Chapter 6 - Toilet Pizza

I say that I "worked" at Michael's Magic, but in reality I had fewer real responsibilities than the activities director on the Love Boat. I jockeyed the register quite a bit, but the store wasn't the kind of place where the counter had to be manned at all times. In fact, for minor purchases of soda, bottled water, or snack-size chips you could just take what you wanted and leave change near the register. I would sometimes host weekly CCG tournaments, but I was often playing in them anyway, so all I had to do was keep a score sheet. Restocking was a little bit of Christmas every time the mail arrived, because I had first crack at all the new RPG supplements right out of the distributors' shipments. I took the trash out before closing: mainly aluminum cans, Taco Bell wrappers and pizza boxes, which nearest approximates the closest I ever approached to real work in the entire day, but otherwise I think I was there mainly to ensure that nobody brazenly stole anything.

There was one other thing I had to do to earn my keep, ostensibly on a weekly basis but really whenever Mike got annoyed with me: cleaning out the bathroom. I always called it "mucking out the stall" because after a hundred gamers nourished on little but Dr. Pepper and Taco Bell have spent a week collectively defiling the bathroom, the place was filthier than Jabba the Hutt's armpits. I won't claim that gamers are any more disgusting than any other group-- say, drunks, soccer hooligans, or rage-infected monkeys (but then, I'm being redundant)-- but I can tell you from years of cleaning up after them that gamers are a pack of odious swine one step up on the evolutionary ladder from picking their assholes in public.

I'm not sure where it comes from, this complete disregard for washroom cleanliness. Gamers tend to be rather fastidious, especially boardgamers. We like to organize our books on shelves, sort our collectible fantasy miniatures in plastic bins and tackle boxes, bag and board our comics, sort the pieces of our board games by color and function in tiny plastic bags that we have to make special trips to the craft store to find, and put thousands of collectible cards in individual protective sleeves., yet every time I cleaned that bathroom it was like the floor of a Chilean hospital for cholera patients. We boast of our superior hand-eye coordination granted by decades of videogames, yet hitting the water in a toilet bowl continues to be a deceptively hard task for some.

I admit that I'm being a little unfair. I'm not trying to put forward a stereotype that gamers are a particularly filthy bunch. It's probably no different from any other public building. I'm simply speaking for the vast majority of game store bathrooms I've visited: yikes. You imagine the bathroom nightmare, and short of cleaning up afterbirth, I've done it all. Every store has some jackass who loves to stuff entire rolls of toilet paper into the bowl and flush. People have sprayed piss all over the walls, sink, and mirror like their dick was an out-of-control fire hose. Someone smeared taco diarhhoea on the walls after only half-filling the toilet, trailing shit over the seat. Mike even installed a urinal once and someone left his piss foaming in it for two weeks before the plumbing was hooked up to it. You might think it was an honest mistake if you don't consider the garbage bag draped over it and large cardstock sign reading "OUT OF SERVICE."

Those were aberrations, though. No doubt the work of one, maybe two vandals with severe bowel problems and no compunctions about sharing them with the world. It's probably just a couple of dirty jerks making every other gamer look bad. But still, the general state of most game store bathrooms I've seen borders on atrocious. How someone can live over twenty years and still not grasp the accepted "poop goes in the water" rule of modern society is beyond me. Who uses a toilet and walks out without flushing? You know how repulsive it is to walk into a bathroom and find someone else's orange piss still foaming in the bowl? I don't care what you do at home, but when you go to a public building, the adage "if it's yellow, let it mellow" does not apply.

I'm not alone in thinking this. At one point, the major gaming convention in Milwaukee, Gen Con, decided to issue fliers to all of its guests reminding them how great it would be if they actually took a shower once in a while. The main reason for this is because Gen Con stands as one of the last great endurance trials for gamers: several days of unceasing gaming. Many gamers attempt to make the pilgrimage to Milwaukee at least once in their life and see if they can go the distance on naught but caffeine and Slim Jims, and if you don't have to sleep, you don't need to book a hotel room and all its attending hygienic facilities. You can imagine the kind of funk several hundred gamers who have been living out of the consuite for three days smells like.

This is the story of the toilet pizza. It is also not anywhere close to the scatological nightmare you might currently be imagining. It's still very, very weird, and it haunts me to this day. Even better, the ending of this story may very well stand out as the most evil thing I have ever done.

We were playing a D&D 3rd Edition game in the back room-- Mike's favored spot to game because he could watch the rest of the store without craning his neck around. Unfortunately, this meant we were right next to the bathroom so every time the door opened after someone dropped the kids off at the pool, we sat at the table retching until the poo-gas dissipated. Believe me, I wanted to move to the front of the store, but Mike had a favorite green table in the back and he wasn't moving it. So I pulled the collar of my t-shirt over my nose, commando-style, and soldiered on. Of course, now I'm smelling my own armpits, but better my Old Spice deodorant than Chanel "Number Two."

Anyway, my character, Smilin' Jack D'Arcy (a Bard/Fighter working on the Dread Pirate prestige class for no better reason than it sounded really cool) got stiffed with a Hold Person spell so I decided to stretch my legs a bit because the fight was going to take a while. My wanderings eventually led into the bathroom because when I'm at the gaming table I tend to drink Mountain Dew like Dean Martin pounds back martinis. Mountain Dew is a curious beverage with a taste that's rather hard to define other than "it tastes green." Which it is. It's also nearly undrinkable when it's not cold and rumored to cause sterility in men. Fits right into my plan.

I can only be grateful it hasn't yet turned my pee green.

After doing my business, I flushed and began to head for the toilet when I noticed something wedged underneath the toilet bowl: a pizza box from the nearby Peter Piper Pizza. I would collect pizza boxes quite often from around the store because almost everyone choked down that godawful pizza every night. It was horrible stuff. Peter Piper is mainly a place for kids to have lame birthday parties and blow a few bucks on arcade games and skee-ball. It's certainly not known for its gourmet cuisine. Made from frozen, pre-packaged ingredients and slopped together by apathetic high-school students, it was bad even by take-out pizza standards; it was the kind of disgusting, limp pizza you couldn't pick up with your hands. Either you'd try to heft the slice with one hand, causing all the cheese to slough onto the plate leaving you with a reddish hunk of dough wrapped around your fist, or you'd try to pick it up with two hands, covering your fingers in grease and scalding cheese and try to mash this lump of lard and saturated fats into your mouth before your plate disintegrated. The grease was so plentiful it would form into standing orange pools on top of the pizza, soak through the "crust" (term used loosely because it had all the structural integrity of a tortilla) and even dissolve the cardboard box, leaving a moldering yellow stain on the white tables. We used to steal napkins and smother the pizza like a chemical spill, hoping to wick off the grease to make it slightly less-likely to cause us massive heartattacks before the age of thirty.

We ate it constantly. Every day we were there. Oh, we complained about it endlessly. It tasted like Super Mario wiped his ass on a plate. It was too expensive, and it was so unhealthy when we'd finished off the rubbery crusts we'd all felt like we'd done something unholy to ourselves we'd one day pay for later in our lives, and pay dearly. But every day I'd make the run and throw in an order for two large pepperoni, two large cheese. It's impossible to order anything else because any assembled group larger than three people can never agree on toppings, and then you're dealing with half-orders, weird allergies and aversions to sausage, and some sick fuckers even like to put pineapple on them. But nobody was willing to make the drive (or even the walk to the Taco Bell down the block) to go anywhere else, and nobody could ever remember the number to a better pizza place. Even when we could, there was always some asshole who cried out "Papa John's SUCKS" and ruin it for everyone else. Going anywhere else would also mean taking the orders of sixteen people, and seriously, fuck that noise.

It disturbed quite a bit when I pulled the box out from under the toilet and found it to be ponderously heavy, feeling a weight shift from within. I should have just run to the dumpster and thrown the box away and gone somewhere to use a blowtorch to sterilize my fist, but in some weird moment of Lovecraftian curiosity-- you don't really want to know, you just sorta have to know-- opened the box.

Inside lay a pizza. Pepperoni. Whole and intact. From under the toilet. It looked like it was made of wax, with a strange glossy film along the top tinted like rosé that must have been a thin lacquered layer of mozzarella oil. At a glance it actually looked...well, normal. It didn't look good by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn't really look like you'd expect a toilet pizza to look. There were no massive, rolling slopes of semi-sentient mold or nests of maggots, no stench of rotting cheese. The pizza was such an unnatural biological hazard that it held no nutritional value for vermin and was too toxic to serve as a host for mold. Instead it has just...hardened. It somehow looked stiff, as if I could pick it up in one contiguous disc and throw it. I had unearthed a perfectly-preserved pizza fossil.

I closed the box and found a receipt taped to the lid. The date marked the pizza as over a month old. How many times had I cleaned the bathroom and missed a large pepperoni pizza wedged vertically behind the toilet bowl? How many hairy naked gamer asses had the toilet pizza borne witness to? How many taco shit fumes had seeped into the cardboard, the very crust of this pizza?

I had so many questions, and I stood there with the toilet pizza in my hands turning the quandary over in my mind. This was, by far, the most Zen moment I had ever experienced. How had the pizza come to rest under a toilet? Who would ever take a whole pizza into the bathroom, and why? I like to imagine some guy bringing the pizza back to the store, sitting down at his game of Settlers of Catan and suddenly realizing that he had to use the bathroom. He looked around at the three other gamers, not trusting a single one of them alone with his pizza. "It's my pizza," he'd think, "I paid for it, and I'll be damned if the fuckstick who stole my Longest Road points is going to lay his filthy hands on a single solitary slice." So he tucks the box under his arm and heads into the bathoom as the other players watch him go in puzzlement.

From here my narrative gets a little cloudy. Maybe the person encountered some...straining difficulties and needed to use both hands to bear down on something, so he stuffed the pizza underneath himself before he realized what he was doing. Although I have no idea why someone who would bring a pizza into the bathroom would suddenly balk at taking the pizza back out of the bathroom. The Rubicon has been crossed, man. I just can't conceive of a single situation where the end conclusion is "I know, I'll store this pizza under the toilet."

