Getting in Touch with my Inner Geek
March 2008 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Make Your Own (Easier) Miniatures
- Gaming in the Media: The Cutest Serving of Stereotypes: The NYT on Dating a Gamer
Interviews
- Industry Interview: Victoria Lamb
Articles
- Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Analyzing a LARP
Author: Stephanie Pegg
- Sculpting Player Expectations
Author: Brendan Davis
- Women’s Gaming Group: First Impressions
Author: Robyn Fleming
Stephanie uses a LARP questionnaire to examine the questions "What do LARPers really want?" and "How different are men and women gamers, really?"
Brendan shares tips on how to use Power Point to get players excited and into the campaign they are about to embark on.
Robyn discusses her first impressions of her all-women gaming group.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
Odds 'n Ends
I am a 31 year old woman. In the last two years, I have been taking real steps towards l33t g33k status, though my geekiness has been within me for most of my life. My first foray into the genre of fantasy really began when I was eight years old and my grandmother handed me a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to browse through for a good name for my new troll doll (remember the ugly plastic ones with the crazy colored hair that were so popular in the 80’s?). I picked “Frodo” because it called to me. Then I read the book. I don’t think I have ever fully come back from that world. I still have Mr. Frodo – he’s on a hutch in my bedroom and he’s gotten me through some pretty hectic times in my life.
Though I was never immersed in the geek culture, I dabbled in many areas. I wrote programs on an Atari 800. I read fantasy novels and made up “Mary-Sue” (a term I have just this week learned) type stories in my head about the new worlds I was introduced to. I did a kind of LARPing (does it count if you’re by yourself?) in my backyard while taking the garbage out. Those Ringwraiths never caught me. I was in chess club in high school and I played a form of “D&D” with my boyfriend and his friends. I was in a Shakespeare Touring Company in high school, and got to learn fun stage combat (there’s nothing like “dragging” your guy friend across the stage…by his balls) and got to wear fun Ren Faire-type costumes. I even had the HeroQuest board game. I only got to play it twice, but I went through and set up all the different dungeons on my own.
Writing it out like this makes it seem like I did a lot of gaming, but really it was only little bits and pieces of everything and always for short periods of time. And most of it ended when I met the boy that would be my husband.
Michael was very self-conscious and very worried about what other people thought of him. Since I was connected to him, he was also very worried about what people thought of me. Mike imagined a guy in his thirties living in his mother’s basement, drinking beer, eating Cheetos and sitting at a filthy desk painting miniatures while wearing a wizard’s cloak when he thought of D&D. Mike certainly couldn’t be connected to that, and therefore neither could I. I still remember the conversation when I told him about my fake roleplaying experience in high school, and he made some worried comment about how his family probably wouldn’t ever want to hear about that (really, his family wasn’t like that, he was just so worried about what people thought about him that he believed they were).
Eventually, I just learned to suppress my interest in interactive geeky things and satisfy myself with the fantasy books I read. I think the saddest thing was that Mike himself had the heart of a geek. He could have been the l33test of them all, if he could have accepted himself as being able to be a professional, responsible person that was also a geek.
In any case, we divorced and suddenly I found myself free to express myself in any way I wanted (or at least in any way that my financial situation would allow. No pretty corsets for me…yet). It began with World of Warcraft. I became friends with a group of people that played the game and I ended up purchasing my own copy.
I was in. Geek talk was all around me and I sat and listened to it with joy and awe. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but it was great. It was also a little frustrating. There were so many things I didn’t know about; inside jokes, world information, AC ratings and what they meant… These people had been true gamer geeks for many years. I didn’t even know that the name of the company that owned Dungeons & Dragons was Wizards of the Coast. I know, blasphemy! I have learned the errors of some of my ways, but there is history and knowledge out there that I will take years to sort out in my head.
My new group of WoW-playing friends also played D&D. I was jealous every Sunday when the guy I was seeing left for the weekly game. Finally, I befriended his Dungeon Master and weaseled my way into an invite to the game. After several nights of instant messaging and phone calls from the DM, all of which were filled with abstract mystical information about feats, skill points and class characteristics, I had myself a level 12 Gnome Archivist – a complex character that I had no idea how to play for a game I only had a vague idea of how to play…at least I knew there were dice involved.
