Those of us who were teens or adults when Wizards of the Coast brought forth their first foray into the roleplaying game market with their take on the Dungeons & Dragons game occasionally forget that 3rd edition is now an old game. When D&D 3rd edition first reared its misbegotten head in 2000, I was fourteen. Roleplaying games were something I'd only just been introduced to, so these were heady days for me. I'd discovered an outlet for my imagination that I never could have conceived existed (though it's entirely possible that had I not known of their existence, I might have reinvented the wheel given time).
Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption (a PC game) was being advertised in the gaming magazine I had a subscription to at the time. I was really excited, it seemed like everything I could ever want: vampires (still to this day one of my favorite monsters from our collective human folklore), crusaders fighting demons and creatures of the night, maidens in need of rescuing, and a story that would span time - taking advantage of the titular vampire's cursed vitality.
One fateful day, I was on my way to Dirk's house (my best and oldest friend) to hang out and possibly play video games or whatever it was we did then (Diablo, Starcraft, Mario Kart, and Goldeneye most likely). We were in the backseat of the truck and I was telling him about VtM: Redemption, and how excited I was for the game to come out. And then he dropped a bombshell on me that likely altered the course of my life forever: he invited me to come and play with his group. I hadn't even known he played roleplaying games at the time, or that they existed aside from the article mentioning that Redemption was based on some other game. I was vaguely aware that Baldur's Gate (a game my younger brother Nigel owned a copy of) was based on something called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but I didn't really know what that meant other than the game seemed complicated. If only I had known.
And that's also how I met my eventual brother in law Dan. Dan ran the group's games of Vampire the Masquerade, Shadowrun, and AD&D. I only played Vampire (and very briefly 3rd edition) with Dan at the helm, and eventually he left us all to join the army, and later participate in the second invasion of Iraq (rumors of his demise fortunately, were just that). That is, however, another story. 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons had just arrived, and the group was starting to collect the books, and we eventually started playing. I believe my first ever D&D character was a half-orc monk, who was nearly killed by a rat. As I said, Dan joined up, so DMing eventually fell into the hands of others in the group who, despite their exuberance, were not very good at it, having unfortunately a dearth of talent, and having picked up terrible habits from our older mentor, now gone.
That sounds really critical, and perhaps unfair to them, but if you've ever experienced NPCs whose personalities range from egomaniacal to smugly superior with no deviation, huge monsters crammed into impossibly small spaces, and goblins that explode with treasure, then you know that what I, and the rest of the group were experiencing was effectively roleplaying Hell.
I eventually took up the mantle of Storyteller for our World of Darkness games, running Vampire the Dark Ages and Werewolf for several years in a medieval city. I ran things mostly off the cuff with as little dice rolling as possible. I tried to be fair in my arbitration, and in general I think I was both successful and an abysmal failure. Successful in that everyone was having a good time, but failing to challenge them, and in fact, being a little too much on their side, allowing fudges and all sorts of things I consider cheating nowadays.
It was during this time that I met a person who for a time was one of my best friends, and is now something of a bitter enemy. I don't hold that much animosity toward Jeremy, and I've always tried to be fair about his faults, and virtues even when my instinct was to be as vicious, and awful as possible, but I have heavily disliked him for several years now, and no apologies will change that even if they were forthcoming (which they aren't). I suppose I should have realized our friendship was doomed from the start when he didn't want to tell me about his science-fiction "masterpiece", because (as he would later confide) Jeremy's initial impression of me was that I was a plagiarist, despite having zero prior knowledge of me.
He, more often than not, took over the job of DMing for us with D&D. Unfortunately for me, our group had several players who had been playing characters from 2nd edition, and they weren't quite ready to give up on those characters whom they'd played for at least a year before I joined. They also did something rather unthinkable: They converted their characters to 3rd edition by comparing their experience point totals from 2nd edition to the ones in 3rd edition. This is a massive problem, since XP in 2e and XP in 3e are not only calculated differently, but the classes and levels use the same XP chart in 3e while in 2e the classes have differing experience charts. So... they were something on the order of 80th level characters, having extrapolated the XP needed for that by reverse engineering the 3e XP tables, and comparing their many hundreds of thousands of XP gained for being elven fighter/wizards, and taking that as their objective measure of power.
