dungeons and dragons

 A wholly uninspired title, I'm aware--but it's really the only thing that encompasses what I'm talking about, and it's eight PM, and I want to get three things done before I go to bed and go back to school tomorrow because it's going to be a late night tomorrow; it's donkey basketball and I will be in concessions. That same place I was always relegated to as a student, because I was the only person who could make decent fucking change.

Dungeons and Dragons. 

I've been playing DnD for five years now? Before then all I knew about it was that my best friend's boyfriend played it a lot. When I was in college, my library coworker approached me with an idea to play a "library DnD" game. Her husband would DM, and everyone who played would work at the library. Later, several of those other people dropped out, more people were added (including my old psychology professor at said college, which was mildly weird at first), and we have gone through one full campaign. 

My first character was a bard. Later on, he took a handful of levels in barbarian, because he was kind of low-key already the backup tank, and it is way more useful than one would think to be able to dimension door in the middle of things and then rage as a bonus action. Especially if you're fighting people who are just hacking and slashing away at you. But Kosef, my bard, he was incredibly dumb. As is the same with writing, I didn't have a good handle on his character for a while. Once I had him though, he was fun. Got a full-on 55-song playlist for him. Five random songs taken from it: "Shut Me Up" by Mindless Self Indulgence, "Kill Everyone" by Hollywood Undead, "Ace of Spades" by Motorhead, "Rich Kids" by New Medicine, and "Novocaine" by Fall Out Boy. Dude was a former sailor, dumb as a box of rocks, had a dead mom but was like, OK with it, was in love with the party cleric but didn't know how to deal with like, real emotions? So he just held back and held back and held back and never got anywhere. I like to think that, after the events of the last session of his campaign, he went downhill. Probably had a couple of bastards of his own, drifted around, mercenary killing, probably? The party gave him his first family and when they don't need to be fighting together anymore? Man. 

My current character is a cleric. His name is Al (Alain, but nobody can pronounce it right so he goes by Al) and I dumped constitution for the character. Don't ask me why I only play male characters. I just like to. Anyway. In this campaign, the DM asked us to make college-age characters so Al is a fragile twenty-year-old whose mom is dead and he's not okay with that. Al songs tend to be more acoustic, indie songs about wanting to die ("Brave as a Noun" by AJJ, "I Can't Handle Change" by roar, "Aesthetic" by Panucci's Pizza, "Pineapple Boy" by Authentic Pines, and "Mononokay" by Sorority Noise). Kosef was stadium-tour, Al is open mic night. I did try my best to make the two of them deeply different. Al just wants to read books and learn and he's a nervous wreck and his mom is dead and he's convinced he'll be dead in the next three years and part of him kind of wants to be. Al, I did base off of one of my existing characters. He is essentially Allan from the Pentalogy of Hell. I have also turned Al into kind of a uh, fantasy version of a "chronically online 'revolutionary'" where he yells a lot about how bad the monarchy is but he can't really do anything. He's not even like, super good at healing? Bro's a knowledge cleric. His dump stat is con because he is a fragile being. He's depressed and has an eating disorder. All the female characters are deeply worried about him and that embarrasses the hell out of him. 

I'm going to have to leave this new campaign early. We're, more than likely, moving out of town in May or June. That'll be sad. Maybe Al can die. 

I am also DMing two campaigns for my creative writing classes. To be completely honest, I don't do a lot of planning? I just throw myself at it for forty minutes and it's pretty fun. 

The reason I'm thinking about this, really, is because while writing the next Aughts Boys book, the Benji book (not to be confused with the Benjamin book), they are some DnD nerds. As this takes place in 2001, I've done some light research into older editions of DnD. Not a ton, because it's a first draft, but it's vaguely intriguing. Would like to learn more at some point. It's always really fun to try and figure out what my characters would play in a DnD campaign. I kind of did so for the POH "apocalypse crew"--aforementioned Allan, of course, is a knowledge cleric, Sam would be a warlock, Goliath is a barbarian if I've ever seen one, Cassandra is a wizard, and Juliet, as stated by Sam in-book, is a fucking paladin. Other crews; Division 80 crew + Michael: Michael's a barbarian, Casey's a rogue, Edie is probably a bard???, Jeremy is... maybe a warlock also, actually. Jeremy stumps me. I dunno. It's fun. I'm going to miss playing after this spring.