Games We Play

I’ve been playing role playing games for a long time. I started playing when I was around 12. My first character was Wilberd the Silent, a Gray Elf cleric/fighter/magic user/thief. He had stats that were, to quote my child “better stats than a lot of the dragons in the Monster Manual!” And “a better AC than TIAMAT!” (His AC was -4.) I loved Wilberd. I thought about him all the time—what he liked to do in his spare time (train), how he’d gotten so amazing (just born that way), and what he was going to do after he stopped adventuring (open a bookstore).

The thing is… I never actually played him, not in a D&D campaign at least. I was terrified that a DM would figure out I had engineered his stats (what? I remember rolling those 6s, so many 6s. Okay, maybe I doctored a few of them). I was also certain that in the first real adventure my DM would put a brain-eating worm in his head at the first door he listened at or otherwise do something to kill him or maim him or turn him into a slime mold.

The brain-eating worm was a legitimate fear. My first DM, the family friend who introduced me and my brother to D&D, hated that we listened at every door rather than just trying to open them. So she “solved” that problem by introducing brain worms. I still have flashbacks to D&D when I watch “The Wrath of Khan.”

But at 12 my main interest was in the world building. I loved creating the characters, and most of them had some type of flaw, even if just a 16 on one of their stats (who needs an 18 constitution, anyway?). I also liked drawing maps of the world and creating intricate dungeons with secret passages for the gelatinous cubes to block players’ egress and a mimic for every floor.

In college I experienced a truly devilish DM who first led all our pre-made characters into an acid trap (I learned what TPK meant). Then ripped up our character sheets. “They’re dead, you can’t use them anymore anyway.” The final blow to my participation was when he sent our second set of characters through a portal, ripped up the new character sheets and handed us brand new characters with a flourish. “You traveled through a portal that transformed you as you traveled to this new realm.”

I walked out. If I wanted to get railroaded I’d have bought train tickets.

Role playing games fell off my radar then. I had adulting to do. Getting a job, paying rent, feeding my pets all took priority. I didn’t start playing again until my child was in grade school when I connected with a group of parents who were interested in getting together during the school day to play D&D.

That DM was epic. He ran games with super elaborate miniature sets and theme music. He exhorted us to watch Critical Role and he wanted us to do voices and really get into our parts. I played a druid and then an artificer whose claim to fame was he made rocks make noise.

During the pandemic, I started playing regularly again. Every week a group of friends from college would get together online every week and play. We ran through the “Curse of Stradh,” and a few other campaigns. Eventually settled on Lancer which we’ve been playing for the last year and a half. I run a mech that specializes in putting its massive fists through walls and uses grappling hooks to manipulate the other (usually enemy) mechs on the map. My character is not very smart, but is a size 2 mech in a size 1 world, so I make it work.

My child decided we should play other role playing games as a family, too. So we have played games of D&D 5e, then Pathfinder, then GURPS, and the latest is White Box. Let me tell you, White Box is evil. We’ve had two PCs and two or three NPC party members die of poison. Basically poison in those early versions went like this:

1. fight the centipede
2. centipede bites you
3. fail your poison save
4. die

It was shocking the first couple times, but after a while we just had a couple of pre-rolled characters in the wings if we thought we were going to have to fight venomous creatures. The only reason my mage didn’t die in that campaign was that I became a master of run in, hit with my stick (only one spell—light), run away. White box doesn’t have attack of opportunity any more than it has slow poison.

But I no longer worry about whether my character will die. In the lancer campaign, I spent at least two sessions actively trying to kill my mech (as opposed to what usually happens where the dice are conspiring to kill me). And in White Box, I recognized that death was inevitable.

Poor Wilberd would be toast if I created him today. I just rolled new stats: 10, 13, 12, 7, 7, and 13. That’s significantly lower than his stats back in the day. But maybe that’s his story. How a painfully average elf turned into the powerhouse he was in my head.

What do you think? Did you create OP characters that you didn’t want to kill off only to switch to average characters that actively seek deadly situations? Or was that just me?