suited for reckless abandon. Ed was well-versed in the now-defunct FASA Games' sci-fi/fantasy crossover game Shadowrun. Like ritual, our team of cynic cyberpunks would assemble and plunge into our favorite Northwest American dystopia, falling afoul of one zaibatsu-like corporation or another, ending the game in a ragged firefight.
I recall one quickly aborted attempt to start a D&D campaign with our circle of friends during the summer before I headed off to Syracuse University; planning took too much time and concentration too much energy. We wanted movies, local trips and easy games. Thus my high school experience ended leaving me more like the typical student than the twelve-sided-die-rolling dungeon freak. In what can be considered irony — or a testament to the game's relevance to young adulthood — I truly played Dungeons & Dragons in college.
That fall, a group of four played two sessions led by my roommate. Short but memorable: my friend Dan is both an unlucky dice-roller and a good sport; the six numbers determining his character's physical and mental worth were pretty low, but he bucked up and played the character as a hapless do-gooder. School kept us busy; we took a couple of ad-hoc journeys over the winter but little more. It wasn't until March of 1997 — spring break — that I finally won my money's-worth from the clutch of sourcebooks I'd purchased a few years earlier, and truly came to appreciate the game as a confluence of storytelling, teamwork and friendship.
At home visiting my closest friends — who were one year behind and still in high school — I was invited to lead a game with their roleplaying group of seven or so. That evening after supper I brainstormed and scribbled notes for about an hour, constructing a simple, open-ended courier's mission for an impromptu adventurer's party. I look back at the notes — literally, I still have everything — and marvel at the freeness with which I put together names, relationships and objectives. There's a sweet wistfulness in admiring a discrete idea before it became a colossal thing that carried great expectations; to admire its innocence.
I brought the notes to Ed's house. We played. My friends enjoyed the adventure so thoroughly that they invited me to continue it when school let out. That June, six of us began again and played through the summer; we played the summer after, and the summer after that. But that's another story.