Bring Your Dice!

When my wife, Anne, and I go to social events, I usually find myself telling some form of story. I can't help it; I got that from my dad along with a habit of staying up way too late for my sanity or good health. Oft times, however, many of these stories end abruptly and seemingly without a point. When this occurs, the people that we're with will usually look at Anne as if searching for an explanation of some sort. She usually gets a chuckle out of these looks because she has no idea what the point was either, but at least she's used to my method of story-telling. You'll understand this paragraph better by the end.

I've been friends with Gudy since somewhere around junior high/early high school. We soon found that we shared many similar interests including, it seemed, similar interests in certain females which, it occurs to me, is how we came to be introduced to each other. That's not what this story is about.

To a certain extent, I've come to be Gudy's sounding board. He has a fantastic imagination and is constantly coming up with ideas for stories or things he wants to try out or a new way of being able to anal-retentively micro manage something in regards to fantasy sports. The unfortunate part is that he often abandons the ideas. He's got a great imagination, but a poor attention span. That's not what this story is about either. It's all set-up. Bear with me, here.

One cold fall night, Gudy called me with another idea: Let's create our very own role-playing game. Wow. Did you hear that? That was the sound of dozens of browsers simultaneously closing. Never thought I'd be that affective. Oh well. Growing up in a very conservative household, I was never allowed to play a role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons. However, they always intrigued me since one was gathering with a group of friends and, basically, writing their own stories set in a fantastical world where they could play characters in whatever manner they chose. They could be heroes or rogues. Catalysts or foils. Men or women. Bright or dim-witted. It was a fascinating concept to me. Creating our own would be a challenge, but fun. I was fresh off of reading the Tolkien novels and had a new passion for the fantasy realm. I was up to the challenge. So, after covering some of the basics (allowed races and classes along with attributes) I set about working on the mechanics. I wanted it to be simple, so instead of needing a large number of differently faceted dice, I went with using standard six-sided dice for everything. I also realized that I needed someone to play with since Gudy was a good four-and-a-half hour drive away. Well, four hours away for me at the time. It would be about five and a quarter for most rational humans. As luck would have it, Frederick III was living in the same town as me at the time, and he had previous experience with role-playing games. So, we set a day to get together and give it a shot. It went okay. F3 created an elven rouge (thief) named Glyndor that was quite anti-social. Therefore, I put him in a setting where he had to interact with people. I take evil glee where I can find it. F3's wife, Eleonor, was also there watching along, and like me, she had never played an RPG before, but she was intrigued.

So, it came to pass that in these simpler times (read: Only three children between both families as opposed to the seven for which we currently account) we all sat down and played an RPG together. Surprizingly, we were able to get Anne to play as well. It's surprising because, outside of Tolkien, Anne has essentially no interest in the fantasy realm whatsoever. She was willing to give it a shot because of the social aspect of things. We were having friends over and interacting. As the mother of a small child, she would take all of the grown-up conversation that she could at that point. Eleonor played a Dwarven Paladin named Dis (pronounced "deece"), and Anne played a human Paladin named Lidian. Anne got into the role-playing aspect the least of any of us, and her character was mainly relegated to just being muscle. Over the course of the next few months, we would get together and play a few times. It ended up being not nearly as much as we would have like to. After all, 3/4ths of us were in college at the time, and both couples had fairly new babies. We had a few adventures, though. I forced the two characters whose races had a deep-seated hatred for one another (Dis and Glyndor) fall in love (evil glee); Glyndor was poisoned at one point by some caustic berries, and every time he'd get them washed off, something would happen where he'd be splattered with them anew (evil glee); I had a villain for them to fight that I really liked and thought was quite menacing (a goblin named Ahab based on the old song "Ahab the Arab" which, looking back on it, could be considered quite racist). There was betrayal, revelation, and violence. Time marched forward, and we ended up moving away from the city. It was at a point in the story where we were just about to have some really interesting things happen. I had some pretty major plot points that were going to be revealed to the others really soon.

In the course of my lifetime, I've left dozens, perhaps hundreds of stories seemingly hanging, and for the most part, it doesn't bother me. Either I said what I wanted to say on the topic or, in mid-story, my brain finally catches up with my tongue, and I realize that the story isn't going to say what I want it to say, and it'd be best to bail at that point. I regret not finishing this story, though. Part of it is a point of pride. I want to share my cleverness with the others. I wanted to see their faces when I revealed the plot points that were intended to surprise them. There just wasn't enough time to get all of the stories told before life caught up with us. Maybe some day, I'll use this forum to get the story told in a short form over the course of a few posts, but that might be boring for the others who read this site. All six of you. At any rate, for now, the stories will just have to remain in my head, waiting for their time in which they will be revealed.