Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (7 page)

Dungeons and Dragons was the game I played. All through middle school and the first couple years of high school—until the possibility of sex hove into view. Before that, sex seemed like something for tall people who could run fast.

And here’s how you played Dungeons and Dragons:

You got a sheet of paper. You got a pencil. You got three six-sided dice. On the sheet of paper you wrote, in a list, these six attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma.

Got it?

You picked up the three dice, and you rolled ’em six times. One throw of the three dice for each attribute. Eighteen was the highest. Three was the lowest.

These six attribute scores became your “character.” How strong, smart, wise, healthy, quick, and good-looking you were was all based on the roll of three dice.

Then you chose a race. And not black or white. An actual genus—human, dwarf, elf, halfling, half elf. Each race had advantages and liabilities. Dwarves were superhealthy and resistant to poisons. They were also ugly. Elves were more intelligent and graceful but were fragile. Halflings were small but quick and quiet.

I wonder if people realize how, simultaneously, Dungeons and Dragons was wildly progressive and archaic. Human beings were no longer black and white, male and female. We were all one, sharing the world, equal against the elves and halflings.

Of course, dwarves weren’t human.

Then you chose a “class.” That’d be your profession. Fighter, wizard, priest, or thief. There were subclasses— illusionist for wizards, ranger for fighters, for example.

Your attributes and your race determined what would be the perfect profession for your character. Dwarves made sturdy fighters but were clumsy with magic. Half-lings made excellent thieves. Elves were the best magic users. Humans could pretty much do anything. Dungeons and Dragons was very egalitarian when it came to the human race. And seriously—what’s with those sissy elves? Am I right?

An 18 strength meant you were a nigh-indestructible bruiser, able to bend bars, lift gates, and twist the head off of any foe who dared stand against you. An 18 intelligence meant that, as a wizard, you could memorize more spells, speak more languages, perhaps identify artifacts. An 18 dexterity made for a thief who could pick pockets and locks, climb walls, and backstab like a wicked finger of darkness.

One of your friends acted as Dungeon Master—he’d design the adventure and stock a subterranean keep with fabulous wealth, powerful magical items, and deadly monsters guarding them. You and your other friends—and their characters—would venture into an imaginary hole in the crust of a pretend world and defeat fantasy beasts to gain possession of unspendable gold, jewels, and gems, as well as claim the right to wield magic rings, enchanted swords, blessed armor and artifacts, and scrolls that, when read, unleashed wonders that could change reality.

None of it changed
our
reality, of course. But winning a fantasy baseball league doesn’t prevent you from having to go back to your stultifying tech job Monday morning, and there’s no VIP champagne celebration waiting for you at the end of a fantasy Super Bowl. If the victories we create in our heads were let loose on reality, the world we know would drown in blazing happiness.

And that was Dungeons and Dragons. Six years of my young life. Roll abilities, pick a race, pick a profession, fight monsters, gain glory. All on paper, chronicled in graphite lead.

There were, of course, endless variations on this theme. I’m giving you the basics. This is how I was first introduced to the game, and despite a brief flirtation with an adult group of players in my late thirties—perhaps the most gentle, sedentary midlife crisis ever on record— this is how I remember it. You were supposed to “play” your character—a fighter who wasn’t too smart and was prone to walking into danger; a thief who might not be very honest and loyal; a priest who, though able to heal and banish the undead, might come into conflict with the edicts of his god. But it really came down to a casino-like game of numbers—your attributes and skills against any monsters you might encounter.

You rolled those dice one last time to determine your hit points—the amount of damage you could take before you were dead. The monsters had their own hit points. And when you met, your axe or sword or lightning-bolt spell dealt out so much damage, and you absorbed so much damage from the swipe of a goblin’s mace, the touch of a ghoul, or the breath of a dragon. You rolled more dice (a meteorlike twenty-sided die to determine if you’d scored a hit, an eight- or ten-sided die to determine damage) and your fate was decided by which side faced up when the dice came to rest. Gamblers at three a.m. live on the internal rush and collapse that come from the flip of a card, a ball falling into a slot, dice resting on felt. My friends and I, in basements and kitchens and in the cafeteria of Seneca Ridge Middle School on a Wednesday afternoon, rolled dice and heard, in our heads, the sound of orc skulls being split—or, oftentimes, the gurgling groan of our mighty fighter falling on the blood-soaked stones of a mossy crypt, ten feet away from a pile of gold and vorpal sword.

