D&D and Me: Part 3 (Playing the Roles)

[This is the third post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[When we left off last time, I had sort of kind of played D&D, but not really knowing what the hell I was doing.  Still, many characteristics of those early games still hold true today (or perhaps are true again): I was the GM, I homebrewed a lot of stuff, I made sure my PC didn’t die, and I played a GMPC.]

To understand my D&D experience in college, we first have to understand a bit about my overall college experience.  I went to college right out of high school, as many folks do nowadays, but back then I was the first person in my family to do so.¹  I went somewhat aimlessly for two years: I did well in a bunch of classes, did horribly in others, and dropped more than a few.  After two years, I had neither a major nor enough credits to technically qualify as a junior.  I decided that college was too hard and dropped out to go work in the Real World™.  Well, after 3 years of that, I decided that working in the Real World was even harder (most of my readers no doubt just said “duh” under their breaths) so I decided to go back to get my degree.  Long story short, I ended up spending my last 3 years of college about 3 years older than everyone else.  Being in most cases the only person around old enough to buy beer certainly has its uses in terms of popularity, and I found myself with a much larger friend pool in this second college stint.

I was also attending college with one of my best friends from late high school and the period just afterwards.  He was 4 years younger than I, not even a freshman when I was a senior, but his mom had been my Spanish teacher, so I’d known him forever.  And he was always much more gregarious than I was, so I inherited this large group of people who were predisposed to think kindly of me because we had this great friend in common.  And, at some point, my friend says to me, “hey, you used to play that Dungeons & Dragons thing, right?” D&D was never his thing, but some of those other folks were into it, so maybe I could hook up with them?  I was a bit hesitant, because remember: I still didn’t really have a clue what I was doing when it came to playing the game.  But at least I had played before, and that counted for something, and soon I was inducted into my first real gaming group.

I first joined that group in about 1990, and played in it very regularly until I moved to Maryland in 2004.  (And my very last game with the group was on the occasion of my going away party when I moved to California in 2007.)  Of course, people came and went continuously throughout that 14 years, and, much like the paradox of Theseus’ ship, it could be argued that it wasn’t really the same group at all by the time we got to the end of that period, with only 2 of us original members remaining.²  By the time it was over, we had not only played every version of D&D up to that point (1e, 2e, 2e + Skills and Powers, 3e, and 3.5e), but dozens of other games besides: Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (two different versions), Traveller, GURPS, Wheel of Time, Mage, Trinity, and In Nomine.  We further rolled up characters for but never played (or only played an introductory session of) Shadowrun, Hero, and BESM.  Games which I bought but never played included Palladium, 7th Sea, Earthdawn, EverQuest, and Jorune.  I don’t reel off this long list to impress you, but rather to impress on you what a huge part of my life this was.  It didn’t consume all my spare time, of course—there were videogames, and books, and TV and movies, and beaches and skiing, and a little bit of dancing and a lot of drinking—but I doubt there was a single month in that 10-to-14-year period when I didn’t play at least once, and, outside of Novemeber and December when the holidays would invariably bork our schedules, not even that many weeks where we didn’t play.

At first, it was all one insane, connected campaign.  If we got bored with one setting or plotline, we just planehopped somewhere else: from Ravenloft to Athas to Sigil, from White Plume Mountain to Castle Amber to a strange land laid out like a chessboard.  Some of us would keep the same characters, some of us would roll up new ones, and I have a lot of difficulty remembering which characters adventured with which and where one adventure ended and the next began.  I remember we decided to play an “evil campaign” once and, instead of rolling up new characters, we just turned all our old characters evil.  It had rather dire consequences for the ranger and the cleric, but I was a druid at the time (and therefore true neutral, whether I liked it or not), so I just sort of shrugged and said “whatever.”³  Occasionally our characters would die, but more often we’d just get bored with them and “retire” them ... you know, just in case we ever needed them again.⁴  Later, we adopted a rotation system, where we would take turns being the GM so that each person had more time to prepare for their campaign, and we would play a different game—often a whole different game system—every week.  Thus, even when we were playing Vampire or Star Wars or Call of Cthulhu, we were still playing D&D concurrently.

