D&D yesterday, today, and tomorrow

(continuing along with the #OneWeekDailyBlogging challenge from Emy . . .)

Hello dungeons delvers!

I've played a bit of D&D before in my life and especially when I was a kid. When I close my eyes and think about playing D&D in the past I remember three locations.

- A guy's kitchen that was about two blocks from my best friend's house
- A guy's basement bedroom that was across the street from my best friend's house
- In the room of the brother of a friend's house.

We were such nerds about D&D, and I'm sure those rooms smelled of sweaty socks and Doritos.  I think this was right around the time that Atari was taking off, but besides Atari, this was the LIFE! The smell didn't even matter y'all . . . we were gettin' our fantasy fix and slaying hordes of orcs and other crazy things. YARRR! *insert the sound of rolling dice*

Eventually, I stopped playing D&D, and I talk about that in another post I wrote when Dave Arneson died.  I'll quote from it:

"Eventually when I was in my early 20's I was without a job living in the upstairs apartment of a guitarist that I use to play drums for. It was kind of a sad and very poor time in my life. Well, I traded all my early editions of my D&D books to him in exchange for rent for a month. That was the Monster Manual, the Dungeon Master's Guide, The Players Handbook, Dieties and Demi-Gods, the Monster Manual II, and a really super rare book of traps. By that time I hadn't played the game for a few years, so they didn't really matter to me. But now . . . now . . . I kind of wish I had them again just to take a look at them and laugh a bit at a few memories I had with my friends as we played that game."

A few years ago, I picked up the Red Box basic D&D set again (edition 4 apparently) because my daughter was wanting to play, so I got the box and gave it a shot. It was a struggle for us and my DM skills were incredibly rusty. I continually had to stop gameplay and check rules and scratch my head. I think the experience turned her off to the game . . . but she wanted to go crazy anyway with making a character that was half unicorn and shot rainbows of death out of its butt or something like that, and I just wasn't prepared to bend the rules because I didn't even know the rules to begin with.  It was a struggle.

Now, people at work play pen and paper D&D on lunch break all the time at KingsIsle, but I never really got involved much until . . . something I can't talk about . . . sorry, the first rule about D&D Fight Club is that there is no D&D Fight Club. Now who's the rule breaker?!

D&D fight club is DM'd by the one and only Jeff Toney! Basically two people go against each other, you start at level 3, and when one player wins, they advance to the next level in one fell swoop.  If you lose . . . well, it used to be permadeath for your character, but it felt a bit punishing when you'd get up to 4th or 5th level and then have to start all over. Now the rules are that when you die, you lose one item to the other player, get 200 gold and keep your level. Currently, my druid is a nice stepping stone to pass better players on to 6th level where you can purchase magic items and start the potion meta-game.  I figure I have enough gold built up from defeat I might be able to buy something amazing, which will probably be stolen by another player . . .

Let me cut to the chase by saying IT'S FUN!  It's fun and it's gotten me back into D&D a bit.  Jeff is even DM'ing a game for me, my kids, and his daughter on the side every other week or so, and it's been pretty awesome. I can safely blame Jeff for getting me back into D&D.

At work I'm now playing a game where on Thursdays at lunch, Blind Mew himself is the DM guiding a group of us through an adventure!  (And can I just say it was pretty awesome to be part of a jail break in yesterday's session?)

Tomorrow is another Jeff Toney hosted D&D session for my family, and I can't wait to continue on our journey. Seeing as my kids are involved, it's a bit crazy and Jeff is more than prepared to handle my kids' creative minds. Hopefully when they look back at their D&D experience, they'll find it has a better smell to it than sweaty socks and Doritos . . . it's been upgraded to scented room fresheners and usually pizza, cookies, and sodas . . . complete with colorful characters hand-drawn by Jeff Toney himself.

I'm the Dragonborn bard in the middle. :)

Happy Dueling!