STUFF & THINGS 5

By Richard Early

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“How much are the quarter packs?”

THE BOY WHO NEVER FOUGHT DRAGONS

I’ve played a lot of role playing games in my day. But I was just thinking about the fact that I have never played a game of Dungeons and Dragons, in any version. Sure, I owned the old AD&D box set like everybody else. I may have even rolled up a character. But I’ve never played.

In high school, a friend of mine got me started in RPGs with the old ICE Lord of the Rings system. I loved it. We played that all the time. I was this warrior human from Gondor named Rog-we (a pun of the word rogue). We did it all. We fought orcs and dragons and Balrogs. I became so powerful I basically ruled the country and we eventually had to dump those characters and start over. One of my friends and I each learned one word in the black language of Numenor so we could send each other signals during combat. I learned “Chips” and he learned “Ahoy”.

We had this great basement at my buddy’s house. It was finished and there was cable TV and a VCR and all that good stuff. Friday nights were play night. There was a convenience store about two blocks away and this one friend of ours would get a 2-liter of Mountain Dew and a bag of Doritos and eat it all himself.

The other big game I got into was the Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game. I ran these games and was a total fanatic for the system. We played in the Marvel Universe, but always with our own characters. I killed off so many of my group’s characters that I was able to bring them all back to life as an opposing team at one point (sorry Geoff Johns). We had such diverse heroes as Clubber – you might be able to imagine his power. Yep, a strong guy with a club. One of my favorites. Then there was Sparky, a dude made out of Diamond (sorry Emma Frost). Or one guys Punisher rip off, whose name I can’t even remember. All I know is that he called him Kovaks as a Watchmen reference. We had characters made out of copper who could conduct electricity. We had a guy who could control gravity but had no legs. He was called Gavel and was studying to be a lawyer. I always wanted him to become a judge eventually. We were a bloody group, too. We loved to phase people into objects and let go of them or teleport people into walls. Al the stuff that never happened in the comic but made sense to a bunch of sixteen year old guys.

I can remember most of our adventures. One of my favorites was trapping the team in a room made of adamantium with no exits and pitting them against some enemy team. But right in the middle of the room, a black hole appeared. Let me just say the survival rate was not high on that one. Our last adventure ever was set on the moon. I teleported the Baxter building there and our heroes had to reach the top floor to prevent the cosmic forces of the universe from destroying the Earth. All the universal entities were tired of us mucking around with them and decided o be done with us. But one of them, whom we had helped, convinced the rest to give us one last chance to survive. I stacked the building with every powerhouse villain we had ever faced. In the end, Clubber was the last character standing and he set off a nuke that destroyed him, the building, and the bad guys. The Earth was spared because his sacrifice was selfless. But the planet was sealed off from the rest of the universe. Sure, it sounds stupid today, but you had to be there.

Plus that adventure took place as we were graduating high school. Some of our friends were leaving. While everyone else was drinking and hooking up with the girl or guy they always wanted to, we were fighting for the fate of the world. Awesome.

I tried Cyberpunk, Traveler, Twilight 2000, Champions, Killer, and several others. We played lots of Steve Jackson games. We played OGRE and Car Wars. We tried the original FASA Star Trek: the Next Generation. We tried the Star Wars game. And I picked up Battletech and tried that. My personal crush was for the Robotech system from Paladium. I was a huge Robotech junkie and went nuts for the game. At one point, I owned every piece they released for the game. Man, that was an awesome system. We pretty much cut the role playing out on that one and just piloted Veritechs against Hordes of Invid and Zentradi. Loved it.

But in all that time and the twenty some odd years since, I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know why that is significant, it really isn’t. It just popped into my head today when someone was talking to me about 3.5 vs 4.0.

Nobody on my staff right now is a role player. It’s been that way for a while. I’ve had a mind to hire someone in that area but just haven’t done it yet. I was thinking recently that maybe I would go back to my pre-Magic roots. Maybe I would pick out a game to run. I of course contemplated D&D, but I’m just not feeling it right now. I really liked the superhero stuff we used to do. There are two major systems out there right now: the Hero System, and Mutants and Masterminds. I decided to try out the latter. I just got the core book and haven’t cracked it yet. I know it started out as a d20 game so I’m interested to see what I think of that. I’ll probably let you know some week.

WHAT’S NEXT

As usual, I have no idea. So far I’m pretty much finding that I blog about something that hits me on a Friday. I start off the day wondering what to blog about and three pages later, I’m done. I like it, it’s fun.

I’m also starting to have random people I barely know mention that they have read it. That’s kind of scary but also kind of exciting. After all, that’s the whole pint, right?

Oh, quick acknowledgement. Thanks to Brian Hellevang who makes this legible every week. I asked if he had read last week’s yet and he said, “Read it? It’s unpublishable until I fix it!” I’m pretty much a big word whore who doesn’t care about typos. After all, I know what I'm trying to say.

See ya.