Actually, come to think of it, I've been operating under the assumption that the person who put the pizza under the toilet did it for himself. Maybe that person did it to spite someone else. Same setup, only your opponent brings in the pizza and he just stole your Longest Road. He gets distracted by some obscure Jango Fett debate and you think "This'll fix his wagon. Your pizza is going under the fucking toilet. Teach you to drop the robber on my 8-forest, you dicktard..."

My god, I may have solved it. But I can never know for sure, and to the end of my days I will forever ponder the mystery of the toilet pizza, spinning the questions around in my head uselessly. Who? Why? And the most important question of all...

If I put this pizza out in the store, would anyone eat it?

I can only imagine the bouquet of flavors that flooded Nick's mouth the moment he took that first bite, but he knew something was wrong the moment that first fossilized morsel snapped off under his teeth like a stale graham cracker. I was never going to let the guy swallow it, but there was no fear of that. If he didn't already suspect something was wrong, the taste of Italian death in his mouth and my complete guffawing lack of a poker face sent him spewing back into the box declaring vendetta on my house. I suspect that one day he's going to be awaiting me in my bedroom with a roll of duct tape, a funnel, and decade-old avocado dip.

Still. Totally worth it.

Concerning Alignments & Throttling Paladins

It's prudent to address the issue of alignments before getting too far into the retelling of classic gaming stories, because many of the best stories of RPG group meltdowns involve alignments closely. For the benefit of any readers who aren't familiar with alignments, I'm not talking about adjustments to the wheels of your car; I'm referring to a descriptive term applied to an RPG character that loosely defines his ethics. Basically, they allow you to demonstrate that your character Lance Pureheart is, in fact, a Good Guy, the villain Scourge Asswipe is absolutely a Bad Guy, and the asshole druid Waffles Grayberry is just a neutral guy who really just wants to stay out of this argument and fuck a dryad or two.

There's more to it than that, of course. Some games don't bother with alignment-- you just act however you want-- other games have variant types of alignment like Rifts and the other Palladium games that take the form of an enumerated list of ethics, like "will not hit a guy with glasses on" and at what point that character will break his word. But most of the time when you're talking about alignment, you're talking about the Gygaxian alignment system in the Dungeons & Dragons RPG-- a system that not only defines a character, but empirically defines the entire structure of the galaxy and all its multitudinous dimensions, afterlives, and religions. It's also the most common argument to blight the gaming table, one that nobody's ever made any headway fighting, and can often end with people not talking to one another anymore. I've been in more than one group that has ended because of differences over the interpretation of alignment. It's sort of the Roe v. Wade argument of gaming, only way pettier.

I'll start simply. D&D's alignment consists of two factors: a character's adherence to the polar notions of law or chaos-- meaning, is a character more likely to operate within the bounds of law & order, or is he more anarchist in his approach. On one side would be Judge Dredd, a man who blindly follows the law, and on the other, think about Robin Hood who routinely breaks the law to help his common man. The other aspect of alignment is, on its face, relatively simple: is he devoted to Good or Evil interests? All you have to do is pick Law or Chaos, Good or Evil, and that's that. Easy, right?

I wish it was.

This isn't some wishy-washy terminology like I've made it out to be. In D&D it's serious business. It's not so much a description for a lot of players and DMs, it's a restriction. It's used to restrict membership in character classes; you can't very easily be a Lawful barbarian or a Good assassin, and it doesn't make much sense for a paladin to be Evil. In fact, a paladin has to be Lawful Good. They're the boy scouts. Further, you generally have to be of a similar alignment to the god your character worships, especially if you're a cleric and you expect Zeus to grant your requests for lightning bolts to smite thy foes. If Zeus thinks you're an asshole and knows you don't hold his ethics to heart, he's just not going to listen. Alignment is of key concern to religious classes.

It's also why paladins are, with few exceptions, insufferable shitheads. Imagine bopping around a fantasy realm with a glowing ninny in plate mail who literally radiates an aura of smug pretentiousness. I'm serious, you can see it. It's a little like hanging out with Superman, if Superman chopped anything he perceived as Evil into quivering sandwich-sized strips. Sure, when you're dealing with vampires and mummies there's no one you'd rather have in front of you then a 250-lbs. virgin with a five-foot flaming sword, but try living with him for a week.

Paladins are the ultimate wet blanket on a party's good time. You think he's just going to stand by and let the thief run around backstabbing sentries and slitting throats? Hell, a paladin would go apeshit if he knew a thief existed in the party. It's a thief. Stealing is wrong. The character will be lucky if that paladin doesn't take a heavy mace and beat the Bubble-Yum out of a thief's head. Forget looting the bodies of your enemies, ambushing that party of orcs, telling a lie, imbibing alcohol, or engaging in premarital sex. That's dishonorable.

You don't even have to do anything wrong to piss a paladin off. They can smell the taint on your soul. Your character's alignment is more than just a descriptor, it's an aura that he gives off. Paladins can detect evil at will just by looking at you, so if your alignment has the word "evil" in it, within seconds of meeting you he'll scan you with his stupid Sonar of Judgment and ram his sword into your chest before you can whimper "habeas corpus."

Sometimes conflicts like this will end in bloodshed, often the player will simply refuse to associate with the characters who offend the paladin's delicate sensibilities. You have to
understand, the paladin has to act this way, especially if the DM is a stickler for adherence to alignment. Paladins walk a moral tightrope. As soon as they stray from the path of righteousness, their patron god yanks their divine powers out from under them and they never get them back. That's not the paladin's fault, that's just the way he is. They're hard to involve in a group that takes alignment seriously, because it's hard to justify slitting an opponent's throat as an act that is good and noble, even if that throat happens to belong to a troll.

It's about here where the argument gets ugly. It's why I usually leave the room when it gets to this point, because it's all terribly pointless.

"But the troll is evil!" comes the counter-argument. "It says so in the Monster Manual. Troll: Chaotic Evil." Surely slashing the jugular of an evil creature is justifiable. The paladin might concede this point but point out that such a cowardly move is still dishonorable and therefore not Lawful, and is therefore still intolerable.

About now the person playing the druid chimes in, asking what specifically makes the troll irredeemably evil. What, we write the entire troll species off as evil just because the book slaps a label on them? There can't be any good trolls?

"Nope!" shouts the smartass wizard. "Remember when we slaughtered that room full of orc babies?"

"You did what?" the paladin recoils in horror. I start looking for booze.

"They're evil," insists the thief, still pointing at the Monster Manual. "Orcs: Chaotic Evil. They're evil fucking orc babies who will grow up into murdering orc raiders. I'll drown every last fucking orc baby I see if I get the chance."

"Remember when I put that orc baby in a pillowcase and smashed it against a wall?" laughs the fighter.

And now we've officially entered the "Death to Orc Babies" sub-argument of the alignment debate, where everyone tries to establish if orcs have a genetic basis for being Evil, or if it's an acquired behavior. Nobody wins this argument, but most agree that it was probably in bad taste to throw them ahead of the party down corridors to set off traps, shouting "fore!"

Just when you thought the worst of it was over, someone starts moaning over how they hate alignments as a whole and wish they could do away with it. After all, Good and Evil are relative concepts and only Sith deal in absolutes. This argument is partial bullshit, because the plain fact is that in most fantasy RPGs there is such a thing as absolute good and absolute evil. Hell exists and is a tangible place full of devils, and if you can't say the devil is evil, you really need to quit gaming and go to law school.

Still, it's a good point. It's easy to come up with justifications for theft, torture and assassination for a good cause (especially if you're a Republican). James Bond is an assassin for the British government, and he's not Evil. And I can come up with counter-arguments that Paladins can be every bit as diabolical and evil as any other villain. You could point to the most vile, sadistic, misogynistic, intolerant torturer of the Spanish Inquisition and claim that he's Lawful Good because he's absolutely devoted to the cause of Good and rooting out heresy. In fact, I've seen Paladins played that way and I can't argue that they did it wrong.

At some point people just need to relax. I've always felt that anyone who wants to bring a paladin to the gaming table really should discuss it with the other players and address potential problems out of the game, because the orc baby thing is going to come up and it's never pretty. If the player behind the paladin can't find some way to rationalize his character's willingness to associate with the party, it's best never to bring it in the first place. I've always felt that the DM should give the paladin moral leeway to fraternize with thieves and killers on the justification that he's fighting a much greater evil, but oftentimes the player himself can't get over that issue, standing stalwart on the phrase "my character just wouldn't do that."

Of course, being forthright and open with the other players before the issue becomes a problem is the common sense solution, which is why I've been in three groups that have melted down because of paladins.

It's a hopelessly muddy issue. Even many villains committed to depravity and oppression of the weak would classify themselves as good people. Few people except the insane would classify their own actions as evil. Everyone has a justification for why their actions are correct. Sure, in fantasy realms you're going to have people who worship evil gods and who are openly wicked, but then you start getting into a circular argument about the nature of these "evil" gods and everyone starts wondering why they can't just start throwing funny-shaped dice around and killing goblins.

Any alignment can be a real headache, though, particularly when you're dealing with jerks who go way overboard with it. And then there are just idiots. Here are all the possible alignment combinations and what they really mean, along with my special classifications for certain extreme alignments:

• Lawful Good, a.k.a. "Boy Scouts" - Pure of heart, noble of spirit, a champion of peace and justice. They're honorable folk, real suckers for charity cases and will believe pretty much anything if the NPC looks pathetic and waifish. They'll often rope the rest of the party along on lame bug hunts and decline payment. It's an alignment usually only taken by asshole paladins, who interpret this alignment as intolerant smug posturing, denouncing or beating the fudge out of anyone with a different system of beliefs.
• Lawful Neutral, a.k.a. "The Fuzz" - Primarily enforcement types who adhere to the law, right or wrong, and are interested only with maintaining order. They're difficult to justify as wandering adventurers, since the very nature of their lives tends to operate outside the scope of accepted law. They tend to be undesirable in an adventuring party because they're not much fun and will turn you in to the authorities for stealing stuff.
  