At the time, there was no rulebook capable of reigning this in (though there was a conversion guide they likely didn't read). Eventually, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting came out, and since they'd been playing in the Forgotten Realms in 2e, they were able to take advantage of the tentative "epic" rules in the FRCS. But, then, near the end of 3e, the Epic Level Handbook came out, and suddenly, the characters needed to be reworked to fit into this monstrous new power level (which is actually significantly less of a jump in power from non-epic to epic than it is from 1-20th level). And there's me. Relegated to making epic level characters (which could take hours) just so that I could play with the group, never actually properly learning the game because I was never given the opportunity to level up, and learn what everything did at the pace the game reasonably expected you would.
To top it off, one Christmas, Jeremy got me the Epic Level Handbook with a snide "Too bad you always make epic level characters" written in it, as though it were my fault that no one wanted to play 1st level characters, and I was stuck doing something I wasn't particularly good at for an hour or more: Math.
I later got my hands on the Wheel of Time RPG. I was really into the Wheel of Time series way back when, and it seemed like the right and proper thing for me to run D&D with, since I knew the setting, the book was gorgeous, and it was in many ways, 3rd edition lite. Of course, I didn't understand the rules properly, and when Jeremy joined the WoT game I put together on Tuesday afternoons at my then-girlfriend Rachel's house (a girlfriend who fell asleep nearly every time), I got to hear all about how I had read the rules wrong, and etc.
And it was true, I had. But I wasn't entirely to blame. I'd never been properly taught the rules, and as a result, my first forays into DMing 3rd edition were effectively disasters. However, I learned from my mistakes, and I got better, and eventually I was the only person willing to DM regularly. The burden fell more or less to me, with occasional DMing from the others when they felt like it, but three out of four weekends it was my ass warming the DM's chair. During that time, I chose to kill off my "epic" character, whom I'd grown attached to, but whose existence kept pulling me back into DMing epic level adventures which required a lot more prep than I wanted. This upset Jeremy's brother Taylor, a friend I'd known for a lot longer, was a fellow artist I admired, and was someone I very much liked for his wit and kindness. And yet, how dare I kill off my own character, and ruin everyone's fun, despite having repeatedly told him that I wanted to retire the character, since his motive to adventure had been completely resolved in a game Taylor himself had DMed for me.
This was, I think, the beginning of my fallout with the group - or at the very least, the first time I noticed. It may have actually started when I got a girlfriend I really was into, and thought I loved. I remember a day early in Rachel and my relationship when Jeremy and Dirk drove over to my house while Rachel was over, and confronted me about how I wasn't hanging out with them anymore in favor of my girlfriend. What I didn't realize at the time, was that it was because I wasn't DMing for them as regularly. I made them say it in front of her, because I had nothing to hide from her, and I wanted to make sure Rachel and I were on the same page where our relationship was concerned and who it might affect and whatnot. It was, sadly, one of the few actually mature choices I made in that relationship. A relationship that ended badly thanks to yours truly. But that's another, rather less interesting story that doesn't at all paint me in a good light.
Taylor and I drifted apart, partially due to my investing time in Rachel, partially due to my decision not to play my epic level character anymore, and partially due (later) to his use of weed. At the the time, I was very against it, and I was disappointed that he seemed more interested in smoking weed and being popular than he was with being my friend. But perhaps it was my fault for not being open minded, and for cultivating a friendship with a female, and for not wanting to play a character loosely modeled on myself whom I had killed for the sake of not having to play epic level characters anymore. It's possible that I'm just an asshole, and he was right to be offended. Just ask my ex. If anyone knows whether or not I'm an asshole, she would.
