The Day I Quit Playing D&D

Earlier this month (in my one-play reaction/review of Descent: Journeys in the Dark), I outlined a bit of my personal D&D history: read about it in Games yadda yadda, bought the blue box set yadda yadda, nearly 3 years of DMing yadda yadda, and I quit. No yadda - in fact, I promised to tell that story in this post.

So here it is.

As in many D&D groups, our group had evolved over time. We began as excited newbies, passing around the blue book rules & taking turns making up dungeons to explore & plunder. (It was during this time period that I created one of the few player characters I remember using, a Dwarf fighter named Ecnad Tsal... which is "Last Dance" backwards - yes, another clue that I came of age during the late 1970's.) The group grew as we added friends and girlfriends.

My sixteenth birthday party consisted of eating a cake my mom made with a dinosaur model on the top - the closest thing she could find to a dragon - and playing D&D with better quality snacks than usual. Yes, we were pretty much the title characters from Freaks & Geeks. (BTW, I've never actually watched a full episode of Freaks & Geeks - set in 1980, my sophmore/junior year of high school, it was just too painfully close to reality to be enjoyable.)

Over time, the less-dedicated (read: less obsessive) drifted away & the majority of our adventuring took place with four of us:

• Mark (aka fluff daddy and/or pastor guy), the Dungeon Master
• Jim, the neutral human druid
• Tom, Jim's younger brother who went through a variety of characters... I think most of them were elves who were chaotic good (which pretty much described Tom himself)
• Dave, our oddly lucky with the ladies (esp. for someone who played D&D) friend who played a halfling thief of variable alignment (Some other time, I need to y'all about Dave's dating life & the vaguely Calvinist theory of dating the rest of us developed in response to his success.)

The characters had continued leveling up nicely but not quickly - I was not a Monty Hall DM. (For the uninitiated, that means I didn't give out gold, experience points and/or magic items lightly... they had to work for that kind of stuff.) Again, I'm fuzzy on the details, but all three of them were 10th level or better and had been running those particular characters for 2+ years.

So, one afternoon after school, we're upstairs in Jim & Tom's bedroom, playing D&D. (Chances are we were listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall or Jethro Tull's Aqualung... being the ubergeeks that we were.) Anyway, they were exploring a volcanic island... an adventure of my own creation. Turns out that the smoke issuing from the volcano was not from molten lava but from a red dragon who was sitting on a pile of treasure.

Anyone who has run a roleplaying game knows what is about to happen - you, as the game master, work to create an open scenario and yet, with subtle or not-so-subtle clues, limit some of the options so that the players will follow the story without feeling herded. Invariably, one of the players decides to push the boundaries... and you have to follow through.

Dave had a history of using his thief like a fighter - and this afternoon was not an exception to that foolhardy tendency. What I had intended to be a "smash & grab" of some small (but valuable) magic items became Dave's grand stage - he masterminded a plan to kill the dragon & take all of the treasure.

I threw up red flags: my descriptions of the dragon became more horrific and NPC's (non-player characters) who were their servants issued dire warnings. But nothing would deter Dave from his plan.

And so the battle began. For a while, things worked out for the party. Then the dice started going bad, they tried some desperate manuevers... and Dave found his halfling in front of the business end of a red dragon.

A couple of shakes of the dice later, and the halfling was a crispy critter, incinerated beyond recognition. Dave demanded that Jim (the druid) resurrect him. (There was some magic item they had that could help.) But I ruled that without a physical body to resurrect, there was nothing they could do. Dave's character was dead.

Jim & Tom figured out what was happening faster than I did... as they grabbed Dave as he lunged toward me, spitting & cussing, threatening to beat me senseless for killing his character. I can still remember thinking, "This is just a game. It's just a character on a bunch of pieces of paper. And this guy wants to beat me up over it?!"

What I don't remember is what happened next... how we got Dave calmed down, whether or not we kept playing that day, if I got home in time for dinner (which I wasn't always good about). None of it - it's like my memory banks are wiped clean.

What I do remember is that I quit D&D that day... I was done. Any game that could potentially cause bodily injury to me was just not worth it. I piled up my stacks of manuals, scenarios & folders full of graph paper dungeons... and, weirdly enough, gave them to Dave.

So, that's the story.

But it probably isn't the whole story. There were a number of things contributing to the demise of my roleplaying career, not the least of which was getting an actual "real world" life which included crushes on girls, major parts in school plays, and the stunning realization that high school was almost over.

In another post - which is proving more difficult to write than I anticipated, I'll attempt to analyze what bothers me about D&D and the primary reasons I give for warning people away from it. At this point, it's entitled "The Bill Cosby Factor" and should be a interesting if controversial read when I finish the silly thing.

And, yes, the pictures with this post are from the aforementioned birthday party. Sigh. I was young and had less fashion sense than I have now - which isn't saying much.