• Lawful Stupid, a.k.a. "Johnny Fairplay" - Obsessed with honor and law, usually enforcing both with swift, brutal force. It's an alignment also normally taken by paladins who will tear your balls off for jaywalking or blaspheming under your breath. They will also always demand a fair fight, even going so far as to wake up and loudly challenge an elder green wyrm to an honorable duel instead of killing it in its sleep. They usually don't last more than a week.
• Stupid Good, a.k.a. "Fucking Hippies" - The kind of simpering pacifist who refuses to take a life under any circumstances, tends to play unarmed clerics of wuss gods and are therefore nearly useless in a fight. Will incessantly whine and bitch if witnessing any shady act in progress. Tries to negotiate every encounter away from violence, and will often spend more healing magic on wounded enemies than on comrades, insisting that they be taken prisoner to stand trial for their crimes, no matter the location or circumstances, even if the nearest town is forty miles away and nobody has any rope.
• Lawful Evil, a.k.a. "Republicans" - Tyrants, despots and fascists who operate within the law to oppress others for personal gain. People usually don't choose this alignment because they deal with this type of person enough at work already.
• Neutral Good, a.k.a. "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time" - A common alignment for people who want to be good guys without being assholes about it. They help people in need and don't much care for politics when they do it. Tends to be a low-maintenance alignment a DM can't call you out on the carpet for violating as long as you don't act like a complete psychopath and spike orc babies like footballs while doing the Super Bowl Shuffle.
  
• True Neutral, a.k.a. "Wafflers" - People with no strong moral leanings, such as farmers who care only about feeding their families are Neutral. Often misinterpreted by players who want to be cool mercenaries who serve the highest bidder (when this is actually Neutral Evil). Also the alignment of people who want to preserve the nebulous concept of balance between good and evil throughout the world. In Forgotten Realms, these people are known as Harpers, or more commonly, Pompous Fucktards.
• Neutral Stupid, a.k.a "Unbelievable Assholes" - Some people (read: fucking druids) interpret True Neutrality to be absolute, rigid lockstep adherence to Balance. That's Balance with a capital B, and they believe that Balance must exist in all things. These jagoffs are such unbelievable pricks that, in an example given in the D&D rulebook, a typical druid might fight against a band of marauding gnolls, only to switch sides and attack his own party to save the gnoll's clan from being exterminated. Can you believe that shit?
• True Neutral with Good Tendencies, a.k.a "Neutral With Bullshit Tendencies" - This is an inane distinction made in several adventure modules describing NPCs as Neutral, but Neutrals who do good things to help the party. Most people who play True Neutrals tend to do this as well, which begs the question why they don't just make Neutral Goods if they're just going to tap dance around the whole neutrality issue. You can't be neutral if you tend to always side with one group over another. That's the very antithesis of neutrality. It's just bullshit! True Neutral is a stupid alignment.
  
• Neutral Evil, a.k.a. "Mercs and Assassins" - These people are out solely for personal gain and hold no loyalty to anybody. They have no interest in wanton destruction, but neither are they bound to any code of honor. Typically only taken by PCs who are playing assassins, but most of the time the character is too much of a lying, duplicitous scumbag to be much good as a player character in an adventuring party.
• Chaotic Good, a.k.a. "The Thief" - Best thought of as the Robin Hood or Han Solo type of mentality, which makes it a very popular alignment because everyone wants to be Han Solo. Chaotic Good characters generally do whatever they want and will throw a beating to anyone who tries to oppress them. It's a good cop-out alignment for a character who wants to steal stuff and engage in pointless violence as long as it's generally directed towards the bad guys. Usually the guy who invents the game of orc bowling to find tripwires.
• Chaotic Neutral, a.k.a. "The Cop-Out Alignment" - The character does what he wants, when he wants, period. He has no regard for law whatsoever, and cares nothing for ethics when he acts. These characters are invariably complete tools because they have no impulse control and have a proclivity for randomly stabbing people who annoy them in the throat. It's impossible for a DM to violate their actions on alignment grounds, because how can you ever claim a Chaotic Neutral is acting out of character? People who don't want to justify their actions or who just want to kill shit will often scribble "CN" on their sheets so the DM will leave them alone.
  
• Chaotic Stupid, a.k.a. "The Xaositect" - Named after the Planescape faction devoted entirely to acting as random and bizarre as possible, Chaotic Stupids really are apt to do anything at any time, and usually spend most of their time thinking of the most imperceptibly loony thing to do just to prove that they can. They're just as likely to jump off a bridge howling the Battle Hymn of the Republic as they are to cross the bridge with penis in hand, jerking off into their own sock while shouting "Lemons! Lemons! Contact your network administrator!" They're not nearly as fun to have around at a party as you might think, because then you have to deal with them drunk.
• Chaotic Evil, a.k.a "No Chance Will a DM Allow This" - Take a frigging guess what a Chaotic Evil is like. If you actually think a DM is going to let a CE character slide into a normal group, he's either running an Evil campaign or you bribed him.
  
• Stupid Evil, a.k.a. "So You Bribed Him" - Evil characters are actually very playable as long as you're not an idiot, but most of the time people who want to play Evil characters are idiots, so you won't have to deal with their characters for long. The trick is not letting the other party members know that you're evil (usually you don't want them to know you're secretly an assassin), and so you masquerade as something else. Most of the time assassins claim to be bards, which is a bullshit story most veterans will see through instantly unless your poker face is fucking stellar. But Stupid Evils do everything they can to blow their cover by pulling some truly stupid shit, like stealing stuff from the party and getting caught almost instantly. Never rob your own party. It never ends well.

Chapter 5 - Gamefellas

Michael's Magic was stuck in one of those strip malls that never seems to do much business. You know the kind of run-down area where it doesn't matter what kind of stores open on the corner, be it restaurant or thrift store, they usually close after six months. It's still a bad area of town, worse than it looks: the kind of place that was safe enough by day but by night became some kind of a nexus for delinquents looking for a safe place to drop gang tags and break windows. You never wanted to leave your car there for long after sundown.

The notable shops in the strip mall were a failing United Artists movie theater that looked more ghetto than most inner city grindhouses on the inside and a nickel arcade. You'd think we'd have hung out at the arcade, but for some reason none of us ever set foot in it. There was an Italian restaurant that Big Mike (being a large Italian with a healthy appetite) often sent me to on food runs for antipasto. It had a couple of arcade games like The Simpsons where three of the four joysticks didn't work, and nobody could ever remember which one the good one was, and a generic Sega racing game. It's also the first place I'd ever seen where they had weekly karaoke contests.

My favorite place on that block was the Sukiyaki Express, just past the nail salon: a Chinese take-out place with stereotypical accoutrements like red walls and big gold-colored dragons hung around the place. It was authentic food, too, a family business. Over the years we went though every damn thing on that menu. Some of us were woefully addicted to their crab puffs, but me, I ate their pork fried rice almost every night. It got to the point where they had an order ready for me at six with, densely packed into a white box, two packets of soy sauce perched on top. I'm no judge of fine cuisine, but I still crave that junk. It was probably loaded with MSG and the bad kind of fat I will one day suffer a massive coronary for, and many people often joked that the red cubes of pork were really dog, but I don't care. That was damn fine dog. I felt like Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks talking about that cherry pie.

The second major reason we went there constantly was their policy of 25-cent refills on soda, which the family was good enough to extend to us because we worked on the same strip. And man, did we shamefully abuse that policy like like the cheap scum we were. They eventually upped it to 35 cents, cursing us in Mandarin as overcaffeinated swine even as we ordered a store-full of General Tsao's chicken.

The third, probably real reason we went down there was that the family had their smoking hot teenage daughters working the registers, whose names we never learned and who none of us ever mustered up the balls to ask out on a date. They had a uniform of sorts: dark slacks and a tight white t-shirt over-- and this is the important part-- black bras. You could see just enough underwear through those shirts to make the whole day worth living. And yeah, you can call it shallow and sexist. I can't deny that. But give us a break; those are the only women we'd see all day, most times. It's not like we were stuffing dollar bills into their cleavage.

God I miss them.

For about a year the entire shop smelled like nail polish because of some strange venting issue between us and the salon next door. It drove Mike nuts. As for me, I discovered that if you sat in the bathroom (where the fumes were coming from) for about ten minutes, you got high. I stopped doing this when Mike started questioning why I spent long stretches of time on the toilet making giggling noises.

For all the time we spent together, I never really spoke to Mike all that much about his personal life, and I still don't know a lot about him personally. He's a big guy, a true New Yorker at heart. Big fan of the Yankees and the Mets, and you knew he was authentic the way he'd rip into Steinbrenner at the merest mention of the team. He was married when I met him, but (from my perspective) it was a persistently rocky marriage where they were always both in varying levels of not speaking to one another, still fuming over some argument had in private. I don't think she had much patience for Mike's obsession with collecting nerd books and playing with funny-shaped dice. She always had this pinched-face look of disdain on her face whenever she spoke to me, which was infrequently. It always seemed like she treated the interior of the store as if it were populated by highly-excitable monkeys infected with Ebola and irritable bowel syndrome.

The store traded primarily in RPGs and card games when it first opened. Mike started his business trading and selling rare coins on eBay, and he was apparently good enough to turn a profit at it. He had a lot of sources to old, used things, and I guess thats' where he got access to a treasure trove of out-of-print RPG sourcebooks and games-- a major reason for the store's popularity. That's important to gamers and card collectors.

I was still relatively new to gaming and had the precious resource of a credit card backed financially by my mom, so Mike liked me just fine. We sat around and argued about stuff all day, usually with new customers over the store's copy of Settlers of Catan (a German game about cursing a pair of wooden dice for being traitorous whores). We played so much Settlers that we actually wore a copy out. The cards were warped and split, filthy from skin oils, the spots on the dice work off from over-use. Now I can barely stand to play the game, but it kept us occupied for a long time.

I tried a little bit of everything there. That's the danger of hanging out in a game store with friends for too long: you can get roped into some truly stupid shit. I've lost count of the lame CCGs I bought into: Raw Deal, Rifts (yes there was a card game), Shadowrun, Young Jedi, Warlord, Mage Knight...jeez. When we had a lot of people around and long stretches of time to fill, we either busted out some obtuse board game printed by Avalon Hill like Civilization or its many, many war simulations or robber baron games, or we indulged in some marathon RPG sessions.

