The saga begins...

When I started this blog, I thought it would serve as an excellent tool to exorcise my inner demons…especially those which cause my depression. While I’ve hinted and promised more information about certain people and events in past entries, I recognize that I haven’t lived up to those promises. So, dear readers, this is the first of what will be many entries altogether dealing with who I am and how I got here. I hope we both learn something along the way.

Before I can start talking about failed relationships and broken trusts, I need to start at the beginning…and that is with “the game”. Gaming – I’ve talked about it in my blog entries, but unless you play I doubt you have a damned clue what I’m talking about. So to clear up any misunderstanding or stereotypes…gaming means sitting down* with other gamers and role playing characters which you create in a fictional setting. There is no board to guide you along, but there is a story and plot (provided by either a book or the imagination of your GM^ – Game Master – who runs the game). The players create characters– you have so many points and the way you spread them out over the character sheet determines who your character is. You can be witty, pretty or strong – but as with life, not in even amounts. You can be a hero, or an anti-hero (my personal fav). You can be a warrior, a peacemaker or hell, even a slacker. You might be a human or something else. You create your character and then interact with the other characters in the game’s setting. We use dice rolls (based on the points you spread out earlier) to see if we succeed or fail at tasks. The game itself could be about anything/anywhere – it is only limited by your own imagination.

Most people will get what you mean by “gaming” when you say the following three dreaded words…Dungeons & Dragons (or D&D). For the record – this is not a satanic game! We don’t meet in our all black clothing and plan the next Columbine tragedy. It’s a game people – and when we come across those players who seem to not understand the line between reality and fantasy, even we shun these crazy freaks. It’s fun. No one gets hurt and more times than not, you are playing a hero type character. So step off Christian freaks and try it before you crucify those who enjoy playing. Gamers get a bad rep – some of it deservingly…yes, many need to shower more, drink less Mt. Dew, fine-tune their social skills and learn to have a life outside of gaming. The world of gaming, though, is varied. For instances: in the game I am playing in now, we are all in our late twenties to mid-thirties. We are normal people with real jobs. We are all married and two of us have kids. We are educated. We just like to meet once a week and save the world using our super powers! :o)

I’ll admit it…my first role-playing experience came with playing D&D – and then A(Advanced) D&D. I was living at this tiny Air Force site which literally sat atop a mountain in the UP of Michigan. There was little for us kids to do. The place was so small that the library we had was on the honor system. People brought in books they were done with and the door to the two room office was always unlocked. That is where we played. No one ever came there – just us. There were 5 of us; 4 boys and one girl** (that would be me). I guess my parents might have been concerned about their middle school aged daughter hanging out in a lonely office with 4 boys, but I was still pretty much a tomboy back then and boys were buddies not objects of affection for me – besides I could have kicked their asses if they had been stupid enough to touch me. LOL I don’t remember a lot about those games, except for the musty smell of books that were boxed up too long, the haze of the dying sunlight through dusty old mini-blinds and that I played a Thief who was half elf and half human. I once killed another character - a loud, drunken Ogre – by hitting him in the head with an oversized oatmeal cookie. (Hey! I had a good roll of the dice…what can I say?!) It was a fun, new use for my overly-active imagination that reading, writing and drawing didn’t satisfy. I got hooked. It was so cool to me to become this other person and do outrageous things like killing Ogres with cookies…and to be with other people who thought it was fun and cool too.

After we moved onto our next assignment in Texas, I lived “off base” for the first time in my life and my interests branched into other things (like boys!). I didn’t game again until my early adulthood – my college years here in Ohio. That is how I came to know Barb…my father introduced me to his work colleague knowing that she and a group of her friends were looking for another player to try out this new game called Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

My life would be altered forever by both…but I’ll leave that for another entry.

^ - GMs are also referred to as ST’s – Story Tellers.

*(OK – there are other ways to game; like with cards, using miniature figurines, playing online or by acting it out in what is known as a L(ive)A(action)R(ole)P(laying). I prefer table top gaming and that is what I am referring to 100% of the time when I talk about it.)

**(This is typical for gaming. For the most part, gamers are white males from middle-class America. They tend to be those shy, pasty geeky guys you shunned back in high school. Women gamers are a special breed. Most games might have one or two, but I have yet in all my years of gaming to see an all women game or a majority of the girls versus the guys. In a lot of cases, gamers bring their girlfriends in and they get drafted into playing. That wasn’t my case, but it happens. Regardless, for the most part girls get treated like queens in the gaming world just because we are so rare. Who am I to argue? I’m just glad to see at conventions these days that the ages and races of players are growing in diversity.)