D&D is always best when played with a group of people. That said, the first time I played D&D was with Kyle, who doesn't really count, not because of some ethereal or imaginary state of existence, but because he was the Dungeon Master. Because he was running the game and not playing it, my first few sessions amounted to a lengthy and lonely single player campaign. Saying I played those sessions with other people would be like saying I play Oblivion with my good friend Xavier Box.
Eventually we managed to get my friend Levi in on our game. Levi, as you might recall, took the role of Warrior from my weary shoulders while I settled slowly into my new position as the party wizard. Here again, I start to bump up against the lingo of D&D. The party, as it's called, is normally composed of at least three (the VERY least), so Levi and I were more a dynamic duo, akin to Batman and Robin, though less ambiguously gay, which is to say not at all. Oh, and there were no spandex or hot pants either.
Our adventures, because of their unorthodox nature, were almost always doomed to failure. We were a wizard and a warrior often without any money or means to heal ourselves. This kept us from really taking the game all that seriously which in turn, lent a strange comic bent to our games. There were a few occasions where Levi and I would manage to gump our way through a dungeon, barely making skill checks and tripping over levers to secret areas. A perfect example of this was our fight with a stone Golem. Levi had been ineffectually hacking away at the blasted thing while it chased us around the room. While Levi kept it busy I ran around the room trying again and again to identify the various magical items we had found earlier. Finally, after Levi had been beaten unconscious I managed to identify a wand of stone to mud that reduced our hellish nightmare to a janitorial task.
We were more than just unprepared for our encounters, we were oblivious to the deeper mechanics of the game. We never spent time looking at ways to optimize our characters, nor did we really think about what skills or spells really fit the situation. For the most part our selected feats and abilities had one thing in common; they sounded totally awesome. We may not have known what the hell we were doing, but we sure as shit looked great attempting it.
Unfortunately, Levi wasn't always able to make our game sessions and Kyle had a knack for losing our character sheets from time to time. We had no battlemat, and so relied on Kyle's sometimes vague descriptions of the rooms we entered. I seem to recall there was dense fog almost everywhere we went, which I think was Kyle's way of keeping us from questioning the ever changing dimensions of the dungeons we fought through.
It wasn't long, maybe six months before our game sessions petered out completely. Levi and I didn't play D&D again for a long time. It wasn't because we didn't want to, we just could not find any way to get our games to conform to a set schedule. We were kids after all. Our parents schedules were our schedules and they had precious little time for rolling dice to hit make believe monsters. At least they didn't think we were some kind of cult.
Then in high school I was invited to a couple games by a friend. The people running the game were in their twenties, making them instantly cool in my puny mind. I dusted off my dice and went to the group expecting the same kind of comic mischief and complete obliteration I'd been so fond of in my first games. There would be none of that here, well at least not intentionally.
The guy who worked up this campaign set us up with god-like characters of such high level and skill that it took each of us over an hour to pick our feats. Again, I was a wizard, although instead of a wizard with holes in his sandals, a broken staff and dollar store quality spell components, I was the single gleaming mold from which all other spellcasters were made. I was the great god of spellcasters, able to destroy entire armies with a tweak of my nose.
I shouldn't really call it a campaign, it was really just a giant dungeon crawl meant to toady to the players so we'd let him run the games from then on. He allowed us ridiculous leeway in gathering our equipment and especially my spells. I had six pages of spells at my disposal, many of which I'd never even heard of. But because I didn't know any better, I jus twent with it. Hey it'll be cool to feel so powerful for once.
The game opened on a vast open plain with a looming evil fortress jutting out from it's center. Our band of demi-gods stood before the plain, gazing out over a vast army of goblins and orcs. The dungeon master had crafted this entire area and built a complex map for the interior of the castle, taking cues and bits of architecture from Gothic cathedrals and real medieval keeps. He sat there beaming over his painstakingly researched, carefully crafted dungeon while we fought through countless hordes of baddies outside. Every blow we struck killed twenty, thirty of the enemy and still they came.
It was about this time that I, floating over the battle like some deadly icon, had an idea. Looking through my spelbook I came across a spell called Dig. After consulting with the DM and the other players, it was decided that with it I could bury at least a good quarter of the orcish horde with it. "Sounds good to me," I thought and I let loose my furious diggy doom. Having cast the spell, we set about calculating the area and depth of this magic hole. As our DM checked some numbers we saw his face go pale. The god characters he'd given us in his bid for favor had backfired on him.
He looked up from his screen, a single tear running down his acned face. My dig spell had become so powerful that I had buried not only the entire army, but demolished the castle like toddler in Lego Land. All his hard work, weeks of building every corridor and trap for maximum entertainment value, and the newest player had buried it all under sixty feet of dead orcs and rubble. I was never invited back.
Coming in part 3... The second drought, college attempts, and I come home to play...
