I used to play Dungeons and Dragons

I was talking to my brother a few nights ago, and we were talking about Brian Bean. Which got me thinking about things a few days later that me and Brian used to do together. Which made me think of a story so funny, that it just had to be blogged about.

Actually there are a few stories here to be told. And to make the story relevant I'm going to have to reveal something rather embarrassing about myself. I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. A lot, all the time, anywhere I could. But I figured to really tell this story, I must first discuss how much of a geek I used to be.

I suppose my geeker-dom was born in 1987. Until then I was just a kid. Played with my toys, did my chores, said "yes sir" and lost teeth every once in a while. Then I got a Nintendo. And me and Mario went on a wild ride. At some points I would imagine that I was Mario, that it was really me on the screen, dishing out fireballs to the gumba troopers.

Then I got a game called Bard's Tale. A completely horrible game by today's standards, but a great game in its day. You got to pretend you were a party of four, and you didn't have to be a human, you could be a dwarf, or an elf, and the game had levels. Not only were you a dwarf or a half-imp but you were a level of dwarf or half imp. And sometimes when you hit things, you didn't just hit them you critically hit them. Causing double the infliction adding gasoline to the addiction.

I had a friend named Matt growing up. He was the first role player that I ever knew. We met at school, and I was probably talking a little bit too much about my party of heroes on Bard's Tale, when he asked me if I wanted to play D&D. I was like...."What's D&D?" And when he explained it it basically sounded like Bard's Tale, but Bard's tale in real life. And that's how I got hooked. I went to the first meeting, and I could tell that I was going to be there a while.

Brian, Matt, myself, and JR all met up on a weekend, to play D&D. I didn't even know what to bring. They said bring some dice, so I raided Grandmother's Yhazee. When I got there, I emptied all of my dice out, and they laughed and laughed. They were laughing because while I did have 6 dice, all of them were six sided dice. Apparently, I needed all kinds of sided dice, ranging from D (dice) 3 to d(dice) 20. When I saw a 20 sided dice for the first time, I was pretty impressed. They let me borrow some for the first meeting, and I got my own set of oddly shaped plastic fate changers at a later time.

Then we made my character. Which is the most important day of your life, when you're role playing. It was on that day that Fargle Fire Dwarf was born. He had the class of a warrior, and the intellect of a dim light bulb. You see I rolled a very high score for strength, and a very low roll for intellect. At times I would need an Angel of Understanding to explain things to me. Some would say of Fargle after he roamed through their nook, "Now that deaf dumb mute, could sure swing that ax."

And so I was this undernourished mind, for the next three summers. And I kind of was a spaz when I was 8-10, so I think everyone enjoyed me playing the part of the retarded Dwarf, because I would always respond to questions with a harpooned stutter.

We campaigned for years, just the four of us, in the basement of Brian Bean's house. And some good and bad times were had. Sometimes, when you're role playing, people become very very stubborn. Because they're all imagining, and trying to tell a story, and a lot of ego's get hot and heavy.

I think when we all got into the Eighth grade we realized that maybe we were growing out of playing Dungeons and Dragons. Girls were growing breasts, something called The Play Station was coming out in September, and there was a lot more shit going on in our lives than a few years prior. We had to stop, and I think everyone could feel it in the air.

The last time I played a little D&D was the last time. And we didn't even play. Everyone wanted to do something else. But what? We ventured outside and found out something about Brian's house. We had been going over there for over 3 years, but had never noticed this before. He lived on the top of a Giant gorge. It was at least 800 feet to the bottom of it. And because we had been playing that shitty game, we had all never seen it before. There was a giant hole in the earth, that we never ever knew about.

JR and myself start rolling down the sides of it, about 50 feet at a time, not caring what we ran into. Everyone started doing that, after they saw how fast we could get going. Then after we were all just laying on the side of the hill, breathless from actual physical activity, we saw something else. There was a trail that we could go down.

We decided to walk it, and see where it lead. We were still a party of four weren't we? So off we went. Not as dwarfs or Imps, but as tweens. And we may have not been the coolest or the hippest kids around, but we were the only ones headed somewhere down that dusty road at that moment in the united universe. In fact we were about as un-cool or groovy as you could possibly get. We were role-players, and little did we know it, we were about to become ......well cooler than role-players.

It's a very steep slope the trail is on. It looks as if it goes down the entire giant hill. While we walk it we find that it's nearly impossible to just walk, without falling. So one of us gets this Bootsy ass idea to start running. The rest of us who were either too scared to be left behind, or viscerally chasing after him, started running too. When you run down this hill you are like a Cheetah without gravity. Only the twinkle-toes of your feet touch the ground, as you zoom. And you don't know what's ahead of you, if you had to stop you couldn't, and you don't care. Because for once in your life you don't care. You've never ran like this before.

And as we make our way racing toward the finish line, we see it in the form of a cliff. There was a little place at the very last second that if you really thought about turning off you could. But you still might break your legs if you do that. There wasn't much of a choice, in how you got to be punished. Reckoning would soon follow. The only decision that we got to make was how we faced it.

There were those of us that sped up near the cliff's edge and those of us that didn't. I don't want to call anyone out, but I sped up. And while other's stood huffing and puffing, at the top of the cliff, I spent if barrel rolling, summer-saluting in time. I landed on a nice little tree, one the perfect size to break my fall.

As I lay there feeling the pain of a slightly sore shoulder, I couldn't stop laughing. I haven't looked at a dice since.