Adventures of a Part-Time Rogue: The Beginnening

I have a confession to make (though since I'm pretty sure only my friends read this, it won't be a particularly astonishing one): I roleplay.

DUN. DUN. DUNNNN!

And I don't mean in the "I'll be the strict Dean and you be the naughty school-girl" sort of way....well, not for this post anyways. I mean in the Dungeons and Dragons sort of way. Cue visual:
I've been at it since around grade 10, when I was pulled head-first into the world of pen-and-paper RPGs, by a group of friends. The first game was played during a Forty-Hour Famine event at our high school, as a way of killing time and forgetting our hunger. Now here is where most Dungeons and Dragon confessionals will tell you that their group doesn't fit in to the stereotype, but I'm not going to do that.

We did.

That is not to say that we haven't all grown up to be bright young men with exceptional social skills because we have, but at the time we were the geeks,. The nerds. We wore the terms proudly. Most of us are still geeks (we just got better at hiding it) and we have gone on to become writers, game designers, computer programmers, and political scientists.

So you won't hear any apologetic we-were-cool high school D&D stories from me. That isn't to say the stereotypes are wholly true or that I've yet to find "cool" people who play pen-and-paper games. In fact, since high school the stereotypes have been completely left behind and now I game with cinematographers, snowboarders, plumbers, rock stars, frat boys, and yes, the occasional video game producer. I write and direct films, but seeing as how that really is just a more expensive version of Dungeon Mastering (more on that later) I'll leave myself out of that line-up.

We first began playing, 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Weeks later Wizards of the Coast would release 3rd edition and we would switch to that, but my first game was AD&D complete with THACO (To Hit Armour Class zerO, I looked it up). Now I'm pretty good at math so THACO wasn't that hard for me to wrap my head around, but the logic behind wanting to have one score low when every other score was supposed to be high never made much sense to me. It was needlessly complicated and I am glad it is gone. I do miss rolling character sheets up on nothing but a chunk of loose-leaf though.

So with the Famine rapidly approaching High Schoo Stu had to roll up his first character. It was at this moment, lunch on a Friday in the Tech Support Students lounge, that I began a long career of perfecting the Elven Ranger build. Now I may tend towards roguish humans these days, but I still get a sense of home whenever I play something with pointy ears and a bow. He was pretty rough to start off with, but after all it was the first character I ever made. Later rangers would excel in the art of staying hidden and sniping from the trees, annoying fellow players by never getting hit, and perplexing Dungeon Master's who never did figure out that they should stop setting battles in forests where I was at a distinct advantage.

But old Leos, wasn't quite so magnificent of a build, none of his stats and ability choices really mixed all that well and he had the charisma of a particularly dull chunk of oak. I imagine him somewhere still hacking away at Kobolds with his longsword and rusty chainmail. Somehow I can't see him progressing too far past the early levels, but he's a survivor and my first so I can't allow myself to imagine him dead.

His career lasted all of one game, storming a dungeon alongside a mute, dwarven beastmaster, a talky Half-Elf Mage, and a human barbarian or fighter or something big with a sword that hit people a lot, but somewhere between brainstorming with the mage to set a flaming grease trap for a couple of Goblins behind a door and one-shoting both of the DM's big bad pet dire wolves, I was hooked. No amount of snowboarding and starting positions on the high school basketball team could save me from the nerdery to come.