Getting back into some Dungeons and Dragons

I got a text from my old-buddy Dan (Otis) last week. He wants to “get the band back together” and game, role playing games – like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s been a long time.

 I gamed with him for years in the 90s and 00s. Actually we met through gaming. I had just gotten out of the Navy in 1993 and came home to Vancouver, WA (literally north of Portland across the river). The first thing I did other than enroll at the local community college was go to my old Friendly Local Comic (and games) Shop – Pegasus Comics owned by Dark Horse. I got caught up with the comic guy there who I had not seen in 4 years. We talked about the comics I missed while I was gone and I put up a 3x5 card on the cork board saying I wanted to get back into some gaming.

Dan answered the card (the only one to do so) and we started to game and have been friends ever since. My first “adult” friend that was not from school or military. We became roommates in The Slaughterhouse, I was a groomsman in his wedding, and we’ve run the gamut of camaraderie. He is a brother to me.

Mathew, my other brother in gaming, moved into The Slaughterhouse after the other guy moved out. We SCAed and gamed, the 3 of us, together for years through all the ups and downs. I was also in Mathew’s wedding as a Groomsman.

Mathew and Dan were in my wedding too. 

The 3 of us wanting to RPG, probably Dungeons and Dragons, needed a Dungeon Master so I got ahold of Jason. We met randomly through a Dungeons and Dragons game in the early 00s and Jason stuck it out with me in many iterations of RPGing. Jason was a Doomhound with Dan and Mathew. Jason was a Blue Ribbon Company Plank Owner and part of the BRC mythology. I kind of “quit” RPGing in 2008-2009 as a lot of things fell apart for me then and I was putting it all back together and rebuilding my social life. Jason was the one who came to me and said, “It’s been over a year man… you should play again.”

We are now looking at playing 5ed Dungeons and Dragons, something I have not touched yet. Just me, Dan, and Mathew with Jason running the table as DM.

Having been role playing, mostly Dungeons and Dragons, since 1979, I feel I’ve done a lot. Maybe not to others but, for me, I’ve hit all the tropes and marks a D&D player could. Run long campaigns, played good guys and bad, role played, roll played, munched, anti-munched, had fun and not had fun. I have met and played with the best and worst. I have had opinions poo-poo’ed and have had the vindication and new iterations of an old system I was critical of improved with my poo-poo’ed opinions. I have sat at a table with every stereotype of Dungeons and Dragons nerd. Stinking fat-beards to candy-scented strippers.

All that under my belt, a few years ago I delved into historical wargaming and it is now 100% of what I play. I have other interests but historicals is what I do now. My hobby budgeting (time and money) is all in that direction.

My hope is that I can put some of that budget aside for Dungeons and Dragons in 2017. I’m pretty settled into my historical wargaming experience and exploring more avenues in that hobby. I love all the people I have met and have not had a horrible experience in 3 years of historicals. Enfilade is a yearly pilgrimage now. I LOVE Enfilade. I love listening to the old Grognards and look forward to becoming one myself someday. It is the first place, in a very long time, that I have felt accepted and I have something to offer.

That said, my first love would be role playing games and Dungeons and Dragons. It’s been a tough relationship over the decades that have defined me in many different ways. I’ve made and lost friends, I’ve been beaten up and beat up people over it, and I’ve had money well spent and money wasted. I learned a lot about math and English. It got me reading fiction outside of comic books. How my favored aesthetic of a woman, being a male heterosexual, was influenced by some of the art in those old AD&D books.

If all goes as planned you’ll hear about it here and I hope it goes well in 2017.

Happy Thanksgiving to you.