It's a sure bet that nobody will remember your name at a game store until you've been a presence there for about two months. In RPGs you'll notice people referring to each other in broad generalizations (as they can't be arsed to remember your character's name, either) like "Elf, shoot that!" or "Shouldn't the dwarf be here? The ranger isn't back yet. Thief, go check on him." When a gamer finally does commit to remembering your name, it's usually with the aid of a mnemonic device, especially if your name is sickeningly common.

At one time I knew about four Mikes, forcing the gamers to hold a conclave and decide once and for all, which Mike is to be known as what. There was Store Mike (the Mike I knew), whose name had to be changed to Big Mike when I was reminded that there was another Mike who ran Game Depot, and he was Store Mike already, so he had tenure. There was Crazy Mike, a man who looked like a frazzled roadie for Motorhead and one of my most loyal players. There was Crackhead Mike and Skinny Mike, too.

Then there were the Steves: Celtic Steve, Vegan Steve, Ponytail Steve, Star Trek Steve, and He Might Be Steve, whose name we thought was Steve but were too embarrassed to ask to make sure. I personally objected to Ponytail Steve's name, because Vegan Steve had a ponytail as well, but I couldn't fight the system.

I even knew about four Noahs in one very strange time in my life, each requiring his own mafioso style codename. As far as I know, I actually did not have a wacky name-- something that still scares me because people who didn't know their other name had names nobody dared repeat aloud in their presence. I was probably Shithead Noah.

We had quite the cast of characters, though.

• Crazy Mike - Not actually as insane as his name would lead you to believe, he was probably just called that because for a long time he desperately needed a haircut and looked like one of the family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He was notorious for having absolutely no luck at all rolling dice in an RPG, to the point where few people were willing to even sit next to him during a game for fear that his bad luck was contagious. I remember a span of years when he failed to roll a single successful to-hit. Currently, he DMs a somewhat turbulent Star Wars RPG.
• J.D. - A perpetually disheveled guy who favored the classic black rock concert t-shirt as his typical wardrobe, most memorable for a broad smile and a high-pitched "nya-ha-ha!!" laugh. He was big-time into CCGs, playing the Star Wars and Star Trek games as often as he could. Both of his decks were massive, favoring TIE Fighters and the Borg, each of which required a lot of cards. Worse, he tended to put plastic card protectors on each one, which would triple the size of the already ponderous 120+ card decks. As a result, his decks were about a foot tall, yet he had somehow developed the freakishly strong forearm muscles necessary to perform a classic dealer's shuffle with them.
• John - A Desert Storm veteran, rumored to have been discharged after a head wound (although I never pressed him on this). Famous around the store for never losing train-based board games, and I soon found out why over a game of Iron Dragon: he cheated like a son of a bitch. He also had a cute trick during RPGs of sitting at the far end of the table, away from the DM and rolling those awful mottled dice whose numbers you couldn't possibly identify even if you're looking directly over them, then announcing an average number that's usually sufficient to produce a success. One day he just up and vanished, and I never did find out why.
• Danny - Another veteran of our first war in Iraq, discharged after being shot through the face in the line of duty, resulting in most of his teeth and soft palette being blown out of his head. He had a surprisingly good nature despite this, however, and other than a gummy smile showed little other sign of his injury. He was up for pretty much anything.
• The Invisible Jason - I'll tell you the story behind his name later. He's about my age, but left not long before the store closed to go career in the Air Force. He could be talked into pretty much any game, which meant at any given time he was collecting four or five CCGs at once and trying to organize people for a Raw Deal tournament or the Rifts card game. He liked Rifts and the World of Darkness games. Some say...too much...
• That Guy Who Painted That One Miniature of Yours - A very amiable person who was in the store for a couple weeks and offered to paint our fantasy miniatures for us because he was bored. He did a phenomenal job, even adding custom bits of grass and rhinestones to their clothes. Then rumor has it that he hit someone with his car and went to jail for vehicular manslaughter. Never saw him again, but people kept asking if I'd seen him so I could ask him to paint their minis. It really was an awesome paint-job.
  
• Rugby Dan - Rugby players are harder than a coffin nail, and Dan played a lot of it. Most of his best stories are about gruesome injuries, including his favorite about severing his own Achilles tendon with a weed whacker. Somewhat notorious back in the day for being a good DM, but unable to hold a group together longer that two weeks. To this day he's big into Rifts and White Wolf, and would drop everything if he thought he could get a group going again. He's recently found religion and is one of the more devout Catholics you'll ever meet.
• Irish Bob - A huge, burly corrections officer who worked down in Florence and infrequently stopped by, mainly to see if we wanted to get out of the game store and go to the titty bar in an effort to remind us that women exist. He thought I was hilarious, mostly because I always declined to join him for drinks, which he thought was ballsy, considering I was a quarter his size and refusing to drink with an Irishman is a sure way to get your ass kicked. He finally forced me away from a game at a convention to go drinking with the other guys, where I had a choice of either drinking Irish carbombers or going to the hospital.
• Catpee Man - Most stores have a Catpee Man, a person who may or may not be homeless who loiters around the store smelling sharply of urine, and reading the books on the shelves. Oddly, he tends to favor reading whatever book another customer is looking at, and will invade their personal space to rubberneck. Mostly harmless.
• Vegan Steve - A long-haired ninny who nobody liked and whose idiotic behavior has spelled the doom of more than one D&D adventuring party. Never ate animal products, and when anything relating to the subject was brought up, would open the floodgates to a lengthy lecture about animal cruelty and the unhealthiness of our pagan diets.
• Celtic Steve - A lifelong member of the Society for Creative Anachronism who looked at all times like he'd just stepped out of the Renaissance Festival...usually because he really had. His main hobby was goatee maintenance and clubbing people with large metal objects. Probably our best hope in case the store ever faced a classic siege situation.
  
• Fucking Patrick - A loud, obnoxious, mouth-breathing little piece of anal discharge who had made it his life's mission to loudly antagonize people and be generally as pleasant as a tropical skin infection. So-called because whenever anyone saw him approaching through the store's front window, the moan "it's fucking Patrick..." rose throughout the assembled gamers. Was once arrested for brandishing a knife at someone who had beaten him at a game of Magic.

I was the best-looking guy there, of course.

Rifts

Palladium's Rifts has a rabid, almost maniacal following among a bizarre cross-section of gamer geeks. The others absolutely hate it, and shun Rifts gamers like people with taste avoid Nickelback. It's a punk-rock salad bar of gaming ideas, none of which make a fart of sense, but which blend into a chocolate whirl of chaos so awesome most people can't help but throw devil horns in the air and start moshing. It's got everything, and if it doesn't, you probably don't have the right books yet. You want to be a psychic cowboy who kills his enemies with mind bullets? It's there. You want to be a wizard who throws liquid death out of a boombox? I can find you rules for it. You want to be a rock star who pilots the Power Rangers' Megazord? You're thinking too small. Give me something hard.

Rifts has about three hundred thousand rules supplements available, each detailing several dozen races and occupations for characters appropriate to a given region of the Rifts world. The basic concept behind the game is that Earth is suddenly torn asunder by a shattering web of magical rifts, and from these ley lines pour incredible amounts of untapped mystical energy, and entire races of extradimensional beings from parallel ("dee-bee") Earths. This means that everything from Conan the Barbarian to Fin Fang Foom, down to (literally) the Robotech anime and Voltron started walking the Earth and started establishing their own nation-states.

Every one of these regions has its own (sometimes several) books. Most serious collectors have been forced to make additions to their house to store them all. The designers of Rifts long ago forgot about any semblance of game balance, and if you read even the core rulebook for a second you'll notice just how wildly inconsistent the range of character power is. Every book seems to feel the need to top the last in terms of abusive, broken abilities or destructive armaments. The entire game is like a literary nuclear arms race between the Palladium game designers to see who can think up the most whacked-out galaxy-shattering O.C.C. -- and since there aren't really any limits to imagination, it's all about as mature as a bunch of five-year-olds playing tag.

"Nuh uh! I've got no tag-back shields times, like, a billion!"

You do not want to be the poor dumb son of a bitch who gets talked into running a game of Rifts if you're a pussy. Hardcore fans will walk all over you, and casual fans will just make dragon juicers until the veteran players tell them what to do. If you actually care about things like balance, a coherent narrative structure, and games that last ten minutes before degenerating into city-wrecking melees when the glitter boy decides to shoot Odin in the face with a high-yield bunker-penetrating missile "to get the jump on him," then prepare to start sucking down Maalox in six-packs to stem the tide of ulcers you're about to get.

You need to have brass balls to run that game. Be willing to engage in the exact same pissing contest and have no mercy. Rifts GMs need to establish alpha dominance early or it gets out of control fast. Most games I've seen fold within four weeks, because no matter how awesome your character is, the very nature of Rifts is that there's always a bigger fish. So either the DM gets tired of the players running roughshod over his game, or the players get tired of rolling up new characters when the DM starts cracking down so he can finally tell a goddamn story.

The part I always like explaining about Rifts is its concept of "Damage Codes." See, in Palladium Fantasy, most average guys swinging a sword will do around 1 to 8 S.D.C. (which is short for Structural Damage Code). But in relation to buildings, vehicles, and various extraplanar beings, there needed to be another class of weapon necessary to cause meaningful damage. After all, you attack a Bradley tank with a broadsword, how many hit points does the thing have before you've worn it down?

Enter M.D.C. (Mega Damage), a classification above and beyond normal damage. Each point of M.D.C. is roughly, but not exactly equal to 100 S.D.C., to the point where it's hardly a relevant equation. Even if you managed to whack that tank with your sword about ten thousand times and do its S.D.C. equivalent in M.D.C., it still doesn't exactly work. And even if you had armor with 1,000 S.D.C., if that Glitter Boy hit you with a particle laser for 4 M.D.C., you'll still be a pile of grease, and so would anything behind you in the Hyborean Age for about two miles.

