Memories of Dungeons and Dragons

I stumbled upon the Wikipedia Dungeons and Dragons article today, and was intrigued by the responses I felt while reading it.

It triggered an intense nostalgia in me. I used to play it for days on end as a teenager. I remember the anger and loss I felt when my first character, the wizard Feason, was killed, unfairly I felt, in a battle with the odds so heavily stacked he couldn’t survive. The seething injustice when a Dungeon Master who wanted to stir things up decided to send endless hordes to destroy the castle and army my knight had so carefully built, condemning everything my character had worked for to destruction no matter how cleverly I played.

Just the names of some of the modules causes a physical ache, as I remember the associations, The Grand Duchy of Karameikos, The Secret of Bone Hill, or the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa.

Even though I called myself Christian at the time, I remember too the bad press the game got in Christian circles, the hysteria as out of context quotes from the game about demons, devils and magic spells made the rounds. The urban legends about suicides and devil-worshopping that befell someone in the next town.

I remember the sense of rebellion I felt as, reading a page from a magazine describing Satan in AD & D terms, I was scratched by my cat, and bled all over the book. The blood-smeared book became an object of pride as I allowed fearful Christians to catch a glimpse of Satan and my blood peeking out of my bag.

At one stage, convinced I could design a better game, a number of us spent months designing our new masterpiece, immensely complex, differing rules for combat for each part of the body, huge numbers of skills characters could specialise in to replace the confining constraints of class and race. Unfortunately the game proved too complex and slow-moving to be enjoyably playable, but we had fun designing it.

Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing in general, is all-too often an object of mockery, the epitomy of geekdom, seen as a symptom of a sad and lonely youth. No matter. I remember it with the greatest of joy. The excitement of a new adventure, exposure to new ideas, the ecstasy of all night planning sessions, imagining and reliving scenarios in my head. My circle of friends moved on after school, and I never took advantage of later opportunities to get back into it. But the memories are intact and achingly vivid.