The next time we met, Morgan asked us if we’d completed the leveling process.
“I did,” Phil said. “I’m now a fourth-level rogue, fourth-level bard, and fourth-level shadowdancer.” D&D characters aren’t limited to a single class, even though most players stick to one. Phil has taken this to extremes, stacking levels first in bard, then in rogue, and then adopting an advanced “prestige class” available only to higher-level characters, the super-stealthy shadowdancer.
“And I’m going to take another prestige class at next level,” he said. “The Evangelist from the Complete Divine sourcebook.2 I’m going to try to start a religion.”
Morgan laughed. “The Church of Ganubi.”
After a long day traveling through the mountain foothills south of San Francisco, we made camp at the top of a ridge, a few hundred yards from a primal oak forest. Jhaden caught a rabbit, built a fire and a spit. When the cooking was done, Ganubi told one of his stories while we feasted.
“Hark to the tale of Ganubi and his gallivanters,” he began, “brave heroes on a righteous quest. One night, while sailing across the great ocean, their ship was overtaken in an unnatural fog . . .”
I usually enjoy Ganubi’s accounts of our adventures, even if he does make himself out to be the hero and the rest us become mere grooms and squires. But on this night, exhausted from our travel, I skipped the stories and bedded down for the night. I drifted to sleep with the sound of Ganubi’s voice on the wind.
A few hours later, I awoke to his screaming.
For a moment, lost in the dark, I clutched my bedroll in panic. But a warrior’s instincts are strong, and I gathered myself quickly. Ganubi was on watch, and something was attacking the camp. I sat up and, peering into the darkness, tried to identify the threat.
There seemed to be nothing there. Jhaden was already standing and scanning the landscape, sword in hand. On the other side of the camp I could see Ganubi, his back to me, rapidly disappearing into the night. He was fleeing our camp and some unseen enemy, all the while screaming: “Run away! Run away! Run away!”
Ganubi is an interesting character. Phil’s a performer, so he plays the part with zest and gusto, and will frequently make decisions based on “what Ganubi would do,” even when that’s not the best course of action. This devotion to role-playing sometimes makes the game more difficult—Ganubi is overly trusting and not that bright—but it always makes the story more compelling.
Characters are the heart of any D&D game. As a player, the character is your avatar; you see through its eyes and make it do as you wish. But the act of inhabiting an avatar goes two ways. The more you play with a particular character, the more you identify with it and it controls your actions.
As a player, I knew what happened before Weslocke woke up. The party was attacked by a pack of invisible demon dogs, and Ganubi fell prey to one of their magical abilities, a fear effect that forces him to flee for 1d6 rounds. I understood that, from a tactical standpoint, the smartest thing to do on my turn would be to get up, chase Ganubi, and cast a Remove Fear spell, allowing him to rejoin the battle. But I also understood Weslocke, and I knew he had just woken up, he was startled, and his instinct was to protect himself. So instead I cast Blade Barrier, putting a whirling curtain of magical knives between me and the dogs.
* * *
D&D players invest a lot of time and emotion in their characters, so it’s not surprising that they want to protect them. This impulse even spills out of the game into the real world; I may have sold my rule books back in college, but I still preserve the character sheets from my childhood role-playing games. From fourth grade to my high school graduation, I kept all my characters in a red vinyl document organizer, an off-brand version of the Trapper Keepers that were popular in the seventies and eighties. It was my constant companion to games for a better part of a decade, and even during the long years when I avoided role-playing, I kept it safe—rarely consciously, but always carefully.
In recent years, the character keeper slumbered, forgotten, at the back of a cabinet in my living room. But once I started playing D&D again, it awoke and called to me. Like the One Ring trying to get back to its master, it wanted to be found. So on a quiet spring morning I went to it, shoving aside piles of old tax returns and pay stubs, and held it in my hands for the first time in ages.