People committed suicide because of Dungeons and Dragons. Or plotted to kill one another. These were exceptions that proved the rule—Dungeons and Dragons was harmless fun (unless you counted all the snacks and soda poured into developing youngsters who were aggressively immobile). Someone twisted enough to take a game of paper, pencils, and pretend to a terminal extreme would have found a reason to end their life or deal out death in a
Family Circus
comic. Or the Bible.

Still, I wonder about all my past characters—Raphael the Thief, Delgath the Sorcerer, and Stumphammer, my profane, drunken dwarf warrior.

And most of all Ulvaak, the half-orc assassin (with his sentient sword, Bloodgusher—no, really). This was the last “character” I played before the gun of hormones fired me headlong into forever pursuing sex, and it shows.

Ulvaak was strength and violence incarnate. I was so addled with confusion, loneliness, and lust that I was in danger of falling out of the class-clown clique I normally hung with. Reciting Monty Python bits, paraphrasing
Saturday Night Live
sketches, trying to make Richard Pryor and George Carlin routines fit our everyday conversations—only now, puberty was a bag of cement lashed to my ankle. At least conversationally. Everything I thought and said now had this burning undercurrent of “How’s this going to get me laid?” And wit can’t have an agenda. So I clammed up, and I spent the summer between sophomore and junior years swimming, lifting weights, eating salad and fish, and clumsily trying to reroll the sorry stats I’d been given at birth.

So Ulvaak became my proxy during my clamp-jawed sophomore year. But he never made it past that summer.

18
Strength. He could punch through walls if I wanted him to. I all but bullied my Dungeon Master into giving him Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength, upping his Strength stat to 19.

18
Constitution. He could take the sting of a cockatrice tail, endure the deadly vapors of a green dragon’s breath, or absorb a stab from one of his own envenomed daggers (worn in bandoliers across his blast-furnace chest) and shrug it off like a mild cold.

18
Dexterity. Fast—two-handed attacks, thrown knives always finding their mark, dodging an enemy’s blows like an oiled serpent.

I fudged some of these rolls, by the way . . .

And, finally—
3
Charisma.

Three.

Repellent. Frightening. Not only did I conceive of Ulvaak as physically ugly—eyes crookedly set, a sneering maw full of gray teeth, horribly scarred from a slime monster attack—but also obnoxious and unpleasant. Cruel jokes, quick to anger, slow to calm—he was comfortable being everything that, in life, I wished I wasn’t. Even at my politest, with my braces and cystic acne and snowman torso, no one wanted anything to do with me. So I created a fantasy character who had the strength, speed, and guts to back up every awkward remark I spent my days apologizing for. My comfort during the loneliest days of my adolescence was happy nihilism, which carried an ebony sword.

I left the hideous, confident bastard on a demon-fueled plane of existence. I remember it exactly—me and three other friends at our fourth friend’s house. In the dining room. Sitting around the table—paper, pencils, dice, and lead figures to represent our characters.

The Dungeon Master had taken my figure off the table, to the side, to represent how he’d gone through a hell portal to a different plane of existence, where the sky was roiling blood and the ground was the scabbed-over corpse of a dead god. Ulvaak stood, in dragon-hide armor and a tattered cloak, holding Bloodgusher one-handed. The demon who ruled this hell plane—I forget his name— parlayed with Ulvaak, offering to send him back to the material plane of existence if he’d act as the demon’s messenger and assassin.

Ulvaak served no man, monster, or demon. Knowing that slaying the demon lord would, in effect, destroy the hell plane he now stood on (it being a manifestation of the demon’s ambition and avarice), he slung Bloodgusher like a burning shard from a graveyard explosion. It sliced the demon from shoulder to belly, and Ulvaak, the Black Blade of Gamotia, laughed as nameless damnation disintegrated beneath him and a sky of blood swallowed him whole.

Then I went to a pool party—the first one I was skinny enough to swim at without my shirt. I made out with a girl, and the curve of her hip and the soft jut of shoulder blades in a bikini forever trumped the imagined sensation of a sword pommel or spell book.

Sorry, Ulvaak. Will an epic poem make up for it?