Dead Man Gaming

by A. J. Markam

  I hit the spider about two more times, but then I stopped lunging at it, even though I kept screaming ‘Vicious strike!’ I kind of slashed at it halfheartedly, but nothing much happened.

  Then I realized the little yellow bar had completely run out. I waited a second for it to fill up halfway, then shouted, “Vicious Strike!” again. The yellow bar went down to zero – and my body jerked through the air and stabbed the spider again.

  I recalled what Arkova had said earlier: Energy points determine how fast you can attack.

  The spider’s bar, meanwhile, was down to its last tiny bit. I waited again for my energy bar to fill up to 25%, then I attacked one last time.

  My blade not only stabbed it, but bashed the spider’s entire body in. CRUCK!

  It shrieked and rolled over on its back with its legs stuck up in the air.

  A ghostly ‘75 XP’ floated through the air, and my XP counter increased over two notches. Yes!

  The dead spider lingered for a second, then slowly faded away. This time it dropped two more copper coins and a weird, squishy organ. As I picked it up, a tiny window identified it:

  Venom Sac

  Crafting Reagent

  8 Coppers

  “Dude, what is with this weird crap the spiders keep dropping?” I muttered.

  “You’re a dead guy,” Arkova replied. “I wouldn’t be talking about weird crap if I were you.”

  13

  Things got progressively easier. I managed to kill five more spiders, and even stopped screaming “Vicious Strike!” like a crazy person. I just thought it in my head, and the action soon became second nature.

  The only problem was, I got cocky. I took on two spiders at once and got my ass handed to me.

  My hit points were dwindling, and I still hadn’t killed even one of them. I looked back in despair at Arkova. “Heal me!”

  She just crossed her arms and shook her head.

  Seconds later I was back with my friend Boney the Grim Reaper. I didn’t bother to stick around to talk, I just tore off through the woods looking for my body. I found it in less than a minute, jumped back in, and immediately picked another fight with the two spiders.

  Only problem was, I forgot my hit points were lower than normal from having died. Things rapidly went downhill from there.

  “Come ON!” I pleaded with Arkova as soon as I got in trouble again – which was about ten seconds later.

  She ignored me, and looked at her nails like she was considering going to the salon later.

  What a bitch.

  Back to the Grim Reaper, then running through the forest.

  This time I stopped by Arkova before I jumped in again. “Why do you hate me so much?”

  “What, other than you’re a whiny little punk who expects me to save you every time? There are eight-year-olds who play this game better than you. Get in there and figure it out.”

  I pulled out my daggers – and was horrified when both blades fell off the hilts.

  “What the hell?!”

  Arkova sighed. “You died so much that the durability of your weapons went down to zero.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Target your daggers like you’d select one of the spiders.”

  I selected one by thinking it, and a window appeared:

  Common Dagger

  Damage: 0.33 per second

  Durability: 0 of 16

  “What’s this .33 stuff?” I asked.

  “Is that the damage it deals? Don’t worry about it, it’s part of some long mathematical formula. All you need to know is that the higher the number, the more damage the weapon does – so you want a knife that does ten damage per second rather than five. Right now, what you need to be concerned about is the durability of your weapons has gone to zero – right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s because every time you die, everything you own takes a 25% hit on its durability, including your armor. Open your Stats screen and tell me what your armor currently is.”

  “My stats screen?” I asked, mystified.

  “I keep forgetting, you don’t know anything. Say ‘stats.’”

  “Stats.”

  A new window opened up with a head-to-toe picture of my character. (It was pretty pathetic when I saw the clothes I was wearing from a third-person vantage point.) There were also a lot of slots – most of them empty – around the character, with a few filled in with the articles of clothing I was wearing.

  Over on the right, there were some words and numbers:

  Agility: 10

  Stamina: 10

  Armor: 0

  “You’re right, my armor’s at zero.”

  “It wouldn’t ordinarily be – typically what you’re wearing should give you at least some protection – but the durability has been reduced so much it’s effectively worthless. In fact, you’re basically worthless at this point. Your weapons can’t do anything and your armor sucks. If you pick a fight with the spiders, they’ll kill you even faster than they have been. Which is saying something.”

  “What do I do, then? Is the game over?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Come on,” she said, and jerked her head. “Let’s go back to town and get you fixed up.”

  We walked through the forest until we reached the stone buildings. We wandered through the streets among other dead people in various states of armored badassery, until we reached a skeletal figure standing in front of an anvil and a roaring fire.

  “What you want to do,” Arkova explained, “is find somebody like this and have them fix your goods. Blacksmiths can fix anything, tailors can fix your leather clothes, and there are some other merchants who can do it as well.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Tell him you’d like to repair some items.”

  I repeated her words, and the blacksmith said in a gurgling death rattle, “To repair everything will be 16 coppers.”

  A window appeared.

  Repair all items? Yes/No

  “Should I?” I asked Arkova.

  “Since all your items are toast, yes, you should.”