It looked old, and its vinyl cover was peeling along the edges, revealing a tatty cardboard core. But it felt vital in my hands, solid and reassuring. The wraparound flap was secured with a small Velcro closure, and when I peeled it open the ripping noise made me shiver—a sound, like a bugle call before a battle, that heralded action and adventure. Inside the organizer there were three expanding folders, all stuffed to bursting, and a half-empty pocket on the inside cover. I reached into the pocket and pulled out a small stack of paper.
It was a pile of possibility . . . or a few dozen blank character records, if you want to be literal about it. Most role-playing game rule books provide one of these fill-in-the-blanks forms for players to photocopy and use when they make a new character. To devoted players, each sheet represents a chance to be a different person, a new and exciting escape. As a child I fetishized them, and constantly searched new game books and magazines for better layouts. I even made my own on the Brother LW-20 word processor I was stuck with in the days before our home had a computer and a printer. I remember the hours of painstaking work—counting presses of the space bar to ensure that attributes on one line would align perfectly with those below, and holding down “shift” and the hyphen key to produce long underscores where I’d later pencil in each character’s details. After dozens of imperfect drafts, I’d have a pile of crumpled-up pages next to my desk, like a frustrated novelist in an old black-and-white movie . . . and a single perfect sheet, tabula rasa, which I’d protect between the flaps of a stiff manila folder and carefully place in my father’s briefcase. The next day he’d use his office photocopier to make me a few dozen copies, and when he came home from work I’d tear down the stairs to our front door, give him a grateful hug, then grab the prize and bolt back to my bedroom. I’d extract the original character sheet from the folder, archive it between the pages of an oversized children’s illustrated dictionary, and then place the copies into my red vinyl organizer. There they’d stay, safe and secure, until I needed a hero.
I loved the process of character creation so much that I’d spend hours designing characters with no intention of using them. When you’re making a new character, you may have to record anywhere from a dozen to a hundred personal details, depending on the game. Some parts of the process are simple, like when you roll four six-sided dice to determine a D&D character’s starting ability scores.3 But you’re also required to dig deeper, imagining a character’s personal history and motivations. I enjoyed it as an analytic exercise (How can I exploit the rules to my advantage?) and as an act of creativity (Who is this person, and what drives them?).
The three expanding folders inside my organizer contained hundreds of characters, and each said something about who I was when I made it. The first pocket was full of D&D characters, most of them created when I was in elementary school. They’re goofy, sweet, and naïve.
On top of the pile was Wizzrobe, an elf wizard I based on an enemy in one of my favorite video games, The Legend of Zelda. My grandparents gave me a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas in 1986, so I was probably ten or eleven years old when I made the character. Looking at it years later, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the way I replicated powers I saw in the video game: Wizzrobe wears a ring of teleportation and carries a magic wand that casts the spell Telekinesis.4 Farther down the pile I found Aries, an eleventh-level human cleric. In the upper left-hand corner of the character record, in a space labeled “Player’s Name,” I’d written “Dr. Dave,” and below that, after “Character Began,” the date: 2/19/88. I was eleven years old. Aries carries a Bag of Tricks, one of my favorite magical items: It’s full of small fuzzy objects, and when
a character pulls one out and throws it, it balloons into a full-sized, living animal. Rolling 1d8 determines the species, and, depending on your luck, you could get anything from a weasel to a lion.
As I flipped through the sheets, each character reminded me who they were and what I wanted them to be. Leaf, a rogue, was inspired by Matthew Broderick’s role in the 1985 fantasy film Ladyhawke. Robin, a swashbuckling fighter, was my attempt to emulate C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian. Another character, written in pencil on a faded piece of graph paper, wasn’t mine, but I remembered it all the same: Nightwind, a level-fifteen human ninja, carried a distinctive +3 wakizashi.5 He belonged to my friend Michael Bagnulo and was used in a campaign we played all summer long before we started sixth grade. When school was out, role-playing game campaigns could stretch to a truly epic length and complexity; this one drew to a close in a marathon thirty-hour session at a beach house owned (and barely supervised) by our friend Scott Johnson’s parents.
