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.

Chapter 1 - Zero-Level

At the risk of starting this account on a flat note, I thought I'd start out by mentioning that my childhood is hardly worth mentioning. Hannibal Lecter probably best described my ancestry when he called Clarice one step removed from poor white trash. Not to throw my entire extended family under the bus, but I've grown up to be an urban, technologically-competent smartass whereas most of them are straight out of the American Gothic painting: dour, unemotional farming families from strict judgmental Christian upbringings who raise children through shame and oppression and believe any comforting physical contact is anathema.

They had a lot of weird ideas in their heads. My grandparents were cheap, angry, and outright insane most of the time. My grandfather's idea of fine cuisine was Kentucky Fried Chicken because, to him, it was the best food you could eat in a restaurant that didn't require you to tip a waitress. My uncle refuses to go to McDonald's because he heard on fundamentalist Christian radio that they put LSD in the salt shakers. Why anyone would waste perfectly good LSD in public salt shakers, or if McDonald's even uses salt shakers anymore, or why he doesn't just, y'know, not use the salt shakers, I don't know. My grandmother raises chickens and to this day refuses to wash the eggs before cooking with them because she believes doing so keeps them fresh longer. Her sister died of E. coli poisoning.

My dad managed to escape by becoming a civilian contractor for Hughes during the war and we moved to Arizona when I was about two years old, before I was able to remember much of anything except that before we moved out of the Ozarks my dad wore a beard. Arizona is a miserably hot place about ten months out of the year that can kill you in about fifteen minutes if you're not careful, but I'll still take it over the humid hickville that is rural Missouri, where they still refer to most distances as "yonder" and very long distances as "o'er yonder."

My younger brother and I are of similar age, and so we share most of the same gaming experiences. He's much more introverted than I am, to the point that at an early age, my parents were increasingly worried that there was something wrong with him. There isn't, of course: in fact, he's probably much smarter than I am. I just test better and have a more natural ability to bullshit people. Miles is more thoughtful. Where I will whine and complain for anyone to hear, he's content to suffer silently. I also had the habit of speaking for the both of us, which probably did more long-term harm than good.

In truth, had Asperger's Syndrome been thought-of in my childhood doctors probably would have labeled us both as mildly autistic. I tested as a genius at some psychology department at ASU at an early age when I started displaying the ability to read very complex material long before I should have been able to, and I was able to focus on complex tasks for hours at a time. I was smart, so clearly my parents thought something must have been wrong with me, too.

It really just came from my dad's computer, which I sat in front of almost every hour of every day. These were the days of slow, prohibitively large IBMs with monochrome monitors and seven-inch floppy drives that held less data than you could write on a saltine cracker with a blunt crayon. For some reason, to me, the device was magic. And this was before computers did anything flashy and amazing. At the time, it was all just a DOS prompt commanded by a huge, clacking keyboard.

Dad had bought some pathetic program called "Learning Games" which was really just a collection of simple arithmetic problems and spelling tests where it would show you a poorly-rendered picture of something and I would spell the three-letter word it represented, like "IVY" or "JET." Eventually we got a new monitor, one that showed a shocking eight colors in spectacular EGA graphics, and Dad had bought a big floppy book that contained whole plaintext files of stuff written in BASIC that, if copied exactly, would do things like play Hangman or Pong. I must have reproduced every file in that book, work that also taught me how to type quickly and accurately. I didn't know BASIC at all, so I could never have tracked down a typo if I'd made one; I had to get it exactly right the first time around or it wouldn't compile.

That computer (and its many replacements) dominated most of the years of my life since I learned to speak. The games I remember playing most were the old Ultima series, primarily Ultima III: Exodus, a game I was too young to truly understand but spent most of my time just running around killing stuff, dying, and starting over again with another, more outlandish party of characters than the last. To be fair, there wasn't really much more to Ultima III than wanton slaughter, but it's my earliest memory of an interest in the sword-and-sorcery genre.