My history as a player was both weird and predictable.  Just like with comic book characters, I liked the oddballs.  Fighters were boring: all they could really do (at least pre-third-edition) was swing their swords and repeat.  Wizards were both diametrically opposed and exactly the same: they had this huge plethora of spells (which came with a massive amount of bookkeeping work), but, at the end of the day, all they could really do was cast their spells and repeat.  I was drawn to the classes that nobody else wanted to play because they were strange or “underpowered,” classes that couldn’t do any one thing better than anyone else but could do a little bit of everything.  I favored druids and bards,⁵ once a nature cleric (who was almost a druid, really), and later on a psionicist and then a monk (who also had a few psionic levels).  I also experimented with hybrid characters, using the Skills & Powers system, trying to create the perfect blend of thief and wizard.  The two times I was reluctantly talked into playing a straight fighter, I chose a half-ogre the first time and an alaghi (pseudo-yeti) the second time.  For yet another evil campaign, I played a wannabe necromancer who was so low-level that he could only reanimate zombie chickens.⁶  Basically, any excuse to do something different.

Again, it’s an interesting exercise to analyze my behavior in hindsight.  Could I say I was embracing diversity, even back so far as when I was trying to “collect” all the monsters and let them all have an equal place in my fantasy world?  Well, somewhat ... but I don’t want to hyperidealize my younger self.  Absolutely I was always happy to go around slaughtering orcs and goblins just because that’s what you were “supposed” to do in the game, and I will admit it never really occurred to me to question that until I started hearing about other people doing it first.  So please don’t imagine that I’m claiming more social consciousness than I deserve.  But I do want to give credit to D&D for a little of that type of thing.  For instance, the first time I ever imagined myself as a woman was because I wanted to play a swanmay, and there are no male swanmays.  At that time, I wasn’t yet comfortable enough in my identity and sexuality that this was a no-brainer for me: I struggled with that decision for quite a while before I took the plunge.  And I no doubt didn’t do a very good job portraying a woman—just putting on someone else’s shoes doesn’t automatically make you understand their journey.  But it’s a start, and, as they say, every journey starts with a single step.  Since that first female character (Ellspeth, my nature priest), I’ve played straight women on at least two other occasions, and once a shapeshifter character who was very gender fluid.⁷  And while I might not be ready to give roleplaying credit for broadening anyone’s horizons to the point of epiphany, I can certainly say that it helped me avoid the trap of having all my imagined characters default to white / male / cis / etc—in other words, exactly like me.  And that’s definitely a good thing.

Next time: I’ll take a little closer look at what playing all these different roles meant to me.

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1 Except for possibly my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was the only other person before me to even attend.  But I think even then there was some delay between high school graduation and college matriculation.

2 Actually, technically speaking, I wasn’t an original member myself, so there was really only one.

3 What I actually said had more to do with maintaining balance in the universe and how we’d probably done enough good in the world that we could afford to do a little evil for a while without tipping the scales too much.  But it certainly meant “whatever.”

4 My absolute favorite was my friend Tim’s dwarf (fighter? cleric?), who took his helm of underwater breathing (or somesuch; I’m probably misremembering the exact name of the item) and retired to the ocean floor to become a kelp farmer.

5 Prior to second edtion, bards were notoriously impossible to play; my first bard character was drawn from the Dragon magazine article “Singing a new tune: A different bard, not quite so hard”.

6 I mean, theoretically, he would have been able to raise proper zombies at some point.  But we didn’t stick with that campaign very long.

7 That would be in the Trinity game.  For some reason, I was very attracted to the biokinetics in the game, who could change their body shapes and facial features pretty much at will, and I decided I was actually 3 or 4 different people living in one body, with different races and genders.