I lost my table top roleplaying cherry when I was 21 to a room full of boys who’d been playing D&D for the better part of their cognitive life. I’d no sooner been asked to describe my character to the room than something clammed up in my chest and I froze, like a terrified actor on a stage, and was simply unable to make a sound. I had to leave the room to compose myself. I was almost brought to tears. I’m sort of embarrassed by this story because I’ve spent the rest of my role playing life fighting to be more than just the girl at the table with an unhealthy attention to what my character is wearing. The fact that I didn’t kick open the proverbial doors, pull up a chair and throw down at my coming out party is humiliating. But there it is. When I was presented to the group, I got stage fright and had to be given a pep talk before I was able to simper back into the room.

Since then I’ve played D&D 3.0 and 3.5, Warhammer, Little Fears, World of Darkness, Vampire, All Flesh Must Be Eaten and other games. I’ve enjoyed them for the most part, preferring high fantasy to the fru-fru fan fair of Vampire (in any of its incarnations). I’ve even run a couple of games, though not well, and enjoyed the world creation process for the most part. I am married, I have a normal job, plenty of friends, and healthy hobbies, but I kill orcs on friday nights and relish in getting my halfling cat burglar intoxicated while carousing after a day of dungeon crawling.

Now that you know my geekery background, let me segue into the topic of my marriage. One of the things that brought Ryan and I together was our mutual interest in roleplaying games. He was my first DMwhen I moved back to Omaha and we blossomed our romance by playing footsie under the gaming table. Our marriage is amazing, and we have a strong enough respect and admiration for each other that translates into hardly ever fighting. Withthe exception of PMS days, we hardly ever argue longer than a moment and we nearly never get into full on heated arguments. That being said, there is one topic of conversation that, for some strange reason, gets us into the worst fights we’ve ever had. We fight, we scream, we call each other names, I usually end the argument by drowning it out with my hysterical sobs. Here’s the secret: If it weren’t for D&D, my husband and I would have precious little to disagree about.

But we fight like vicious, savage animals over D&D. It usually starts out with us talking about the game, pondering a certain rule, class/race combo, or some aesthetic of the game. I start critically analyzing it and suddenly my husband turns into a crazed lunatic who immediately takes the devil’s advocate side of the analysis and works tirelessly to prove me wrong. Sometimes the fights are just about how quickly he turns on me, other times the fight is about the analysis or rule or the game itself and eventually builds into his turning on me. It is particularly bad when he takes a position against me when he’d taken my viewpoint in a previous conversation. I become like some ridiculous monster of the deep, flabbergasted, frustrated and outraged. I can feel my brain boiling as I try to reason with him, “But YOU are the one who taught me about this problem in the rules! My opinion is based on your teachings!” and he proceeds to irrationally prove why the problem is no longer true since I took up the mast.

We haven’t been able to narrow down why he does this or why it makes me so crazy. I suspect that I don’t have enough street-cred to talk shop with him like he does with his friends who’ve been playing since they were old enough to no longer be reading big print books with full page spread of pictures. (Funny enough, D&D is just small print books with full page spread of pictures) Or maybe it’s because I’m a girl, despite his religious adherence to gender equal playing table. I’d like to think it’s not because I’m a girl, though I suspect it has more to do with the fact I’ve not played any D&D game before 3.0. The reason that I suspect this is that many of his examples for disproving my opinion are drawn on what D&D has done in the past, which seems like a serious persuasive fallacy that I can’t seem to stop him from using.

This is sort of the hipster’s answer to the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. It means “after this, therefore because of this” and can be heard in any gaming or music circle around the world. Because of what happened in the first edition (insert: first album, first band, first appearance), regardless of how good an idea, how well written, how well performed, how well accepted it was at the time, it is now the measure by which everything that comes after it can be contextualized. So for gamers, in order to talk about 4th edition, you must subsequently talk about first edition or the cycolopedia in context to 4th edition. And any thing about 4th ed that is annoying that can also be found in the first edition in some incarnation removes the right to find the thing annoying. Since I think this persuasive argument is ridiculous in all its forms, I end up beating my head against the brick wall my husband has constructed between me and him and his roleplaying bookshelf. He holds the cyclopedia up like armour and I consider setting him and the book on fire.