The constantly-escalating power level of Rifts results in the fact that nearly everything is based in M.D.C., so even your average schmuck in low-grade armor in Rifts has the approximate durability of an aircraft carrier. For frame of reference, if I were to put on some average Coalition environmental armor and someone were to hit me with the Batmobile, back up, and run over me several times, the best you could say is that you've annoyed me and gotten my suit muddy. In fact, to even scuff my armor you'd have to drop enough explosive ordnance on my ass to shock and awe Saddam Hussein.

That's the level of destruction that occurs when Rifts characters fistfight. Imagine what happens when they get mad.

Then there are the maddening array of rules that mitigate damage before it's inflicted. There's some kind of maneuver called roll-with-impact, a move that lets you over-sell a hit like one of the bridge crew on Star Trek when the Enterprise gets his with a photon torpedo. Somehow the act of doing a Kirk shoulder-roll reduces the damage you take. Attempting to explain when and how this act is performed requires careful years of study, flowcharts, a laser pointer, and an eightball of cocaine.

Then there's dodging and parrying, something even more complicated that causes 4 out of 5 arguments between Rifts players and GMs. Almost anything can be dodged or parried, if you're willing to sacrifice an attack to do so (and a lot of the great character O.C.C.s can have...what, 6 or more a round?). And that's not even getting into auto-dodges and auto-parries, which you always get, even in the most mind-bogglingly ridiculous circumstances. These rules have driven more game masters to gibbering madness than Highlander 2: The Quickening, and it's easy to understand why if you've ever played a game of Rifts in your life.

Can a character auto-dodge if he's not aware of an attack coming? Hell, I don't know. Can you attempt to dodge a projectile fired from a rail gun at point-blank range? Can you auto-dodge lasers, which are in fact moving at the speed of light? I think so. Is it possible to auto-parry a swarm of bees? I'd like to try and parry that semi-truck barehanded; it's trying to run me over so that counts as a hand-to-hand attack, right? I should get to apply my assassin martial arts mods.

Just be prepared to listen to about two weeks of surprisingly well-reasoned appeals and motions to dismiss your previous damage rolls, because Rifts is tailor made for players to whine about how their character shouldn't be dead. I've found that the only marginally-successful GMs to run Rifts savagely curtailed player shenanigans from the offset by limiting the number of sourcebooks allowed to about four, and explicitly banning a list of O.C.C.s about as long as your arm. He actually had a two-page leaflet prepared of things the players couldn't do, like "No Mind Melters" and "No Titan Juicers." (For those of you who don't know, Juicers are warriors of the future who become Hulk-like freaks capable of untold devastation and atrocity by injecting themselves with a hilarious amount of steroids, combat stimulants, and very often, the blood of mythical creatures. They have a life span about as long as an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, give or take.)

I'd write more, but I understand this review has caused the entire Rifts fan community to put out a fatwa on me, with orders to kill on sight. I need to retreat to a secure location and hope they don't bring any juicers.

Chapter 4 - Waterloo

I probably started looking for a game store when I got roped into Magic: The Gathering and I needed to buy cards. You couldn't really find CCG products outside of a game store-- maybe a few token booster packs at Toys 'R' Us and the dusty corner near the paperback books in Wal-Mart-- and today the situation is relatively unchanged. Toy stores tend to carry more of these games now, but they focus more on the kiddie card games like Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh!

Most game stores live and die based on their CCG sales. It's the only "safe" product to stock because you know it'll sell, and due to the games addictive, collectible nature, sell quite rapidly. Not nearly as many people play RPGs, and the product doesn't move off the shelves like cards. Once you've bought Dungeons & Dragons, you own it, and you don't really need any more of it. Board games are a money sink. Many of them are quite good, but they're expensive and collectors are a very fringe group, even among gamers. The only other product that sold well were the Games Workshop miniatures on the Warhammer and 40K line.

eBay and Amazon.com have basically delivered a deathblow to the small-time FLGS because you can get as many cards as you want delivered to your home, and cheaper.

Waterloo was an unusual little shop situated in Old Gilbert, a historical throwback to old Arizona architecture, sort of like what might happen if you took the town of Deadwood and moved modern shops into them. On the exterior, it looked like the Old West. With stoplights. I remember there being quite a controversy when the bar across the street put up a neon light.

It was just about everything you'd imagine a lonely nerd lair might look on the inside: an underlit, shadowy basement with an uneven (borderline dangerous) flooring, poor air conditioning, and dusty, smoky shelves. Imagine the shop in Gremlins where the old Chinese guy sells off Gizmo, only darker.

The owner, whose name I could never remember, chain-smoked to a hilarious degree, which couldn't have been good for the printed products stored inside. And that place was constucted of old, splintered wood, packed to the rafters with paper products. If he'd dropped one of those smokes the place would have gone up like Mrs. O'Leary's barn.

It was a great place, unusual even for a game shop. It was called Waterloo because it originally started stocking miniature Napoleonic War soldiers-- not for a game, just for hobbyists. A full quarter of the store sat disused for as long as I was there, stocking those little French dudes. The rest of the store was dominated by the RPG products, but they never really sold that well either. That's why I liked Waterloo: the RPGs sold so poorly that I could find almost any rare, out-of-print book I wanted buried somewhere in there.

It was a forty-minute drive, so I typically only went there with an agenda. I spent most of my time in the storage room in back playing RPGA modules and chatting with its resident group of counter monkeys. They were a surly bunch, fond of making ultimatums and talking ill of people behind their backs. The third edition of D&D was on the horizon and it gave them something to bitch constantly about instead of their normal topics of conversation: how much they didn't like the other players in their Warhammer 40K group, how cheesy the Space Marine army is, and arguing about the most disgustingly unbalanced O.C.C. in Rifts.

If you didn't follow that, believe me, it's not worth understanding.

A lot of old gamers go that way, eventually getting terminally pissed off and hanging around the back of game shops telling newbies how much their games suck while playing really obscure wargames or German board games. A lot of people mistake them for grognards, but real grognards tend never to leave their basements because their wargames usually require a table around 10 square yards in area and take approximately a month to finish.

You think I'm kidding.

Like any group of chatty gossips, gamers do more than just sit around a table and whine. They do other things while whining, rather like a sewing circle. These guys played a lot of 40K, so most of the time they took up the large central table and painted their dozens of miniatures together. It's a common hobby among miniature wargamers. It's a slow, exacting process that takes steady hands and a lot of spare time, and most people who do it perfer not to do it alone. The process also normally takes good lighting, and how they did it in the cave-like confines of Waterloo without giving themselves permanent eye strain still puzzles me.

I tried my hand at it, but never demonstrated any appreciable talent. It requires patience and artistic talent, of which I have neither. I foolishly decided to play an Orkish army, one of the most difficult armies to paint because they have a lot of exposed skin (skin tones are hard to paint) and bared faces (eyes and faces are also hard to paint on such a small scale). Not only that, Ork armies are normally very, very large and a 2000 point army can have around a hundred individual pieces, not counting vehicles. If I'd had any brains at all I would have played Necrons-- spray paint black and you're done.

The only decent figures I've ever painted were a team of Skaven (rat-people) for Blood Bowl, a game about violent American style football played by fantasy races like elves and dwarves. I don't know how I did it, and I couldn't do it again. I've played Blood Bowl exactly once about ten years ago. With my brother. Let's just say that's one purchase I regret.

I never worked there and I rarely spent more time than the tight four hours necessary to play an RPGA module, mostly because it was so hot that I couldn't stand sitting there for very much longer. The place was already a nightmare of allergens and B.O.; I didn't need to suffer any more heat stroke than was absolutely necessary. Remember that the summer temperatures in Arizona top out at around 125 degrees. So I don't really have any great stories.

Those came when Michael's Magic opened, a place about fifteen minutes closer where the nerdy pecking order had not yet been established. Geeks can be rather territorial about their stomping grounds, but loyalties will shift on a dime on things as small as driving distance or whether or not the owner stocks Dr. Pepper. I won't say I felt unwelcome at Waterloo, but it was never my turf and the gamers there weren't the welcoming sort. That can become a problem when the established store lurkers hang out all the time but don't really like each other.

So began the invasion of the Wizards of the Coast.

Chapter 3 - Leaping Wizards

Gaming in Arizona is thin, especially if you're into tabletop RPGs. It's a lot bigger now than it used to be when I started, but it's still a very small movement. Conventions and game stores are the places to go if you want to find a group, and there are less game stores now than there were before. All my old haunts (Michael's Magic, Waterloo, Game Knights) are closed now, and at the moment there are exactly two notable shops, down from the five I knew before.

The RPGA (Role Playing Gamers' Association) is the de facto public face of all roleplayers, as nobody really takes the Steve Jackson Games' "Men in Black" group or White Wolf's "Camarilla" seriously, and they represent games with much fewer players nationwide. It's a sort of national fan club for Dungeons & Dragons, an organized system for playing the game publicly, typically at conventions. The RPGA holds events at most conventions, where membership guarantees you a spot at a table, and your character is eligible to play in any RPGA event. The reason RPGA certification is important is that their adventures, treasures, and rules are balanced and standardized, so there's no hope your buddy DM will allow you to have major world-breaking artifacts when you bring your sheet to Gen Con.

Seems like a great idea, especially when you're between groups and looking to game. Today the conventions are jam-packed with RPGA tables, something that still surprises me when I cruise the gaming rooms. It surprises me because it wasn't always like that. When I joined the RPGA there were almost two conventions a year for gaming: Hexacon, Leprecon, and CopperCon. Only Hexacon had organized gaming; the other two claimed to have rooms for "open gaming" but nobody ever showed. Today there are two gaming conventions: Hexacon and ConGames. And ConGames sucks.

So it's rough-going if you're in Arizona. The RPGA allows sanctioned gameplay outside of conventions but it's a poor substitute for a regular group of players who aren't handcuffed to an approved adventure module and strictly limited in the treasure they can award.

I was pretty much one of the original members of the Arizona RPGA, and considering I started in the 90s, is really sad. There are a lot of gamers now, but when I volunteered to DM an RPGA event at Hexacon, we had exactly one table with four players, and one of those players was my brother. I did that for about a year, running monthly sanctioned games in the dusty back-room of Waterloo, a room without air conditioning that routinely ran over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, cooled only by an oscillating fan from the Cold War. It was the same group of people almost every time.