My older brother Doug liked it, too. It inspired him to pick up some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books, something I found fascinating. But Doug is a lot older than me, and he was in high school when I was about seven years old, so everything he did was interesting to me. Everyone wants to be like their cool older brother, even if he was only cool in my eyes. I doubt he was able to find other gamers in high school to play with, which probably explains why he was willing to run me through a bunch of solo adventures and teach me how to roll up characters. Doug was always good to me, a great older brother. Even as a child I knew he didn't have to treat me as well as he did, but he was always willing to play games with me whenever I wanted. And that says a lot about him, because looking back I was a fairly petulant, annoying kid. I didn't deserve the attention.

These early AD&D games didn't go very well. I was too young to handle such a complex game and I was easily upset at the notion that my characters could die, or that bad things could happen to him because I'd failed to notice something or act properly. Roleplaying at that age is difficult to handle. Kids aren't exactly masters of the art of empathy, something necessary to playing an effective character. Doug, to his credit, didn't fudge the dice or let me win just because I whined. It made me realize that AD&D was the big leagues, not for mere boys!

Miles and I found the Hero Quest board game to be much more palatable. It had miniatures, a colorful map, and scripted adventures prepared with pre-generated characters. It was fast and fun hack-and-slash, a great introduction to fantasy gaming that we discovered on our own. It had just enough story elements to keep us interested without overcomplicating things. We were the good guys in a dungeon full of bad guys. It's all a kid cares about.

Hero Quest occupied us for a long while, along with its expansion packs, but eventually we'd played it out to the point we'd worn out the cards and the dice and played every scenario. There wasn't much to do beyond that; we were in elementary school or junior high, and there just weren't any gaming clubs around for us if we'd wanted to pursue fantasy roleplaying.

Instead we'd become enthralled with the Nintendo Entertainment System, the home gaming console that simultaneously gave me some great memories and a crash course in how to deal with ulcer pain. There were a lot of good games for the NES, and of course I gravitated towards the Mario titles and the RPGs like Final Fantasy, Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, and The Bard's Tale. But I owned just as many horrible games like Robocop, Fester's Quest, and The Adventures of Bayou Billy. Remember, this was before the dawn of the Internet, where you could hit Gamespot or Gamefaqs to find out whether a game sucked or not. We had to rely on Nintendo Power (a house rag that never gave bad reviews of its own products) and word-of-mouth. I got inventive and convinced my mom that it was much cheaper to rent the cartridges at Blockbuster Video for $3 a pop to scout the games out. After all, it's much cheaper than dumping $50 on a game we'll hate, and more often than not three days was enough for us to beat the game anyway.

I played that thing to death. Probably more than it's safe to admit. I'd beaten Final Fantasy more times than I could count, even being as pathological as to attempt it using freakishly unfair groups of characters like four thieves, four black mages, or (most hardcore of all) four white mages. The release of the Super Nintendo came as something of a relief to us all, because it meant that there were other Final Fantasy games I could move on to.

Junior High school presented me with new ways to slack off. It was my first opportunity to take computer classes in the school lab, which was populated entirely with Apple IIes, primitive gadgets that were nonetheless quite impressive for having a graphical user interface, where I had a much advanced IBM PC still operating on a DOS prompt. Not only that, these computers were networked, also a revolutionary concept for the time. These computers communicated via a stone-age media access protocol known as Appletalk, a one-bit-at-a-time method that was prone to deadlocks, stalls, bit collisions, and dropped connections. But even more amazing was that each computer in the lab came with the earliest networked multiplayer game I've ever seen: The Oregon Trail.

Acquainted for the first time with nerds who shared my interest and who had already far surpassed the rudimentary curriculum perpared for us by the Mesa Unified School District, we finished our week's homework in about ten minutes and hit the Oregon Trail hard every day without fail. We had huge wagon trains braving starvation, cold, raging rivers, and dysentery, but our biggest nemesis was the dreaded Appletalk. Our attrition rate was horrendous; we lost entire wagons due to connection errors, and once you were kicked off, you couldn't rejoin the train.