So the last time we fought about D&D was when I started reading the new player’s handbook for 4th edition. I hate it. I really do. I hate 4th edition, not so much for its rules but for it’s attitude and the delivery of the new material. It’s so commercial, dirty, greedy, cheap. The book is either poorly written or poorly edited, I can’t decide which. Perhaps that says more about me than it does about the game, but at some places I just can’t get past it. For example, I was reading a section that was describing some powers (I think it was a racial power, but I can’t remember the exact page) where it listed an example of something (which I read and reread trying to figure out if it was something I was supposed to know) and then when I read the paragraph bellow it, discovered that the explanationfor the example was under it with the sentence, I swear to God: See above for an example of this type of listing. What the hell kind of editor would have thought this was a good way to set up a book? Put the examples first and then the explanation. And let’s not forget that most of theexplanations and descriptions come with a handy message to see another chapter for more info or my favorite, see another book. Hope you have access to that book, or you’re going to have to punk down $40 more dollars for the rest of the paragraph.

4th edition is dirty. It’s the first time reading a roleplaying book where I really felt like it was a commercialized game and not an atmosphere or state of mind in a bold new world. The book repeatedly breaks the pleasant fantasy atmosphere to remind you that it has every intention of rolling you for as much money as it possibly can. Enjoy your game, asshole.

Anyway, I digress. The last time Ryan and I fought it was about how much I disliked the game. Ironically, we’d had this discussion dozens of times previous where we were both on the same page, disapproving, disbelieving, cynical. Out of the blue he decided he really liked the game and I became enemy number one who must be taken out immediately. The up coming game was canceled, we fought mercilessly for days, and barely spoke a nice word to each other for the duration of it. Eventually we stopped fighting about it, but he informed me he’d be running the game whether I was playing in it or not, so grudgingly I got on board because having no game to play in was worse than playing in one written by a bunch of a corporate monkeys in need of a better editor.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I can now tell you that I’ve made my first D&D 4th Ed character. A halfling ranger, mostly because I’m partial to archers and one of the few things I love about 4th Ed is their re-mastering of the halfling race. I’m so enamored with their new write up! I have a ton of complaints about the game, but I like the halflings and sometimes that’s good enough. I’m surprised to be admitting this, but character creation was not half as terrible as I imagined it would be. Oh it was difficult to break down my resistance, but I managed and I’ve got a fully constructed character to show for it.

I like the new break down of allignment and I like that I am now unalligned. I miss the Gods that I grew to know and love and I really dislike their unnecessary need to rename things for the sake of renaming them (some of the Gods are obviously ones from 3.5. Renaming “Attacks of Opportunity” to “Opportunity Attacks”, etc) Some of the powers were cool, though I’m a little alarmed at the idea of having to keep track of so much stuff. I’m a story player…I rely heavily on the story and character development being really good. Constant record and housekeeping might get in the way of getting into character (funny, considering my original stage fright) but I’m hoping that I memorize everything pretty quickly and am able to keep track of a lot of it in my head. I was a little angry to discover that “a pot” is no longer an item on the equipment list that you can buy (or at least know the price of). Like I said, I’m a story person, and if you’re going to cook food on an open flame, dammit you better have a good pot. In fact, there are quite a few items no longer on the equipment list. I would have hoped they would have expanded it to make the world more rich and varied, but instead they got rid of a lot of useless detail equipment and made it more streamlined, to the point that now you can, apparenly, walk into a general store and buy a basic adventuring kit with all the things you’ll need to make your way in an adventuring world. I hope it comes in a decorative keepsake box that says “My First Adventurers’ Kit” on the outside.

I like that at first level I’m going to get to hit two enemies with two arrows at one time a-la-Legolas. That’s pretty fancy schmancy high fantasy there. I can get behind looking cool, though I will kind of miss starting out as a hard scrabble pioneer in search of treasure and mischief armed with barely more than a working set of leather armour, a standard issue weapon and a sunrod.

So now that I’ve gotten a lot of back story and anecdotes out of the way, I suspect I’ll be sharing many more gaming stories withyou, a little opinion, a little verbal violence, hopefully some other things I discover that I love. I’m going from a group that has 3 women and 3 men in it to one with five men and me, the loneliest girl in the world.

Coming soon.

-Sommer

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