I think D&D 3rd Edition is what really caused the spike in membership, but I'd quit the RPGA by then so I couldn't tell you for sure. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Funny story about that game at Hexacon.

RPGA characters are based on a point-buy system instead of the normal D&D method of generating each of your attributes (like Strength, Intelligence, Charisma) by rolling three or four six-sided dice. A point-buy system gives each player an equal number of points to spend as currency on those attributes, so all characters are equal and nobody has to openly accuse another player of being a cheating swine when he brings a guy with 18s in every attribute to the table. This also has the side effect of making every character nearly identical in a class-based system.

When I gathered the four players who had signed up for my first-ever RPGA tournament module, I took a look at their character sheets just to make sure everything was kosher. I thought someone was playing a prank on me.

They were the same character. All of them.

Different names, different handwriting, exact same numbers. Apparently I wasn't aware of the AD&D fad class known as the "specialty priest," a new type of class popularized in the Forgotten Realms campaign supplements. A specialty priest is basically a cleric, but one who has unique powers and spells from the particular god she worships. So basically a specialty priest of a storm god would have a bunch of lightning spells. Things like that. I actually helped my brother create his character, and together we saw a class that was rather appealing: the Specialty Priest of Selune (goddess of the moon). These clerics were gifted with some particularly abusive spells (one I remember is the ability to conjure a sick-ass longsword made of moonlight) and combat bonuses that waxed and waned along with the phase of the moon.

Every single player had brought a specialty priest of Selune. They didn't get together and discuss it, they weren't trying to pull a scam, and they weren't even really trying to min-max. Every person had independently been flipping though the books, saw a rather unbalanced class and said to themselves "now that is badass!" Why play a normal cleric when one who worships Selune gets a +2 to-hit on a full moon?

Well, at least they all had an easy excuse to adventure together. And they certainly wouldn't be short of healing magic.

I don't remember much about the module itself. Like most RPGA modules it was boring, shallow, unnecessarily jokey, and short. They have to be shallow and jokey because it has to be appropriate for very young kids, and they have to be short because you only have four hours to finish the module, and about a half-hour of that goes into issuing certs (for magic items) and voting for the winner. If you're wondering how there can be a winner in an RPG, there can't. People just vote for the MVP and that person gets some extra experience points. It stinks, and it can really make the other players at the table feel lousy.

Anyway, I do remember one key encounter for that adventure because it stands as the most humiliated I've ever been during a game. Embarrassment like that tends to stand out in your memory. While journeying to another city, the party made camp in a small copse of trees on a hill. The module had a scripted encounter for this, wherein a group of four 1st-level Magic-Users would sneak up on their camp that night and attack. I don't think any explanation is offered for where these Magic-Users came from, what they wanted, or who they worked for, but that was the encounter.

After making surprise checks, I announced to the player on watch, "You hear a rustling from all sides of the camp. Just as you shout a warning, four robed men wielding staves leap out of the underbrush and give a shout!"

They wouldn't stop laughing for five minutes. It was (for lack of a more P.C. term) the gayest ambush in AD&D history.

That had to be demoralizing to the mages when their war cry was met with howls of derisive laughter. It was worse for me, because that stupid encounter made me look like a damn fool. In an instant I'd become the running joke of the convention when the "Leaping Wizards" incident became well-known. It was such a crappy encounter, such a pushover, and so unrealistic even for a fantasy setting that even now, a few old friends like to bring it up just to push my buttons.

Just imagine what course of events led to that: a group of four plebian magic-users, constantly picked on in their childhoods and unable to secure honest work decide to turn to a life of crime, attacking groups of heavily-armed travellers with quarterstaves and their one magic spell. Yes, one spell. First-level wizards in AD&D got one, exactly one spell to cast. These were the hardcore days, the all-or-nothing days where a wizard was a long-term investment. Until you reached about seventh level and could hurl third-level magic you were a combat liability. A first-level magic-user throws a single Magic Missile and he's blown his load for the night.

So when a group of four wizards tries to ambush a group of clerics, each throwing out 1d4 of damage as their best attack of the night, it makes me wonder how those guys can justify their 16 in Intelligence. Clerics fart more healing magic than 1d4 points. Gandalf would weep. I shouldn't have even been the one they were making fun of! What about the asshole who wrote it? I was just reading the flavor text!

My options at that point were to stop DMing or commit ritual seppuku. I decided to just burn out for a while. After all, only a few people I'd never talk to again know about it.

Oh.

Crap.

---

Amusing postscript to that story:

Someone asked if I was allowed to alter what spells the magic-users had when I ran the module. Well that's the thing: I changed their spell loadout so I could make the fight more competitive.

They originally came packing Magic Missiles, when instead I had them act in a much more coordinated fashion. One of them memorized Sleep, and the others memorized Ray of Enfeeblement. After hitting the group and incapacitating two of the clerics with Sleep, the other three hit the biggest-looking cleric with a trio of weakening Rays.

I nearly won that fight.

I was a little angry that they were laughing at me so I ruled that they wasted an entire round doing that. The Enfeebled cleric got utterly ganked by some lucky hits and was killed in the first round. The only thing that saved them was the only remaining cleric went around kicking his sleeping comrades in the face to wake them up.

When the regional supervisor heard what I'd done, he was furious and made me overturn my own decision to have one of the wizards deliver a deathblow to the unconscious cleric. He told me not to alter the module as written, and further, to restrain myself from inflicting any fatalities on the group. Characters in the RPGA level up slowly, so a character death can be a major thing at high levels, and almost impossible to recover from. They represent a massive investment of time. Many of the modules were written with fudge rules on how to proceed if the bad guys start to win so that the adventure can continue.

The DM is not only directed to treat the players with kid gloves, he's directed to let them win. I objected to this general practice and never really bothered DMing much for the RPGA after that. What's the point? I may have misspoken earlier when I called my days in the RPGA the "all-or-nothing" days, because I remember those old TSR tournament modules being fucking hardcore. Certainly no leaping wizards in there. Some of those tourney adventures were goddamn character meat-grinders.

No room for whiners when Gygax was in charge. Recognize.

Autopsy of a Dead Game: Freedom of Choice

When your DM burns out it's incumbent upon the other players to elect a representative or two to fill in. Most DMs just want a little time off from behind the screen to play a little and recharge their creative batteries. Until then, it's an opportunity to play some of those games people buy, never play, but always say "yeah we should play that" when discussing what game to play, then just settle on Dungeons & Dragons because it's the only game everyone owns. Games that never really get any table-time, like 7th Sea, Promethean, or Conspiracy-X. It's one-off time.

I went around the table asking what games people would feel comfortable DMing for a short while. Crazy Mike suggested Werewolf, because he's the sort to always suggest Werewolf and then go into prolonged tangents about his other "awesome" Werewolf games that remind you why you stopped playing Werewolf a long time ago. Kyle plead disability on account of his dyslexia. Jason offered to come up with some D&D filler, and my brother Miles (who had never DMed at all before) asked if he could run Farscape on alternating weeks.

First-time DM? Blood in the water.

Miles took an intriguing approach to the game by setting it in a parallel continuity, where the setup to the show is the same (like the ship, supporting characters, and the villains) but the protagonists are replaced with our characters. So instead of the television show's John Crichton character, I was the game's resident human character, Jake Sebastien, a dopey scientific intern displaced in a tragic teleportation accident. The others had managed to roll up much more original characters than I had like a cowardly Sebacean con-man and a Luxan who liked throwing heavy things at people because his Qualta blade was broken.

If you haven't seen Farscape, I've officially left you in my dust. Bear with me.

The entire plot of the show is as follows: an astronaut falls through a freak wormhole into a distant corner of space and joins a crew of misfits and rogues, who spend every episode looking for Earth and running away from everything bigger than them.

For a few sessions we were having a blast. We'd managed to repel several crawling, tentacled threats from our ship and even managed to lure the nefarious Captain Crais into a galaxy-devouring necromantic death cloud of horror. See, Crais wanted me dead and he had an entire fleet of ships to do up the zipper on my bodybag, so killing him with such style was a good thing. Unfortunately, the aforementioned Cloud of Death was more a Cloud of Undeath, and once it had killed Crais and everyone in his entire fleet, it infected and reanimated them as an armada of shadowy spectral space pirates who still wanted me dead.

The next session saw us reaching a spaceport for repairs from our last encounter, where a group of very helpful aliens pulled myself and Jason's con-man aside for a discreet meeting. I was only hanging around Jason's character to make sure he didn't do anything stupid in the casino. His was the sort of character who takes the words "let it ride" and "double or nothing" as his personal mantras.

These aliens (the Zargons, if I remember correctly) offered to give us structural schematics of Crais' command carrier and even provided plans for a critical weakness in its reactor that, with the proper application of explosives, would end his menace once and for all. Just like Luke Skywalker and the Death Star!

Jason and I looked at one another, nodded, and never mentioned the plan again to anyone. The game folded on the spot, as Miles couldn't think of a single way to convince us to march directly into the waiting jaws of the Death Fleet, infiltrate a cruiser full of unknown reanimated shadow creatures, plant explosives on their reactor core (only the most-guarded room on the ship, no doubt) and shoot our way out. The poor guy had the entire thing planned out, too: maps, encounters, NPC stats, a full sci-fi dungeon, and we immediately ran away from it, fingers in our ears and screaming "la la la la we're not listening!"

I don't think Miles ever forgave us for that one, and even I admit it was a pretty dickish thing to do to him. How are you supposed to anticipate dangling a plot hook in front of your players, only to have their immediate reaction be "Are you kidding me?! What do we look like, idiots?"

But man, there was no way we were going to go charging straight at the Big Bad of the entire series, not for all the flarn on Minbar. The dude has frag cannons. Frag cannons, man! There's being adventurous, and there's attacking a major NPC at second level! That's just madness!

The best part of this story was the end. Miles had borne his anger like a real soldier, calmly accepting that we'd royally screwed him over and wasted quite a lot of his time. He started giving us our experience points, and when he was wrapping up, shouted "And for completely pussying out on my adventure, you get nothing! NOTHING!!!"