The trail got boring after a while, so my friend Bill and I started making a game-within-the-game. There was a control within the game where you could hold a vote and exile individual wagons from the caravan, something that struck Bill as particularly hilarious and exercised as much as possible. Me, being a much more orderly sort, suggested a more reasoned approach to the game where every time we stopped at a town we would hold a vote and remove who we determined to the the weakest link to the group. The criteria was all over the map, from who kept breaking wagon wheels (incompetence) to who lost the most people to cholera (to best avoid the wrath of God), to whoever failed to be the most disgustingly wasteful while hunting animals (manifest destiny means leaving a trail of bodies all the way to the Pacific). Most of the time groups of friends just voted as a bloc for the sole purpose of pissing people off, but it was a ton of laughs. It was like an early, grade-school version of Survivor.

Bill was out of his mind, most of the time. All he cared about was filling his wagon with ammunition and stopping every quarter mile to hold a vote that the train should go hunting. Everyone would agree, because then the game would shift to a first-person shooter view where you could snipe rabbits, squirrels, deer, bear, and (most importantly) buffalo with your rifle. Your character could only drag 200 lbs. of meat back to the wagon, and nobody was ever lacking for food, but that didn't stop them from annihilating any sign of life that dared to cross in front of their gunsights regardless (or should I say, especially) that they didn't need to. Everyone got a good chuckle out of the notion that our wagon train was leaving a horrible, bloodstained nightmare of carrion-eaten dead bunnies and wasted buffalo strewn carelessly for three thousand miles across the Great Plains. Our settlers would rampage across the nation like a pestilence, raping the land and suffering none to live behind us.

We made the Indians cry.

Introduction

At the time of writing, I am a 26-year-old graduate from ASU who still lives with his parents and has done absolutely nothing appreciable with his vaunted intellect or (more remarkably) his degree in computer science other than unpack Dell PCs on a loading dock for Boeing. And that job lasted almost exactly four days. I have little room to complain about a stagnant job market. I'll readily admit that my own failure to leave the nest comes from a near-total lack of interest in slinging code for a living and an apathetic self-image. I could get a job in the industry if I felt like it-- almost everyone starts out jockeying phones. I just know enough about myself to know that if I did, I would probably start a shotgun massacre within two days.

I do have "work," if you can call it that. I write a movie review for a magazine based on my own slightly-more-coherent-than-your-average-Internet-dork ramblings on a message board and I act in a local dinner theatre troupe. Both jobs pay about the same, ironically, each probably less in a month than your average waitress at Denny's makes in a night. But the sheer notion that either job pays at all is so astounding that most professionals in either industry would tell me to be pleased simply walking away with a profit of any kind. After all, telling people I'm an actor and a writer is as near to saying "I'm unemployed" as makes no odds. So I certainly can't complain about my success there.

I'm the sort of guy who still doesn't even really have a vague notion of what I want to do. I thought for a while that I wanted to work in the computer industry. I thought that for a long time until the movie Office Space came out and scared it out of me, and now I want nothing to do with any form of cubicle labor. I'm very talented when it comes to programming, software, and all of those kind of Internet things that my mother still thinks is black magic, but my attitude universally sucks and I hate people enough that putting me in any form of long-term group environment is about as helpful as using me as a disease vector for bacterial meningitis.

I suppose if you were to nail me down on the issue, I'd say that I'd prefer to do what I do now, if I could get paid for it. Acting, writing bitchy reviews about stuff, maybe making people laugh, generally sitting on my ass in a foul mood. But all of these are wishy-washy choices that nobody ever really gets paid for except people who least deserve it, like Larry the Cable Guy and Carlos Mencia. Success in those areas comes from a maddeningly chaotic ratio of hard work, proper contacts, shriekingly good luck, the inherent unfairness of the universe, and a stupid catch phrase.

The closest I've ever come to a job-- that is, the type of job where actual work is accomplished most days of the week was at my friendly local game store. This was in my high school days, when I was in my full-on nerd/rebel mode, rejecting anything mainstream and cool because of my desire to avoid being a drone: things like Green Day, Edward Scissorhands, and pussy.

I haven't really moved on much since high school, as you can probably tell. I still hate Green Day, Edward Scissorhands is overrated, and I've done little to revise my brilliant dating strategy of outright cowardice and self-pity.