Not long after that, Michael transitioned from player to Dungeon Master and eventually ran the games that captivated me throughout high school. The next character sheet in the pile, a tenth-level human magic-user with the goofy name Alka the Seltzer, hinted at the beginnings of that storytelling skill: In the character description area of the sheet, under “Fears/Dislikes,” I wrote “sharks and anything else Mike thinks up.”
Next I found Sir Howland the Wolf Knight, a level-fifteen human ranger. This character was a great example of a game gone wrong—an inexperienced Dungeon Master who has allowed his players to build ridiculously powerful characters and then showered them with money and treasure.6 Sir Howland carries a +6 vorpal sword, a +4 dagger, and a +5 lance; in the section of the character sheet labeled “Special Abilities,” my younger self wrote “incredible senses, great speed, immune to disease, detect evil, summon ethereal sword, black belt in karate and ninjitsu, use technology, time/dimension travel.”
Deeper in the red vinyl organizer, I found character sheets from other pursuits, like Star Trek: The Role-Playing Game. Instead of controlling wizards and warriors in a medieval fantasy setting, players of this 1982 game took the roles of crew members aboard a Federation starship. It bored the hell out of me, but I sure did like imagining new Star Trek heroes like the ones on these official “Starfleet character data records.” There’s Charles Adams, captain of the USS Achilles; T’Pec, his Vulcan helmsman; Lieutenant Commander John Martin, first officer of the USS Lexington; even Lieutenant David Ewalt, chief security officer of the USS Enterprise.
The final pocket contained characters I created when I was in high school and devoted to bleak dystopian games like Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun. Their Blade Runner–style settings were the perfect places for nihilistic teenage boys to run rampant, and the futuristic weapons and gear echoed my growing interest in computers. My characters from this era tended to be high-tech savants or streetwise urban brawlers. There’s Leonard Collins, a scientist who goes by the code name of Doc; most of his skill points are allocated to genetics, engineering, and parazoology. Then Columbo, a detective; his list of gear includes a microrecorder and “stogies.” Lurch, a bodyguard, belongs to one of Shadowrun’s unique races; he’s a sasquatch, eight feet tall and strong enough to rip a man’s arm off. King Sun, a soldier of fortune, was named after an obscure rapper affiliated with Afrika Bambaataa’s Universal Zulu Nation; I’d deserve street cred for that reference if I hadn’t dropped it in the most uncool context possible. Then a computer hacker named Keystroke, and another named Technomancer. David Walters, a cop who fights with two pistols, John Woo–style. A soldier called Blackjack. A mercenary named Elvis.
My blade barrier protected me from getting bitten by the invisible attackers, but my companions were still easy targets. I watched Graeme scramble up a tree to get above the danger; Jhaden, swords at the ready, was still looking for something to fight.
The problem, of course, is that while Alex knew the enemy was out there, he couldn’t see them. He had to attack at random and hope he connected with something solid. “Jhaden’s going to swing his longsword here,” he said, pointing at an empty square on the battle mat, next to the mini that represented Jhaden. “This is plus-twelve to hit,” he said, rolling a die, “for a total of twenty.”
“Okay, that’s enough to hit,” Morgan said. “Now roll percentile dice.”
Alex picked up two ten-sided dice. “The red one is tens,” he said, tossing the dice on the table. They came up 7 and 5. “Seventy-five!”
“You hit nothing.”
“What?”
“You would have hit something if there was anything there.”
“Goddamn it!”
Brandon waves his hand. “Hey, guys? I can’t hear.” His voice had an unusual echo. He was smaller than usual, too. “Can you move the microphone closer?” Brandon moved to Los Angeles two weeks ago, but we wanted to keep him in the game, so he dialed into Alex’s computer using videoconferencing software. We saw him in a tiny window on the monitor and heard him through speakers; he watched us through a webcam pointed at the game table.
