Today I went to a birthday party for someone who has been dead for nine years. It was a pretty good party, and I think everyone (else) had a good time. Me, I had a minor (and I think pretty well hidden) freak out, and spent most of my time feeling sorry for myself.
I hate being crazy.
Lake Geneva Games hosted a “Gary Day” today, to celebrate Gary Gygax’s birthday. Thursday is always board game day at LGG, so there are usually people anyway, but today was more crowded than usual. I came in, said hello to friends in the retail area, said hello to friends in the north room, wandered into the south room and found that it had been completely taken over by Ernie Gygax and ten or twelve people playing AD&D 1st Ed in Ernie’s legendary Hobby Shop Dungeon.
Ernie has been my friend pretty much from the day I met him in 2003, when my office got moved into the building where he already worked. He has been running the HSD at conventions for several years, and I have always wanted to sit in on a session, but have never managed to make the connection. And here was Ernie telling me they were going to need a new character in a few minutes, and the chair at his left hand was open, and I was welcome to sit in if I wanted to. I agreed and took my seat; Ernie handed me a character sheet and said, “It’s all filled out, just roll the hit points and fill out the spell list.” And reality, which has been fraying around me lately anyway, started to tear.
I have never gotten along with the D&D magic system, for many reasons. The details don’t matter. What does matter is that something I had been wanting to do for several years, and was close enough to touch, had just landed on top of one of my crazy buttons.
I hate being crazy.
Usually when this kind of thing happens, I need to get away for half an hour or so, get my head into the proper survivalist mode, and then come back and get the job done. Except… This wasn’t something I HAD to do, this was something that I was supposed to enjoy, something that I had been looking forward to for YEARS, and I didn’t HAVE half an hour to walk away, I had to get the job done and be functional in about five minutes.
And then another friend came in from the other room and said that they had a spot open in a game I had asked about a few minutes earlier when I was still sane, and I mumbled something along the lines of, “I can’t do this now,” and I got up and left.
The other game was a brand new, complex board game from a family of games that I enjoy but usually don’t figure out until the second run through. This time I didn’t even try, just made random choices and muddled through. I learned a few things, came in dead last. But the company was good, and I don’t think my companions had an idea of how much pain I was in.
I REALLY hate being crazy.
Uncle Hyena
Well, why? What happened? What was the crazy button? Was it just the bad luck of getting to play a magic user within a D&D (“Vancian”) rules-set?
If there were an easy answer to that, I might have included it in the original post, but it goes something like this…
First of all, a description of my difficulties with the Vancian magic system: http://uncle-gnoll.livejournal.com/4703.html
Now, having gone through that… I have messed around with D&D a great deal over the years; I own a copy of every version of the rules except 4E, and have spent a fair amount of time with them. But my time actually playing D&D was all in the late ’70s, before AD&D even came out, and I have actually played AD&D ONCE, as a pre-gen fighter, in the last decade. So even though I had made peace with Vancian magic conceptually, I had never played it; my magic users back in the day had been home ruled points based.
So there I was, having to create a spell book from a spell list I hadn’t looked at in about 20 years, and THEN I had to create a list of active spells with no idea of what was going on in the adventure. So I had to make a large number of almost completely random decisions in almost no time. My brain doesn’t DO random; if you ask me to name a number between 1 and 10, I will look at you blankly. If you push me… I don’t know; no one ever has, and at that moment I certainly wasn’t going to push myself. So I got up and walked away.
No, it doesn’t really make sense. That’s why it’s called crazy.