I said before that I had played some D&D in high school. I learned after the fact that we played in a way that didn’t quite line up with the Wizards of the Coast rulebooks. First of all, we had no dice, no AC, no skill points or feats. We made up characters and had them do really cool stuff. The DM, my then-boyfriend, would make up stories and we would do what was basically a group story-telling event. If I wanted to shoot my bow at the bad guy, I would pick a number between 1-100. My character would then shoot and the success rate was dependent upon how close my number was to the number that the DM was thinking of. Dating the DM probably gave me an advantage.
Arriving at my first real D&D game last August and seeing the piles of books, the bowl of dice and the papers and pencils strewn across the living room was very daunting. On the coffee table was a laminated sheet with a grid on it and there were miniatures on it. There was even a dragon! It was very exciting to behold. I took a picture of the scene with my cell phone and still can’t bring myself to delete it.
I sat down and started getting told about move actions and rounds. Then there was the joyous event of picking a mini to represent my character. A few gnome-sized figures were brought out for my inspection; some were tossed away as the group vetoed them. I would have preferred to spend hours searching through the box, but I was already feeling antsy about holding the group up. I eventually became very attached to the figure I ended up with, my little gnome with a topknot and tome.
I started looking at my character sheet and figured out that I had no idea what spells to pick to put in my slots for the day, especially since I didn’t know all of the spells I even had. Luckily, most of the group already knew and liked me. And they knew how enthusiastic I was to learn how to play this game. I’m still certain that some of them were getting to the ends of their supplies of patience, though.
After a few weeks I started to actually know what was meant when the DM said, “I need you to roll a reflex save.” I was able to figure out how some of my spells worked. I knew which buffs I needed to cast on my group, before the combat. It was still taking me long minutes to add up bonuses and die rolls and look through my stack of papers and, yes, even go through the Word file on my laptop that listed all of my spells.
I got my real immersion in the roleplaying when my friend Erik introduced my character as the one who is going to explain to the assassin’s guild (or something like that) about how we are going to take over and what they are going to do for us since we just killed their leaders.
I was suddenly in the spot light, sputtering, “Um, well…so we killed those other guys, so um, hmmm, uh, you guys should just do what we say cause um….well, we killed them so I guess we can kill you, and um, yeah, so what he said.” Here, I gestured to Erik. “…And so then we’ll all make lots of money. That’s cool, right? I’m done. I think that’s all he’d say…”
One of the assassins, voiced by the DM, said, “We don’t have to follow the Gnome, do we?”
In my nervousness, I laughed more hysterically than was probably necessary. But I was excited and having fun.
I started telling my other friends (the ones that that still thought I was going through a cute little phase with this “dragons and dungeons stuff”) that I was booked on Sundays. I found ways to fit “with my D&D group” and “when I play D&D” into other conversations. I was full with geek pride as I arrived at my Sunday D&D game every week, and I was delighted when my DM sent me Fire and Brimstone! A Comprehensive Guide to Lava, Magma, and Superheated Rock - and not only did I understand it, but I think it’s hilarious. “You fall into lava, you die. No save.” How can that not be funny?
My friend Robyn introduced me to the webcomic The Order of the Stick through playing the board game. I went to the website and read through all of the archives. 500+ comics in a week (much work was procrastinated). The part I enjoyed most when reading this comic was how much of it I understood. One of the comics made me laugh so hard that I put it in my MySpace pictures, I was that pleased with the fact that I “got it.” Robyn (and her husband Jimmy) also introduced me to Munchkin, a card game which just becomes more and more enjoyable as I really start understanding some of the inside jokes. It still takes work to get used to the idea of being evil and backstabbing people. It’s not something I do often in real life (at least not on purpose). But it’s great help with my roleplaying.
Anyway, back to my first D&D game. The DM really loves the rules and the order of his game, and once he decides that something in particular is going to happen, it’s happening. So as the bad guys and monsters – not to mention the dragon – get stronger, and our party starts dying off, he decides that my character is going to have lots of assassins come after her. I really don’t want to her to die! I just spent the last 14 weeks figuring out how to play her and I was really getting into developing her personality.
So I decide I am going to retire her. I want her to go off and hide away somewhere and get to read her books and live happily ever after with this grand adventure to always look fondly back on. My DM has other ideas. I should say that he is a very nice guy…and I think he was just excited that I had really gotten into the game. He wanted me to come over and roleplay the assassins attacking my character in her sleep. Apparently, the bad guys would not care that she had retired and had no intention of revealing the prophecy she knew about to anyone else.
I took my character sheet when he wasn’t looking and claimed I lost it so we couldn’t do the session. It’s still in my kitchen. I’m trying to figure out a good way to scrapbook it or something.