We still scream that at each other.

---

Dungeon Masters are like storytellers, only in an RPG most of the story is filled in by the audience and influenced by random chance, as their declared actions succeed or fail based on the roll of dice. Most of the funniest RPG tales you'll hear come from these catastrophic, unlikely runs of bad luck. A long-running game can easily be reduced to an unrecoverable disaster after lucky crits result in a TPK (Total Party Kill). These are funny stories, and we'll have some of those later on, but as a DM they don't interest me as much. You can't really do much about bad runs of dice. Crit happens.

The great appeal of RPGs is their sense of freedom. It's like being in a fantasy novel and being free to do whatever you want, go whatever you want, and say whatever you want to whoever you want. Videogames can't quite duplicate this. It's an interactive process, a chance to be with your friends and interacting with them to tell a story with their characters as the stars.

Dungeon Masters hate that.

DMs put a lot of effort into writing and structuring an adventure, often drafting maps, scripting out an epic storyline, fleshing out an entire kingdom's worth of characters, designing dungeons and populating them with treasure and dangerous monsters, and designing a plot worthy of their heroic deeds. And then you have to trust approximately six people you met in college to play along. In many cases, it's the storytelling equivalent of turning a pack of homicidal howler monkeys loose in a neonatal ward. And I do mean that almost literally in one case, where the entire party of adventurers started spiking orc babies like footballs. You really do learn a lot about people playing AD&D, sometimes.

Players love their freedom; many of them hate "linear" stories, often dubbing stories with no choice but to play along with the DM as "plot railroads." Some players see it as their responsibility to rebel against the plot train whenever they see one. These anarchists should be kicked out of the group immediately. I don't know why they bother gaming if they don't want any involvement in the story. It's almost as if they don't want anyone having fun.

After all, rejecting the plot hook essentially rejects an entire session and you've forced the DM to ad-lib almost everything as the players pursue other, usually petty and selfish goals. It's a gamble for players to force this issue, as it normally angers the DM greatly and results in a sometimes boring, often disastrous session. Many players are good enough to play along with the story, but any DM has to understand that players value at least the illusion of freedom and will often aggressively assert themselves in rebellion if they feel like a puppet.

A good DM will take steps to compensate for this. The trick is to write the same linear plot as before, but make it look like they have choices when they really don't. You have to play to their motivations. Good-aligned characters are easy. You don't really need to do much to talk a Paladin into jamming a sword up a dragon's ass. It's what he lives for. It's the Chaotic characters, particularly the assholes who rolled up a Chaotic Neutral type who will give you endless headaches by saying things like "I'm sorry, my character just wouldn't do that."

And they wouldn't. Finding a motivation that interests every character can be hard, because you'll be surprised how many times one character will throw his hands up and refuse to go on the dangerous, world-at-stake quest on the grounds that it's not his problem. You might chalk it up to a defiant player-- and it can be, but you have to try to appeal to their sense of role-play. Most characters have better sense than to storm a dark fortress or to openly defy an evil archmage. They're not stupid. And don't try to dangle the promise of loot in front of a thief. There's loot, and there's being roasted by a breath weapon before you can spend it. Rangers and druids won't care about the preposterous taxies levied by a greedy king.

Players can be difficult, but they're just playing their characters. But there are ways to get players interested and keep them pursuing your story with dogged determination, to the point where they actually hate any distractions. Here are the ways I've found to keep the group dancing to your tune:

• Figure out what the players want to do - I know, an obvious answer, but rebellion is a sign of discontent. Just asking them why they're dissatisfied can be a very helpful reality check, as well as a painful one because it's hard to hear how you're failing them as a storyteller. Oftentimes a change of game can help, as people can easily tire of a gaming genre. As far as I know, this tactic has never worked. Actually, just forget about it.
  
• Dark Secrets & Overriding Goals - One of my biggest pet peeves as a player are characters who just walk into the tavern and don't even have a name written on the top of their sheet. People often refer to these players as "the elf" or "the wizard," because they have no defining characteristics other than that. I hate characters with no past and no motivations beyond "seeking their fortune." It's boring, and it's weak writing. You wouldn't watch a movie about some schmuck without any real reason for living and adventuring. I don't require that players write full essays about their past, but I do at least request that they define some painful, dark secret from their past or some major goal that they want to accomplish. If they tell you why they're putting their lives at risk or what they're running from, you can often make these backgrounds linked to a common enemy.
• Make it Personal - Revenge is a very simple motivator, and an effective one for RPGs. Find something the players love, destroy it, and design a quest around getting it back or pummeling the bastard responsible.
• Stealing their stuff - You would be amazed how well this works. Players their magical swag and their hard-earned money, and will track any sorry son of a bitch who manages to steal any of it to the far corners of the world, taking the most insane and suicidal risks necessary. Honestly, there is no better motivator than having some cackling maniac ride off into the night with their horses and backpacks in tow.
• That damn lying blacksmith - Shopping and information gathering are tasks most players take for granted, so when betrayed by a commoner players will be horrified. The prospect of being outsmarted by a simple 0-level NPC is a slight to their honor that must be repaid in blood. Be it as simple as faulty armor, cheap weapons, or crummy food, they will be back to take it out of that lying shopkeeper's ass. Likewise, it's fun to have a shopkeeper notice a party flaunting a lot of money and setting them up with a band of brigands later. Instant adventure springboard.
• Acting under duress - Despite what you've seen in Escape from New York, forcing a party to work for an evil NPC under the threat of a curse, poison, or death to a hostage is about the worst thing you can do. Not only is it a total cliché, layers will rebel against it without fail. If you remember the Schwartzenegger movie Commando, you'll see how quickly that plot went off the rails.
• Wuss Villains - Sure, gigantic hulking dudes with insane strength, scary helmets, a terrifying grasp of black magics and incalculable cruelty are fun to slap around. You can design great campaigns around them. But tough-guys who are willing to stand and fight don't exactly have a lot of longevity. If you really want to get a group interested, make the villain the biggest chickenshit in history. Nothing irritates a group more than some pissant loser that they know they can obliterate, but who just won't die. Darth Vader? Yeah, okay, but that Prince Humperdinck needed a beating! Recurring villains are hard to pull off because PCs hate to leave loose ends, but that's exactly what'll keep them hooked.
  
• Vorpal weapons - Players will do anything for vorpal weapons. ANYTHING.
• Stealing their vorpal weapons - See above.
• Homicidal Howler Monkey - See above. You want one too. Admit it.
• Stealing their homicidal howler monkey - Those BASTARDS!
• Make the villain a paladin - Nobody likes paladins. Even player character paladins want to gut the smeggers. Few things are more satisfying than foiling the machinations of some smug, self-righteous git who thinks you're evil just because you spike orc babies like footballs. The hell does he know?

Chapter 2 - Dark Dungeon Master

Someone got me into Magic: The Gathering around my freshman year of high school, which brought a circle of new friends to match my new surroundings. For those of you who don't understand Magic, it's a collectible card game based loosely around the principle that you play a wizard who doesn't like another wizard very much, and you take turns unleashing magical shitstorms on each other and summoning monsters to tear their lungs out. These spells and monsters take the form of cards you're forced to purchase in packs of 15 for $3 a pop. Naturally, the best cards are rare, and if you hope to win reliably you'll design your deck of cards around a theme. This means that most of the cards you buy you have almost no interest in except as trading fodder, and you end up buying a veritable assload of cards.

I got out of Magic around my senior year. Three years is a fairly common duration before the average rational person burns out on their first card obsession. Myself, I just find it ironic that most people talk about quitting Magic the same way they do about a meth addiction. The game is totally harmless, of course, but I think there comes a time in every Magic gamer's life that they give themselves a sudden terrible reality check and realize just how much money they've sunk into buying thousands of cards to win local store tournaments where the prize is more cards. And just when you've perfected your deck of ultimate ass-kickery, one of three things happens:

1) A new edition of cards is released which is designed specifically to undo the strategies abused to great effect in the last edition, and your deck will be obsolete in about two weeks.

2) Your deck works wonderfully and nobody will play you socially because you can't lose, and you end up designing a new deck anyway, requiring more cards.

3) You get bored with your good deck and start designing other weird variant decks, usually because someone dares you to. Suddenly you've designed your deck around the Rabid Wombat card, or slapped together 70 cards attempting to make Plague Rats feared in tournament circles again, and then you realize you've officially lost your mind.

I quit because almost as soon as a new edition of cards came out, Scrye Magazine would almost immediately write an article about the best possible decks their playtesters had designed, and most of my friends would copy it. And sure enough, compared to me they were darn near unbeatable. The popular decks when I was playing were the "burn" decks based on direct-damage cards, "denial" decks and "stasis" decks, both based on the theme that
with the right cards you can force your opponent to do nothing as long as you do nothing, so eventually the other person will simply die of old age and you win by default.

The real reason I quit is because when I started, there were already more cards floating around from previous editions than I could keep straight in my head. I couldn't even imagine trying to get back into the game today. There have literally been dozens of new sets released, each with hundreds of new cards and tons of new rules. No person could remember them all, and I value what little remains of my frayed sanity too much to attempt it. In my day, if a Craw Wurm hit the table (6/4 with no special abilities), that was some serious shit. Then all of a sudden I would see entire lunch sessions pass where every game was a "stasis race," where everyone at the table had a stasis deck, and it was just a question of who lucked out and got the right cards first. I couldn't keep up with the suitcase gamers. I didn't want to. I was the guy making stupid chucklehead theme decks.

It just wasn't my thing. CCGs take a level of commitment and maintenance that eventually wore me down. What the heck, it was fun while it lasted, and it served as a gateway into almost every other game I ended up playing since my freshman year.

We played during hour lunch hour, sometimes in the cafeteria and sometimes outside, sitting right on the concrete when the weather was fair. Our nutrition was humiliating. I usually had the school-assigned meal du jour, be it hamburgers & fries, hot dogs & fries, pizza & fries, burrito & fries, sandwich & fries, or salad. So basically I had a lot of fries. Bill, crazy bastard that he ever was, bought the same thing every day without fail: two chocolate chip cookies about six inches in diameter and a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine. It's a wonder he didn't die of insulin shock right in front of me after a year of that.