  I selected ‘Yes,’ and the coin counter in my bag window went down to nothing. All that hard work killing spiders, just to have to repair the damage they’d caused me.

  I pulled out my dagger and it was magically whole. Still dull and nicked, but at least both weapons were intact again.

  “While we’re here, sell off some of the crap you picked up from the spiders.”

  “He’ll take it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s a blacksmith.”

  “In the game, anybody who will take money for any service, or sell you anything, will buy your items. Just tell him you want to sell him some things.”

  I shrugged and turned back to the skeletal blacksmith. “I’d like to sell you some things.”

  “Let me see,” he wheezed.

  “Open up your bag,” Arkova instructed, “and select the things you want to sell.”

  I opened my bag and tapped the pictures of the mandibles and the venom sacs. Immediately the items all disappeared, I heard a jingling of coins, and my counter increased to 45 coppers.

  Sweet!

  “I would ordinarily tell you to buy new gear since everything you own is crap,” Arkova said, “but you’re still Level 1, and you can’t use anything good until you’re at least Level 5. The good news is, you’re probably going to get better equipment in the near future.”

  “How?”

  “By killing stuff.”

  I sighed. “Isn’t there an easier way?”

  “I suppose I could buy it for you…”

  I looked at her hopefully.

  “…but I already told you, anything I could buy for you won’t work until you reach Level 5. So come on, dead boy – back to the grind.”

  14

  We returned to the forest and I started killing spiders again. Less than five minutes later, I’d killed all eight and completed my quest.

 
As soon as I killed the eighth spider, golden light enveloped me, accompanied by the sound of a celestial choir. The words ‘Level 2’ appeared in front of me in shimmering, translucent gold, and then faded away as the light and voices faded, too.

  “What was that?” I asked in alarm.

  “Congratulations – you just leveled up.”

  A new image appeared in my field of vision, then shrank down and moved into the second square on my bar. It was a tiny silhouette of somebody stabbing somebody else in the back. Apt, because when I hovered my finger over the square, it said ‘Backstab.’

  Deliver 25 damage per attack by stabbing your opponent in the back.

  I checked Vicious Blow. The amount of damage had increased, but only to 21.

  “I think I have a new talent,” I said.

  “Skill,” Arkova corrected me. “What is it?”

  “Something called Backstab.”

  “Try it out,” she said, and pointed to a spider about 40 feet away.

  “You mean I can kill them even if I’ve already finished the quest?”

  “You can kill anything you want, anytime you want. Well, computer-generated monsters and enemies, at least. Fighting other players is a different matter, but you don’t need to worry about that right now. Killing stuff is the most basic form of grinding.”

  “Grinding?”

  “Doing repetitive tasks that build up your experience points and level you up. I don’t recommend it unless you have to, because the experience points from quests are way bigger overall. But in this case, it’s a good idea to practice your skills before you need them in an important situation. So go for it.”

  I went over to the spider, selected it as a target, and yelled, “Backstab!”

  The invisible puppeteer took control of me again. Suddenly my body darted around the spider and I stabbed my knife right in its ass. Brutal and unsportsmanlike, but it was a spider, and I was a Rogue, after all.

  A couple of Vicious Strikes and Backstabs later, the spider was dead – and it had barely inflicted any damage on me at all.

  “Good,” Arkova said. “Now let’s go turn in your quest and get your experience points.”

  We walked back to Sentinel Lasterov, the soldier who’d given me the quest. The ghostly question mark above his head was now glowing a golden yellow.

  “Ah, Korvos,” he rumbled as I walked up, “I see you have returned triumphant. Many thanks for your help. The forest is a safer place for your efforts. Here is your reward.”

  There was a jingle of metal, and I saw the coins in my bag counter increase to two silver, 11 coppers.

  I was practically Scrooge McDuck.

  The dead guy held out a cape of some sort. A window hovered above it:

  Cloak of the Undead

  +2 armor

  +2 agility

  “It says it’s +2 agility,” I told Arkova.

  “Good. As you complete more quests, you’ll get armor with additions to your main stats – which for a Rogue is agility.”

  “It’s not the same for everybody?”

  “No. For classes that use magic, like priests and mages, it’s intelligence. For warriors, it’s strength. I think hunters have focus. Anyway, you want to try to get items with increasing amounts of stats on them, so you can increase your agility and stamina.”

  “What’s stamina good for?”

  “It basically determines your hit points – how much punishment you can take.”

  I put on the cloak. I’m sure I looked pretty funny – a guy wearing tattered pants, a vest with no shirt, and an opera cape. It was a little ridiculous.

  On the plus side, when I opened up my Stats window, my agility had increased to 12.

  Suddenly the guard started talking again.

  “Korvos, you have surpassed my expectations and become a true defender of the Othril Forest. Go see Magistrate Taleros for your new assignment.” At the end he added, “As the living, so the dead” – which I guess was some sort of weird dead-guy version of ‘See you later.’

