I did have a good group, we lasted for ten years. But I know exactly what you mean about immersing yourself in those books and dungeons. I have strong memories about spending over an hour rolling up a character and figuring out every little detail about the person, even though I often never ended up playing the character in a game. What better preparation could a would-be storyteller have?

I didn’t know about GG’s death. Thanks for letting us know.

Dude, you spend years writing a series of books that create entire new worlds/cultures. You spend hours, days, weeks or even months perfecting each scene – trying to get the background, technology and characters just right. Then you run a reasonably well-bonded group of people through these worlds.

The only difference between what you’re doing and what we did is that you’re taking both the GM and players roles at once, and you get to make up all the rules.

And, yanno, there’s no dice involved (that we know about).

Yeah, it’s like that. (Especially on the GM side. God, if you only knew how many hours of my life disappeared into adventures that have never seen the outside of a notebook…or appeared briefly, only to have weeks of work completely obliterated by a well-place spell and a natural 20.)

Here’s to the man who allowed millions of us to use our imaginations…

Still, I would have liked to know what it was like to really… really… get into D&D.

I was also lucky enough to find a few good gamers, after a few family fun games eerily similar to your own experience (God only knows how many times my sister’s response to “What do you do?” was “I duck”…until we all shouted at her in unison that her armor class assumed she was at least attempting rudimentary evasive abilities.)

I’m one of those who prefers “fun” gamers over “serious” gamers any day. My favorite gaming group had two kenders, which led to regular rounds of “shake the kender” upon arising for the day’s hacking and slashing, and a 6’5″ monk with +5 flatulence (one episode of “pull my finger!!!” resulted in a fireball that cleared an entire stone balcony of orcs).

At one point in the adventure, the kenders found a broadsword. Too big for either of them to wield alone, they bundled the blade end in leather and took to stampeding down hallways at knee height, which proved to be a rather successful method of attack. When one of them was shot in battle, the other kept right on going at full speed, creating the forever-famous (and surprisingly destructive) “Kender Blender of DOOOM!!!”

Ah, those were the days…

I raise my glass. To Gary!

Thanks for posting.

Well, yeah, for values of “social skills” that include the desire to spend hours after school poring over Teen Glamor and Vogue trying to decide which fashion trend to inflict on everyone this week, huddling outside the school doors in January trying to impress the jocks while freezing to death in denim miniskirts and giving a crap about such idiotic television shows as Beverly Hills, 90210.

Me, I had baaaad social skills – couldn’t give half a crap about most “girly” stuff and was oblivious to the rest of it. But I turned all that energy inward into pure dungeon brilliance as a DM. My crowning glory was the creation of an adventure in which the adventurers had to make their way through the lair of an ancient and extremely powerful dragon who’d fallen prey to an insanity curse. Said lair included a transparent/invisible maze o’death among other fun bits (because the dragon was insane, you see, and also apparently desperately bored with a lot of time on it’s hands). The capper was that when they finally succeeded, they couldn’t just kill the damned thing but instead had to give it a pill/magically-spelled de-cursing pearl of great size. Because said cursed dragon was, not insignificantly, the oldest friend and favorite chess partner of the local ruler, who had hired them to help his friend.

Oh yeah. Those were the days. The Bwwaahhaaahhaa!!! flowed like a snowmelt-engorged river back then.

*Survivors? What survivors?*