The encounters in the graveyard were truly unbelievable. Never before has D&D 4e seen so many critical misses and stupid mistakes – it was outrageous. Our party threw 1 after 1, and the DM shook his head as the monsters crit us all over the dungeon. The only reason we were all able to make it out alive was because he was gracious enough to make the final boss flee from the room, providing enough opportunity attacks to finally bloody him and bring him to his knees. Faced with the choice to drag him back to town or just execute him, we took great pleasure in lopping off his head and pulverizing it with our paladin’s hammer.

After the game was over, we stepped out of the bright lights of Chicagoland Games and into a ridiculous, eerie fog that covered the neighborhood streets. It felt like we had moved from one cemetery to another.

Lately I’ve been spending my Mondays in Edgewater, playing D&D with a group of new friends that come in from all over the city (and suburbs) to mull over rule books, eat Thai food, and compare dice sets. I’m going to try to detail our various quests, since I would like to keep some record of the games.

So last Monday on March 1, I was happy to see everyone from the group I met at D&D 101 had showed up once again. We had a new DM this game, and after our easy win the week before, we decided to play a Tymanther (?) module on hard. This meant going up against several level 7 monsters with a group of level 1 adventurers. We nearly wiped completely, but I was fortunate enough to crit (read: roll a 20) on my daily power and do some serious damage. This was the first time I really put some thought into what it meant to play a beastmaster ranger who still fought with ranged weapons, since the beastmaster build in the Martial Power Handbook is really meant for melee combat. My dog ended up working as more of a shield, providing easy flanking for my teammates, and creating opportunity attacks in the process. We ended up talking our way out of the last encounter, which was a big relief since we had been playing straight from 7 pm until nearly 12:30 am.

After Kevin left this afternoon, I rented The Dungeon Masters through Amazon On-Demand, since I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere else. It was truly awful, since it focused – as many of these documentaries on role playing do – on the craziest, most oblivious people they can find that have absolutely no sense of balance in their lives. My experience with D&D has been the exact opposite, which is to say the players:

• Have real jobs and responsibilities, and start to look worried when the games go too long
• Do not, as far as I can tell, have fake elf ears
• Are not all white
• Do not write all their own adventures, and seem perfectly at peace with their players
• Do not seem to have put much thought into their characters until the next week’s game, when they frantically try to find their last game sheet and tally their HP / inventory.

Apparently we played a campaign from Living Forgotten Realms (?), but who knows what the hell that actually is. I had to fill out some official card to track something or other, but even though they play every Monday, I can’t see myself taking advantage of anything significant over a long period of time. Regardless, I was excited to get going. Our group actually ended up saving a nobleman’s daughter from a twisted werewolf ritual, which took us about 4 straight hours of gameplay. This included some pretty hilarious role playing, actually, which was great because I didn’t find the combat all that interesting at first. My pet got into all kinds of trouble, and one guy even paid a hobo from Baluder’s Gate to follow him around like my dog.

I was rewarded 100 gold / 410 XP for my efforts, and look forward to my next encounter so I can get close to the 1000 XP I need to level up. I also earned “the gratitude and respect” of Scepter Lord Mazak al’Azeem for rescuing his idiot daughter.

I now know at least two younger guys who were there on Sunday, and a few older people in our group closer to my age. I’ll definitely be going back next week, if only for the popular ritual of demolishing Thai food from the restaurant next door, which is just as amusing as any involving werewolves. I’ve never seen such hilarious gluttony. Pictures of one of my new friends (left) and our DM (right) below:

And although I find myself with plenty of time to pursue my personal interests this winter, I’ve been noticing that my level of activity has dwindled. The few friends I’ve made here in the last few years live in the suburbs, and often work on the weekends. My other social activities, although usually very rewarding, tend to be relatively passive. Dinner, perhaps. Talking someone into a movie. I solved this when I moved here by driving begrudgingly to Best Buy to pick up a copy of World of Warcraft, but after several months of exhausting conversations trying to convince my friends in Grand Rapids to join, I disabled my account after hitting 80 by questing almost exclusively by myself.

This winter is actually proving more difficult than I would have imagined, due to a number of factors that are, admittedly, somewhat within my tiny sphere of influence. I’m at a loss for how to move forward, however. Somehow after living in Chicago for over two years, I feel as though I have failed, socially. Concerts, conventions, dinners and volunteering have been half-hearted and calculated. Even when I want to, I never sound (or feel) genuine, and people around me can tell.

So when I woke up this morning and panicked at the thought of not leaving my apartment, I was fortunate enough to come across an item on the Gaper’s Block calendar that caught my eye. There was a gaming store in Edgewater that was putting on a D&D 101 class, which would include pre-rolled characters and introductory campaigns. Local gamers would discuss the history and lore of the game, and even help you roll your own if you were interested.

The drive up north was bizarre. When I stepped out of my apartment around 5 pm the weather was very warm, and I took off my jacket before getting into my car. By the time I made it up Damen, it had already begun snowing. When I finally arrived on Broadway I could barely see the store across the street. Everything was soaking wet, and it felt like I had been traveling for hours.

Almost immediately after sitting down, a tall 30-something stuck out his hand and introduced himself. He looked as nervous as I was, and sheepishly admitted that he had never been able to play as a kid because his parents were so religious that they actually believed in witches and warlocks. The Holy Spirit, for example, compelled them to throw his dice not onto the table, but into the trash. Unprompted, he also expressed a great interest in the Christian Reformed Church, since he had never heard of it, and wanted to learn more about the denomination.

From there, of course, the rest of the night just got better and better. I purchased the Player’s Handbook, along with the Martial Power supplement and my own set of dice to begin working on rolling my first character: A Half-Elf Ranger. He probably won’t be too far removed from Temmen, my dwarf in World of Warcraft. I actually met a lot of people who, like myself, enjoyed the Role Playing aspects of the game more than raiding, and who were interested in the kind of character development that simply isn’t going to happen online. Although I never got a chance to jump in a game, I listened with particular pleasure to the various dungeon masters who guided their players through tunnels and cemeteries with careful voices.

The pictures below don’t really do the evening justice, but there were well over 40 people who showed up, and there weren’t nearly enough seats. Everyone was in good spirits, tempered by a sort of broad, awkward feeling of excitement and confusion. I felt like it was the first day of 5th grade, and even though there was plenty of new curriculum, everyone really just wanted to sit down and chat. So we did.

A brief summary of my Sunday, and why I wish i had more friends living here:

• Paying to park my car just to drop a book off at the library
• Discovering that Blueline has Gumballhead
• Taking the CTA to Chinatown for New Years
• Not attending a Mariah Carey Concert
• Dragons
• Soft Ninja stars
• Trinkets
• Dim Sum
• Dim Sum
• Dim Sum
• The pedway! Finally!
• Musicians
• Evanston to read at Borders and see Wolfman
• Broke-ass GPS directions back to Roscoe Village
• Metal Haven – you will be missed































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