  A golden exclamation mark hovered over the guard’s head, and a window appeared with a text that basically reiterated everything he’d said, plus ‘Accept’ and ‘Decline’ buttons at the bottom. If I did the quest, I would get 50 XP and ten coppers. Not bad for just going and talking to somebody, especially considering I’d just busted my ass killing spiders for not a whole lot more.

  “I just got offered a new quest,” I said to Arkova. “Should I take it?”

  “Yes, but we’re not going to do it right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m tired of killing spiders.”

  “It’s not spiders – it’s talking to some magistrate guy.”

  “Great,” she said sarcastically. “Bureaucrats are even worse than giant spiders.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You can’t kill them. Come on, I want a drink. Let’s go.”

  We went into one of the dilapidated stone buildings with the candlelight flickering in the windows. You wouldn’t know it from the outside, but there was actually a fairly lively crowd inside. Lots of dead people, a few orcs and goblins, and a whole lot of folks drinking alcohol. Or whatever they drank in video games.

  Arkova went up to the bar and ordered two Death Stouts.

  “What’s Death Stout?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  The bartender – a guy missing both his eyeballs – gave us two tankards filled with a bubbling, black substance that looked more like motor oil than beer.

  I waited to see what Arkova would do, just in case she was trying to punk me. But she immediately took a sip of hers, so I followed her lead.

  Nothing.

  “I don’t taste anything,” I said.

  “Oh – you probably have your settings way down. Open up your menu.”

  She guided me to a submenu where I could increase my senses – taste and smell, specifically.

  “Don’t crank it all the way up. Maybe 20 or 30% at first. Otherwise you’re going to get bowled over by the first sewer you walk by.”

  I did as she said, then tried the stout again. To my surprise, it was actually really good – a little hoppy, fairly bitter, but sort of nutty.

  Suddenly a green ‘+1’ appeared mid-air.

  “What’s with the plus one?” I asked.

  “It’s a buff.”

  “A buff?”

  “If you get a spell or some sort of bonus that increases your abilities for one hour, that’s a buff. A debuff is something like a poison – it does damage over a prolonged period of time, or a spell that messes with you. Death Stout gives you a +10 buff to experience, which means you’ll get 10% more experience points for the next hour after you finish the entire drink. So drink up.”

  As we sat there, we talked about many things – armor being one of them.

  “When do I get to put on some badass armor?” I asked.

  “If by badass armor you mean that guy – ”

  She pointed at someone wearing a full suit of metal armor.

  “ – then it’s not going to happen. That guy most likely is a warrior or a paladin.”

  “What’s a paladin?”

  “A holy knight. They serve gods and goddesses, like me. Anyway, you can’t wear plate armor.”

  “Why not?”

  “The simplest reason is because the game doesn’t allow it. But it makes sense. Rogues sneak around – would it make any sense for you to sneak around in big clunky armor that anybody could hear from a mile away?”

  “I’m not exactly great at sneaking around now. I might as well be well-protected.”

  “You’ll get the ability to sneak around in a few levels,” she promised. “But you’re stuck wearing leather armor. So just get the best stuff you can, with as many bonuses for your main stats as possible.”

  After we finished the drink, she said, “All right – time for you to actually start doing what you came here to do in the first place.”

  Sh
e led me out of the inn and down the street to a bunch of stone stalls under one roof. It looked an old stables that somebody had converted into a small market. Different vendors sat in each of the stalls, hawking different types of items – axes, chainmail armor, pickaxes, and vials of different powders and liquids.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the profession trainer.”

  “Profession trainer?”

  “Yeah, the person who would train you in mining, blacksmithing, herbalism – ”

  Just as I was about to ask, she threw me an irritated glance.

  “NOT marijuana growing. In a big city, there would be a specialized trainer for each of the professions. Here in a little town out in the middle of Butt Eff Egypt, one guy does it all. He’ll do until we can get you to Sillomar and train you properly.”

  “Sillomar?”

  “Huge city of the Darklings. It’s the closest thing they have to a capital in this region. We’ll get there eventually, but it’s pretty far away at this point.”

  We made our way to the end of the stalls, where an old guy sitting on a bench stared at us with his only remaining eyeball.

  “What can I do for you today?” he asked in a wheezy, high-pitched voice.

  Arkova turned to me. “Tell him you want to train in lock picking.”

  “I want to train in lock picking,” I dutifully recited.

  “An excellent choice, young Rogue. You will have many adventures and steal a great deal of treasure.” He held out one skeletal hand with a bunch of rotting flesh on his palm. “One silver for Beginner’s Training.”

  I sighed and paid for it out of my bag.

  Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a window appeared:

  New profession learned!

  Lock picking.

  Level 1.

  I turned to Arkova in bewilderment. “That’s all?”

  “No – tell him you need the basic lock picking set.”

  I turned to the guy. “What she said.”

  “Another silver,” the guy said.

  I handed it over, and he gave me a small leather slip case with a couple of metal prongs in it.

  I stared at the case, then back at the guy. He just stared at me.

  “Is that it?”

  “Of course it is. What did you think was going to happen, he was going to teach you a class or something?”