Alex moved over to the computer, grabbed the mouse, and adjusted a few controls. “Can you hear better now?”
Brandon’s lips moved, but no sound emerged.
Alex clicked at the controls. “Oops, sorry, man. I turned off your audio.”
Morgan laughed. “You can mute Brandon! Now, if only we could mute Phil . . .”
* * *
It was novel having Brandon virtually present at the table, but not a long-term solution. He couldn’t follow the action or participate fully, so it’s wasn’t a satisfying experience. Since wizards are such a critical part of any D&D party, we really needed one at the table, and that meant finding a new player to join our weekly game.
We’d had mixed luck with this sort of thing before. R. C. Robbins, who plays our group’s rogue, Graeme, joined the campaign well after it was under way, and he turned out to be a great addition. R. C. is thirty-six years old, married for four of those, and works as a business technology consultant for a big corporation based in Manhattan. He’s the kind of guy who always has some crazy story at hand, whether it’s about a confrontation he just had on the subway or a wild party he went to a decade ago. We tease him about it, but he’s a good guy and well liked.
Other additions didn’t go as well. Before R. C. came on board we recruited Jonathan, a local grad student, through a post on a website where interested players hook up with regular weekly games. Jonathan was welcomed into the group but immediately started ruffling feathers. He was obsessed with the rules of the game and seemed to view each session as an opportunity to demonstrate his mastery of obscure details rather than, as Brandon described it, “a chance to get together with friends and have fun . . . a break from the ‘real world’ where things like rules give me a headache.”
But the real issue was personality. Jonathan was just difficult to get along with. He was loud, he talked over people, he lectured, he insulted anyone who disagreed with him, and yet he was easily offended. Even outside of the game he was a lot to take, frequently clogging our e-mail in-boxes with thousand-word essays on topics like the merits of using an off-hand weapon to defend against melee attacks instead of carrying a heavy shield.
And frankly, he was kind of creepy, with a strange, often misogynistic sense of humor. Once he e-mailed everyone in the group to ask our opinion on whether a wizard could reassign people’s gender using the Polymorph spell:7 “I’m wondering if I could set up a spell casting side business during down time between adventures. I’d bet rich men would pay big bucks to experience multiple orgasms.”
Jonathan meant well, and we wanted to integrate him into the group. But his behavior at our weekly games was disruptive, and none of us were interested in spending what little free time we had being annoyed. When friendly attempts to talk to him about it went nowhere, the rest of the group started to discuss telling Jonathan he was no longer welcome.
It hurt to even consider suc
h a thing. Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be a safe haven for people like Jonathan. Many of us gravitated to the hobby precisely because we had difficulty integrating into traditional social groups. We were the nerdy kids, the outcasts, and we found a welcome at the game table. Dismissing someone from a D&D group because they’re too socially awkward seemed like hypocrisy at best, a rejection of everything we are supposed to stand for at worst. High sacrilege.
Besides, we all understood Jonathan too well. A lack of social grace and argumentative behavior are not uncommon traits among my people. Jonathan seemed to suffer from a terminal case of what’s sometimes known as Arrogant Nerd syndrome, a disorder where smart people hide their insecurities and fear through intellectual bullying, and seek to preempt condemnation by judging other people first and finding them inferior.
Thankfully, Jonathan quit coming to games on his own when his schoolwork demanded more attention, so we never had to make a decision about booting him. But now we’re acutely aware of what can go wrong with the introduction of a new player and a little gun-shy about recruiting.
It doesn’t help that sometimes even people you really like can become problem players. One of my friends from college, Jamie Polichak, is a terrifically smart guy who delights in wrecking role-playing campaigns. “In gaming, many people play a kind of idealized version of what they would like to be in real life,” he says. “I was the albatross around their necks. Excessively vicious, entirely useless, or completely insane.”
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 8