So, I took up the DMing mantle once again, and due to popular demand, I wrote an epic level adventure that would allow the group to resurrect my old dead character and thus restore harmony to the group. It was forty pages long. I spent days writing it. And when the time came to run the game itself, we postponed for several hours waiting for Dirk, who now had a pregnant girlfriend (he and Jeanette are still together, and while not legally married, did at least have a ceremony) and was less and less interested in playing roleplaying games with us guys. I bring this up, not because I feel he was wrong to want to spend time with the now expectant Jeanette, but because this was the beginning of his attempts to push us all away. Something that he has finally successfully done with me, more than ten years later. I suppose I should have gotten the hint a long time ago.
Even so, he came, and we played for eight solid hours. It was the longest I had ever DMed, and stands still as my record. We had six players that night. During an especially dicey encounter with a devastation spider, my brother Nigel's character failed a fortitude save vs. poison, and promptly died from the huge amount of constitution loss that resulted. The house of railroady cards I had built came crashing down, and I rather boorishly threw a tantrum before going to bed. We didn't continue the adventure I'd put so much work into, an adventure I had been forced to balance around characters whose levels varied wildly between 26th and 80th level because some wouldn't reduce their levels and others wouldn't level up their characters!
This was not to be the end of our days playing 3rd edition (or 3.5 as it was then). Eventually we all graduated high school, moved out or ended up in parent's basements as unsuccessful nerds often do. For a time, Dirk and Jeanette lived in an apartment complex not far from Jeremy's apartment, which he shared with his brother, who was no longer my friend, even though I was dense enough not to see it. By this time, my relationship with Rachel had gone sour, which was almost entirely my fault and I won't be recounting here. My heart was raw, and I wasn't the best of company, so that likely contributed to the continuing slide toward falling out with my friends.
I was humorless, and volatile. It isn't really any wonder to me now, looking back on my early twenties from the vantage point of a third decade, but at the time, I was blinded by my feelings, and so the cycle continued. Still, I was expected to DM. That had become the social contract. I DMed in Jeremy's apartment for several years, with a rotating cast of persons who sometimes would show up, and sometimes would not. I believe I once DMed for a group of ten people. It was a nightmare. Not only was I picking up the pieces of my rather co-dependent personality that had been shattered by Rachel finally having enough of my shit, and leaving like a sane person, but I was also now the "forever DM", expected to produce on demand the fun for whomever was invited.
Hilariously, this is where I met two principle members of my current group. In a fun little game of who knows who, they'd been invited because they were friends with Taylor. One of them, Carlos, the player of Lady Nora in the ASoIaF game, also the player of the elf in our Spies and Pirates game, immediately rubbed me the wrong way. Probably because he's smarter than I am, or at the very least, quicker of wit. We didn't like each other much, and he rightly thought I was a humorless jackass. That association ended when Carlos, and Taylor made a pile of drawings that were lewd puns about cocks, and inserted them between the pages of Jeremy's roleplaying games.
That prank caused him to accuse Carlos of sexual harassment, going so far as to call him when he was on vacation, and banned him from playing D&D with us. Jeremy then had us come over, and instead of playing D&D or just hanging out, and venting about the rather harmless prank, made us search his books for the drawings, and remove them rather than doing it himself. We all thought it was a funny prank, and several of the drawings were rather clever. Cockthulhu, with penises for tentacles, Cock Norris, whose hat was the head of a penis while his balls were the infamous Norris chin complete with pube beard, etc. The sheer amount of time and effort put into the prank was admirable, and even those of us who didn't like Carlos (even Roger and I) thought it was hilarious. But not Jeremy, oh no. I guess we found the actual humorless jackass in the group.
I hear that cock pictures occasionally fall out of Jeremy's roleplaying books to this day. I savor this thought.
Since it seems I've gone farther afield than I had meant to, I'm going to write a second part to this, not only to continue where I left off, but also to make up for my lack of activity in the previous weeks.
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