Skip to main content

Dungeons and Dragons

Back in high school, a pure white boxed set of paper bound books came out with two-color covers and a lid on the box. I bought them because I'd just moved to a new city for my senior year in high school and the misfit boys that I'd ended up being friends with after school were playing D&D. But my friend Alfred had mixed his own version of it, set in feudal Japan, with samurai swords, daimyo, and oni instead of the more standard fare and monsters in the book.



I got my first rude shock when I wanted to play a girl, since I was one, and they all said that girls couldn't even speak, much less fight anything. Of course, I looked up Tomoe Gozen and Marishi-Ten (in the library back then, there was no Usenet, much less Internet then) and showed the boys the books and, of course, they were still unimpressed, but she got her own naginata and laid waste to those that attacked her lord's castle. That was deemed fitting enough. I remembered the naginata later when playing Legend of the Five Rings and did very very well with a girl in the horse clan.

Of course, now I know that one of those high school boys is now the vice president of Dark Horse Comics, and another is an artist at a different comic company. The curiosity and imagination did us all well.

Just in the last month Jet decided he was interested in Dungeons and Dragons and how someone might be represented in nothing more than six attributes between three and sixteen in value.  *laughs*  That was a blast from the past. I asked Carl, and he talked with Chris H. of Endgame in Oakland about what would make the best start for a kid wanting to play D&D. I didn't actually tell them that Jet wanted to run the games, but they came up with a really excellent set of D&D source books and an introductory adventure with tokens, a map, and pre-genned characters.

Jet ran the game for John and I. I think it says something about our relationship as a family that we just jumped in and started letting Jet run the show. He had a great time, too, after the shock of killing one of John's characters in the very first battle. It was a little traumatic, but it helped that both John and I were each playing two characters, and that John was so used to netHack that entering a dungeon and dying wasn't a bother to him at all. It balanced the play, too, as Jet often was juggling four monsters at the same time. We've all really liked how that worked. We just casually decided that the unicorn in the first adventure owed us, so the characters that died just got taken to it and brought back. That made Jet feel a lot better. We have now done five sessions and three adventures under our belts. Characters are starting to level up, and Jet's starting to draw up his own dungeon with monsters from the monster handbook.

It's fascinating and fun watching him get creative with all of this, and start to bend the rulebook and the story presentation in the dungeon master's book just to make it satisfy him. Encouraging him to do that has been a lot of work, but the results have really made him happier and made the game  more fun. He's gotten confident enough that when a friend of his mentioned that he had a character he'd gotten in a game an uncle had run, Jet invited him to play in our game. That was really cool.  So Jet's starting to think of putting together a gaming party for his friends.

And the door opens onto a lot of possibilities. He still remembers when I ran a Faery's Tale for him and he loved his little brownie, who could clean anything and fix stuff. Now, though, he rather likes the battles of D&D and is fascinated by the Gelatinous Cube. *laughs*

Comments

  1. I had a stunted upbringing and never played D&D. I did play NetHack later on and that's enough to cause the phrase "fascinated by the Gelatinous Cube" to send chills up my spine. Have fun!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hack is pretty close!! As John can attest, but yes... it did give me pause when that was the one he got fixated on. *laughs*

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Everything Is A Lot

My mother took my hand, as we were going to leave tonight, and she very deliberately, gently, and slowly pressed a kiss on the back of my hand. And at the look on her face, I clasped her hand back just as gently, but firmly, and I kissed her on her forehead. She smiled and let me go.  Words are failing her. I find it ironic that the only way that I can process her now word-muddled existence is through my long practice with words.  On November 13th, my sister and father did a video doctor's check with my mother. Their GP was so alarmed at her inability to truly respond to their questions made their primary doctor tell them that they had to go to the ER. That there was something seriously wrong with her and they had to get her looked at as quickly as possible. The three of them spend two horrific days in the over crowded ER at UCSD, in order to get the CAT scans and MRI that showed a very large shadow in her brain.  This was while John and I were in Kauai. We heard the begi...

Gumbo Z'Herbes

I'm writing this because my son needs this particular version of Gumbo Z'Herbes as I actually do it. It was based off a recipe in Epicurious that then went to Chow that then went to Chowhound, that then... anyway... I don't know the exact origins anymore, and I've changed it substantially from them.  Ingredients 3  lb  greens (two bags of Costco Super Greens is great for this) 2/3  c  vegetable oil 2/3  c  all-purpose flour 1   yellow onion chopped 1  bunch  scallion chopped 1   green pepper chopped 4   celery ribs chopped 2  cloves  garlic minced 2  t  kosher salt 2  T  Cajun seasoning (preferably Lucille's) 2 cups vegetable broth or chicken broth if you're not going vegan or water 2  whole  cloves 2  whole  bay leaves 3 whole allspice 1  T fresh herb (I never have marjoram, so it's been cilantro usually or parsley)  Gumbo Z'herbes Directions Have a big bowl of i...

Sourdough Bread Recipe and Techniques

Ingredients Leaven 50 grams whole wheat flour 50 grams bread flour 100 grams water 20 grams starter Dough 375 grams warm (90-110 degrees Fahrenheit) water 165 grams Leaven 375 grams bread flour 125 grams whole wheat flour (finer ground, commercial/generic whole wheat) 10 grams salt Technique Mix all the leaven ingredients together. I use a quart sized translucent plastic container from take-out soup because I like to see the level of the dough inside. I put a thin rubber band around the girth of it at the starting level, and place it in a warm spot and let it grow until it doubles in height. It can take anywhere from three to eight hours, so sometimes I use a dehydrator set to 80-90 degrees Fahrenheit to speed the process.  When it's doubled, I take 165 grams of the leaven and mix it into the warm water for the dough (it SHOULD float if you let the leaven rise long enough). I put the rest back into the refrigerator for next time. I actually work it into the water, "dissolving...