dailyeatings

“I’ve communicated our predicament to a few colleagues. I thought it might be a mistake to make hard plans until we’ve seen whatever we’re going to see tonight. Apparently there are a few serious adventurers in town right now, claiming to have just liberated some major trow haul from the ruins… Might be up for a little paid work.”

Derkhan looked up. Her face creased in distaste. She shrugged unhappily.

“I don’t trust them though. Thrill seekers. They court danger. And they’re quite unscrupulous grave robbers for the most part. Anything for gold and experience.”

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

Back in seventh grade, I was one of the Abstainers. I made a public and ostentatious show of not wanting to be involved in what was then the most important reputation-defining activity for anybody who wanted to be somebody in the Gifted Program clique: Dungeons and Dragons. Everybody was in on it. Bryan, the massively overcompensating, belligerent jock-wannabe did it. Ben, the hyperactive Todd MacFarlane groupie, did it. Several band people who I didn’t even know were in the Gifted program suddenly crawled out of the woodwork and would flash their character sheets during rehearsals. Girls who wanted to impress the dorky boys who played would feign interest and discuss the various merits of enchanted weapons with guys who couldn’t care less about girls, much less anything that didn’t have a bonus to hit and damage. Everywhere you turned, people would discuss the game, their characters, and more importantly, they would be discussing Grant.

You see, the game wasn’t really as much a game as it was a Cult Following. Nobody ever really played games. Sure, they had their character sheets and most had crazy backstories about how their massively-bosomed Amazon or their Conan-like fighter was the greatest warrior from a land not unlike our native Pinellas County, but I never once saw anybody whip out dice, a DM shield, or engage in any adventuring. Many hours were spent about how cool it would be were they actually to use their magical items, or about the possible outcomes of head-to-head character battles, but never did any actual gaming take place. Simply having a character sheet was the make-or-break qualification for Coolness. They were avatars of their owners, physical stand-ins for an abstract extension of the fragile middle school ego. More importantly, Grant was the only guy who could make them.

If you wanted a character sheet, you had to go to Grant. At lunch, Grant would be surrounded a throng of people, veteran hangers-on wanting upgrades on their characters, neophytes begging Grant to roll them characters, girls who wanted to be around Grant because of the audience he commanded, guys who wanted to be Grant and who wanted to skim off a little of his vibe. Grant was untouchably cool for a 12 year old. He told stories about how dangerously exciting smoking pot was. He hinted at sexual goings-on in his high-profile relationship with one of the most outrageous girls at school. He had tasted beer. He had access to cigarettes. He didn’t turn in his homework on time. He had a denim jacket. He knew how to play D&D. At the beginning of the fad, he spent the entire lunch period diligently rolling character stats for the small cadre of friends he had at all times. He would make character sheets for anybody who asked. As the trend spread, his loving audience grew in size, and he rolled fewer and fewer characters, spending more time impressing his growing fanclub with his adult tendencies, and less time actually doing D&D related stuff. Soon, he would make maybe only three characters a week. Character sheets became a commodity very much in demand, since they signified that you were somewhat important socially in Grant’s eyes, and that he saw fit to give you this personalized piece of paper with numbers scribbled on it. It didn’t matter if you knew a damned thing about D&D. If you had a character, you were cool. People who couldn’t get in on the action would sidle up to the elect in the lunch line and try to talk stats with them, hoping that if they could convince some of Grants lieutenants that they knew enough about D&D, they might be deemed worthy gaming companions and eventually let into the fold.

A number of us who had made names of ourselves as iconoclasts (Bill, myself, etc.) made it very clear that we wanted nothing to do with the dice-rolling madness. We were contrarians for the sake of being contrary, seeking to be different and unique doing exactly the opposite of what was expected socially. Sure, we bristled in the fact that by consciously defying the social order of things we became complete pariahs, but we remained convinced, in the way that only middle-schoolers can be, that we saw through their mindless trends and were thus above it all. Our lunch table group grew thinner by the day as more and more people flooded toward Grant’s end of the lunchroom. After a month or so, we moved up the table, closer to the center of mass, a little concession to prevent complete ostracism. After another month, word leaked out that Grant and his girlfriend were on the rocks, and that she had told all her friends exactly how puny his penis was. The nerd world was rocked to the core. Grant’s hegemony cracked. He got into yelling matches in the locker room after PE. He got suspended for some hush-hush reason. A few weeks later, people started moving away from his end of the table. By semester’s end, the D&D revolution was over. People would never speak of their involvement, and if asked whatever happened to their character sheet, the subject would be changed quickly. Grant transferred to another school. The Abstainers took quiet pride in that we never sold out to the peddlers of coolness. The school reverted back to more normal standards of elitism, like Bongo jeans and Hypercolor T-shirts.