We were approached about a month after the start of the school year by a couple of very concerned-looking girls. We were playing a number of games. Bill and I had just begun dealing the cards, and I'd set aside an old edition of the AD&D Player's Handbook on the ground nearby. They watched us laugh and taunt each other for about a minute before one of them spoke up in a quiet, fearful voice.

"Do you guys worship Satan?"

That was unexpected. We looked up at them with blank "say what now" expressions for a long while. Not so much offended or horrified, just mentally unable to process the stupidity of the question posed to us. Most of them laughed. I had to hear it again just to be sure I understood them. "What?"

"Well there's a devil on your book." She pointed down at my Player's Handbook, printed from the old days of AD&D when the book had demons and devils in it before TSR bowed to parental pressure and renamed them baatezu and tanar'ri, and in a few instances even had art of bare-breasted nymphs and succubi. This particular cover is probably well-known to most old-school gamers, depicting an adventuring party engaged in a battle around a great statue of a horned demon. Exactly the sort of picture most ignorant people seriously over-reacted to when they heard D&D players were the sort to cut pentagrams into themselves with straight razors while jerking off over copies of The Silmarillion.

And of course me, being an insufferable smartass, swung my hand in the air, made devil horns and said "What do you think?"

Believe it or not, this gesture, long the salute of heavy metal fans everywhere, made these two young ladies recoil a step. Whether it was disgust or fright, I'm not sure, but the whole display was so ridiculous the other gamers found it pretty funny so they mirrored my gesture. We all got a pretty good laugh out of it.

What I didn't know at the time, and I slowly learned through the rest of the year, was that my school was populated almost entirely by Mormons. Now, I don't have an issue with Mormons in general, and I don't want you to think that when I mention Mormons I'm talking about the creepy, maniacal kiddie-raping polygamist dirtbags we see on the news. There are assholes in every religion, so it's not fair to judge an entire faith by those people, just like I don't think all Catholics diddle choir boys.

Anyway, what you have to understand is that Mormons are very conservative, very staunch believers with a strict code of ethics and a mandate to evangelize when they can. I'm not a Mormon, and have never been religious by any stretch. I don't care what you worship or who you screw as long as nobody is hurt or forced to act against their will. When it comes to religious debate, I just want to be left alone. But at my school, there were a number of real go-getters flush with the good word they'd just received from their daily seminary session in the middle of the shcool day, and they had a way of passive-aggressive sermonizing, putting on a show of concern when they saw you doing something they disapproved of, like drinking something with caffeine. They had an entire litany of facts on how unsafe it is to imbibe a drug like caffeine, and by god you were going to hear it. Just once. Message delivered, they knew where you stood.

They never associated with me, so socially I found myself on the same level as the stoners and the criminals-- actually rather good friends to have when you weigh 80 lbs. and have a big mouth.

In hindsight, throwing the devil horns in the air was an incredibly stupid thing to do. The Mormons took it seriously. All of a sudden they were looking at what amounted to a Satanic cult in their midst, and I had suddenly put everyone in a lot of trouble.

The next day I was brought to the principal's office and asked if I would open my bag. I did. I would have even if there was a lawyer around to warn me that it wasn't a very good idea, and let her inspect the same goods I'd brought the previous day: Magic cards, a Player's Handbook, and a leather bag full of funny-shaped dice. She suspended me on the spot for gambling on campus for the dice and the cards, and threatened expulsion if I ever brought any of my gaming materials with me again. I half-expected her to offer me some kind of a deal to name my other co-conspirators in this gambling ring, but instead she gave me my things back and sent me home.

I never really knew where the principal really stood on the issue. If I was committing some kind of a crime she shouldn't have given my dice and cards back. Maybe she was just responding diplomatically to a public outcry against me. The suspension didn't mean anything; it was just a warning. She might have been doing me a favor.

My mom remained strangely quiet on the matter, seeming to trust that I'd made a lapse in judgment that I wouldn't repeat again. Needless to say, we weren't gambling, we didn't worship Satan (and Constitutionally-speaking, so what if we did?), and we weren't out to cause a spectacle. But the worst thing I could have done would have been to make a public issue out of it. By raising a fuss I would have just made a lot of people angry and made my expulsion a certainty, and maybe gotten some of my friends the boot out of school, too. If it was just me, I mightn't have cared. How do you argue this logically with people with a load of moral outrage to retaliate with? All they'd have to do is whip out the infamous Magic card "Unholy Strength" which bore a flaming pentagram in the background and it would have been enough to sink my argument. It's a hard matter to argue rationally when your detractors are convinced that you serve the master of lies.

Bill & Keith helped to smuggle my goods to the school. I was never searched or bothered again, but we'd all decided it would be best to lay low. They'd made contact with a sympathetic electronics teacher who looked like the bassist for ZZ Top. During lunch we'd sneak off to his lab in one of the school's peripheral buildings, safe from the prying eyes of our persecutors, and roll the bones. I'd become a real persona non grata, that Satanist kid nobody would talk to with the dirty cards and filthy books. Nobody did anything blatant like spit on me or make the sign of the cross in my presence, but quite a few people knew I was a gamer and thought I was evil for it. Or if not evil, some kind of a pervert. I thought we'd left that kind of paranoia behind in the 70s. Not so. I never suspected until later that the electronics teacher who offered us sanctuary and allowed us to game in secret was probably risking a lot if we'd been discovered. He was housing what many people considered to be a gambling ring.

It was there that I started game mastering when I'd brought out a boxed set of maps and Battletech miniatures, a game about people pummeling each other with astoundingly expensive giant robots for the sole reason that punching stuff with 20-story tall nuclear-powered robots is an awesome thing to do. Admit it: if you could, you would.

We started rolling up characters under the Mechwarrior system, which was an awful, awful system, but it was never meant to be anything spectacular. We all liked the idea of giant robots, and Battletech had those cool sheets depicting the robots where you could fill in dots corresponding to how much damage you took. It was easy to run. They customized their 'mechs, put them on one side of the map, and I'd put an opposing force on the other side of the map, and we'd go at it for an hour at a time. All I had to do was weave a story of intergalactic warfare in which they, a combat lance of the Ghost Bear clan, were the biggest badasses around.

It was a good game. The system was one of the weakest I've ever played, but that doesn't matter when you have interested players who enjoy the story. I won't lie and say the game was a dramatic wonder; it was just a group of heavily-armed psychopaths bopping around the galaxy causing absurd amounts of collateral damage for great justice.

That particular game ended when Jim's character, the feared Star Colonel Striker was unexpectedly killed in battle against a lowly Inner Sphere Hatchetman 'mech, in what has gone down in my mind as one of the most catastrophic and improbable critical hits I've ever witnessed. It was during a routine reconnaissance mission of a suspected Inner Sphere forward command post. The IS 'Mechs were no match for the Ghost Bear clan's superior technology and genetics, and their sentries fell easily before their combined might. During the mop-up, Striker engaged and quickly brutalized a lowly, outclassed Hatchetman guarding a weapons cache. The Hatchetman suffered grievous damage and even lost its primary melee weapon when Striker turned the weapons of his Kodiak loose. In desperation, the Hatchetman fired his only remaining weapon, a pair of chest-mounted machineguns (one of the weakest weapons in the game, doing only a paltry 2 points of damage at most).

Somehow-- don't ask me how-- the hit location roll came up snake-eyes: a torso hit with a chance for critical system damage. And the bad news just kept on coming: somehow those ballistic rounds found some unforeseen weakness in the Kodiak's armor, punched through, and ricocheted around inside, causing three direct hits to Striker's engine. Three engine hits are enough to destroy the 'mech completely. It was one of those miracle shots that only happens in exaggerated gaming stories that nobody really believes, because the odds are ludicrous. But there you have it.

Jim-- the guy playing Striker-- refused to allow me to fudge the die results. I argued (and would probably still argue today) that there's no conceivable way that anyone could pull such a lucky shot off, but Jim was adamant. He pronounced Striker dead. Shamed by their failure to protect their commander, the other officers in the lance returned to homeworld and committed suicide as an apology for such humiliation. Oh sure, it sounds funny now, but at the time it was a very somber, teary-eyed event. These guys were very samurai and they took it hard when their boss got aced by some lowborn punkass. It totally derailed the campaign.

We decided to move on and tried AD&D. The genre change would allow us to start fresh and release some tension. My older brother had bought me an AD&D boxed set called Ruins of Undermountain, and I volunteered to run them through it.

Undermountain is an agonizingly huge dungeon that nobody is ever really supposed to finish, and even if you did, at the bottom is the dungeon's creator: Halaster Blackcloak, a guy who the party should never encounter because if anyone were to write his stats down, it would look like this: "Halaster Blackcloak: EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT." He's one of those guys like Eliminster that are untouchable. Even if you had a party of characters annoying enough to kill him, he's got clones scattered all over the world. You just don't mess with him. He's an act of God, not a character.

Around this time I'd attracted a lot more players. Discreetly, of course: we sort of had our own "you do not talk about Fight Club" rules to keep the fuzz off our backs, but when we started Undermountain I had twelve, maybe thirteen players. Most DMs will tell you that you should limit your groups to six at most, and they're right. I was doing fairly well, all things considered, but table talk with a group that big was approximately as orderly as the WWF's Royal Rumble. Not to mention that battles started taking three days to complete, because any force I could create that would be a challenge to twelve hardy player characters amounted to a small-scale war. It wasn't feasible.

I ended up splitting the party into two groups, each playing two days out of the week, and on Friday we'd do something else. For a while I was DMing Shadowrun on Fridays. These were days I had a lot more energy. I don't think I'd ever want to try DMing two days a week again, much less five. Somehow I pulled it off. I even signed up for the RPGA: a national AD&D club that held organized gaming. There weren't any conventions in Arizona except for twice a year, but for a time I was even DMing RPGA games on Sundays at Waterloo. Six days a week of DMing?

No wonder I burned out.