The following is an excerpt from my travel-memoir / pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
The passage below recreates the day I learned how to play Dungeons & Dragons. What you need to know is that when I was 12, my mother suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. She survived, and came back to live at home, but as a disabled woman. To my adolescent self, her physical and psychological deficits were sometimes frightening and disturbing. My family life was strange, emotionally chaotic, sometimes spinning wildly out of control. For me, Dungeons & Dragons came along at the right time ... I was the perfect candidate for escape.
[Please share your own "How I learned to play D&D" story by submitting a comment below]
Now... Set the Way Back Machine for "1979" ...
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The summer before my eighth-grade year, the same year I was coming to understand the "new Mom,"something wondrous happened. On a roiling June afternoon, I met JP, the new kid who'd moved across the street from me. JP showed me a clever trick-how to step away from my own body and mind, my family, and travel to places I'd never even seen. A way out.
"Ever play D&D?" JP asked, standing in my kitchen, eyes bright and magnified behind his extra-thick glasses. JP was a grade younger than me. He was quite short, frail-looking, but feisty and fast-talking. He wore a sling. He'd just broken his collarbone. Again.
"D&D? What's that-a board game?"
Rapid-fire, he explained the premise: "Dungeons & Dragons? It's not a normal board game. . . . Not like you've ever seen. . . . You play a character. . . . There's all these rules." He rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a pile of books. Then, he pured a sack of small, colorful objects onto the table. They looked like gemstones. "Check out these cool dice! See, I'm the Dungeon Master. I create a scenario, an adventure, a world. I tell you about it. You tell me what your character wants to do."
"Character? What do you mean?" I asked. This kid was weird.
JP sighed. "OK, it goes like this." He thought for a moment. "Pretend you're in a dark woods. Up ahead on the path, you see a nasty-looking creature: seven feet tall, pointy ears, mouth full of black rotten teeth. It's wearing a ratty suit of chain mail and a helmet. ‘Friend or foe?' it grumbles. Its fist tightens on the morning star in his hand, and it begins to heft it. Like this." JP looked around, and grabbed a frying pan off the stove. He swung it in the air. "What do you do?"
"What do I do?" "It's an orc. What do you want to do?" My crappy house faded around me. The peeling wallpaper, the mounds of dishes, the cigarette smoke, my mother's limp. All of it disappeared.
"Uh . . . " I stalled. I can do this, I thought. But I don't know what this game is. I don't even know what a morning star is. Or an orc.
"Uh, I'll attack? With my sword. Do I have a sword?"
JP rolled the dice. Squinting his eyes, he flipped through some books and papers and looked at a chart. "OK, your short sword strikes its shoulder. Black blood spurts out. It screams, ‘Arrghhh!'" JP demonstrated, knocking himself backward against the wall. "You whack it for four hit points."
"Cool." I wanted to ask what a "hit point" was, but it didn't matter. I was hooked.
"Now the orc comes charging at you. He's really mad." JP bared his teeth and lumbered back and forth for effect. "Now what do you do?" he asked, a big grin spreading across his face.
What do I do? There was so much I wanted to do.
Ethan Gilsdorf is author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, now in paperback. More info on Gilsdorf and the book here
[Ethan Gilsdorf's book tour: Attleboro, MA: Oct. 29th (part of a Creature Double Feature tribute!); Brattleboro, VT: Nov 11th; Somerville, MA: Nov 13th; Cambridge, MA: Nov 15th; Providence, RI: Nov 18th; Newtonville, MA: Nov 21; Brooklyn, NY: Nov 22nd. More book tour info here]