Anyway, most of those days were spent in a state of near-total slacking-off. High school was never a challenge for me; I was one of those genius students who took all the advanced courses and still had time for marching band and drama club. You probably would have hated me. I spent most of my time at the local gaming pit playing RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun, RIFTS, almost anything you can think of, I've picked up and played at least once. I spent almost every day down there after classes until close, gorging myself on enough snack food, sugar and caffeine to make a nutritionist want to retreat and say three Hail Marys for my salvation. I was about as permanent a fixture in Michael's Magic as Norm's ass on Cheers.

You have to understand, a gaming store is normally not like most other stores. Customer goodwill is paramount in a game store, now more than ever because there's nothing-- literally NOTHING-- stopping your average gamer from buying the books and games he needs on Amazon.com for far less money. All your average FLGS owner has is a near-feudal system of vassalage and loyalty. It's understood that if you're a gamer, you swear an oath to shop only at the store of your nearest liege lord. Any patronage of other stores is outright treason. In exchange for this loyalty, game store owners open their floors to daily parties of food, drink, personal abuse, and foulmouthed gaming.

Some stay there more than others. A lot more.

After a year or so of being legally unable to make me leave (after all, I was supplying him with regular business and was involved in role-playing games almost nightly) he offered me "work," which essentially amounted to doing everything I was already doing, jockeying the register when necessary, occasionally mucking out the toilet, and making sure nobody stole anything when Mike went out to get cigarettes. For this, I was paid in store credit and I was perfectly happy with the arrangement. Odds were good that even if he'd paid me actual money it would have just gone right back into the purchase of Magic: The Gathering cards or something equally frivolous from the store.

Most of the fine details of those memories are lost in a haze of Mountain Dew. I usually don't take the effort to remember anyone's name until we've spent about six months talking, but that's common for most hardcore gamers. We like to use nicknames and mnemonics to distinguish the crowd of gamers in our minds, especially since baby boomers were depressingly boring in the names they chose for their children. At one time I knew six Mikes: Big Mike, Crazy Mike, Store Mike (who had to be renamed to Viking Mike when there suddenly became two Store Mikes), Pizza Mike, Gay Mike, and Supermike. I remember at least three Steves and I still know three other Noahs (which admittedly is weird...), each requiring their own Mafia name. The point is, while I can't vouch for every tiny detail in the events I'm about to recall, I can promise that they're generally accurate. Probably.

Gaming has changed a lot from the days of my childhood. Michael's Magic closed a long time ago, victim of a lack of business and an inability to compete with the Internet and eBay. Old school gaming has likewise withered away, replaced with the polished, monolithic spectre of WotC and their popular d20 System: a cash cow of a game loudly derided by veterans much like fans of heavy metal complain and argue about when Metallica officially sold out. The grognards have retreated into their basements to get away from the noisy card gamers, and though there more gamers now than I ever remembered seeing in my past, I find myself rather unsettled by how much it's all changed sometimes. There's a new generation of gamers, and at 26 I'm already one of the grouchy old-timers trying to recruit people for an older edition of a game none of the kids have, a half-dozen retorts already pre-programmed in my mind to shout at anyone who buys the new Player's Handbook.

Bitching and arguing are two of the three major joys of being a gamer, the third being telling anyone who will listen about your characters and how they died in particularly gruesome fashion. This act is best told while hanging from the arm off the store counter, babbling endlessly about die rolls that you somehow remember and rules from obscure books to some nodding clerk who does an admirable job of pretending to be engaged in the conversation while secretly trying to make your head explode. People who compulsively tell these stories are known as counter monkeys, individuals who will exist as long as game stores endure.

Few other jobs have customers like this, where people will approach the counter, usually not pay for anything, and without preamble or warning launch into a forty-minute retelling of some fantasy siege that usually ends with someone inexplicably and improbably getting shot in the face. In all fairness, these stories are usually pretty funny when they don't lead into protracted arguments about how min-maxed they managed to make their characters, or how they don't like the magic system, or how they wish they could do away with feats entirely, or...well, most of these stories end up as labyrinthine roundabout parables about how either a specific person or game sucks.

I've been stuck behind that counter for years. And I've got my own stories.

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure.