And so it comes to an end. Weeks of bloody and humiliating combat culminating in this, the final round. Much like actual war, this has been a painful and harrowing experience, fought for dubious purposes and to uncertain ends. Unlike actual war, no one gets killed and bystanders are rarely bombed. But like war, it is not without moments surreal and grim humor.
The true dork nature has many aspects. Ineptness, lack of social graces, monomania, unjustified arrogance, obsessive pursuit of minutia, vainglory, well-timed bad luck, and fear are the names we give them. No dorkish pursuit affords so many opportunities to indulge in so many of these facets of the dork nature as role playing games. And so I return to the rpg for the final round with two soul-searing tales of role playing madness.
[See the earlier rounds here and here. ]
Blackballed by God
Those who have been following this competition closely will remember my nemesis the fundamentalist Bill. This is the story of why he was my nemesis.
In the dark days at the end of the Carter administration, I was a young boy of eleven years. I had finished with cub scouts and webelos, and had moved on to the big leagues, the Boy Scouts. I went on camp outs, learned to make fire by rubbing matches together, and observed some of the older scouts playing a mysterious game late at night. That game was Dungeons and Dragons. My dork mind was afire with the concept. You could be a wizard, or knight, or elf! How fricken’ cool is that? Of course, I was as low on the dork feeding chain as you can be and still live. I didn’t know how to play the game, had no one to play it with, and didn’t even have the rule books. I burned to play. I found out that my best friend in the whole world, Jeff, (now a rocket scientist at NASA) had a rule book. And was playing with some other kids – some I knew, some I didn’t.
Jeff was a peculiar kid – and kept his friends strictly sorted by venue. There were church friends, school friends, camp friends and as far as he was concerned, there was no need for friends in one set to even know of the existence of the others. As we moved toward junior high, this segregation began to break down. I met Rance in art class in the seventh grade, and we were shocked to discover that we had both known Jeff since we were three – but had never heard of each other since we went to different elementary schools. Similarly, I met my future nemesis for the first time in Boy Scouts. Future Fundamentalist Asshole Bill was a long time friend of Jeff (FoJ) from church – and the troop I had joined was sponsored by Bill and Jeff’s Methodist church. (I was there because it met on my mom’s night off.)
Despite the fact that our group of friends was growing tighter as we all met in the great melting pot of Medina Junior High, and despite the fact that we were all interested in this magical game, somehow I remained on the outside. I never found out about when they were playing until afterwards. My inquiries received vague and increasingly strained excuses and evasions.
So, I convinced my mom to buy me the rule books. I studied them. Well, damn near memorized them. I made characters. Designed worlds. But I was excluded from the only game I new of. I would occasionally catch them talking about their campaign, and there’d be an embarrassed silence when they noticed me.
What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t know until my Junior year, was that Bill was plotting against me in secret. Whenever someone brought up the subject of my joining the game, Bill would blackball me. He’d say that I wasn’t right for the game, that I’d mess it up, or any number of excuses. And the rest would went along, since Bill seemed so committed to the idea of keeping me out.
Meanwhile, to my face, Bill was he soul of amity and comradeship. While I trusted him, asked him to speak for me so that I could gain entry to the forbidden garden, he jealously kept me out because he believed I was a dire threat to his friendship with Jeff. For two years while we went on campouts, school activities and even when he invited me over to his house, he kept me out of the game.
In my dorkish lack of insight into interpersonal relationships, I was blind to what was happening right in front of my nose. I was rejected even by my friends from the one thing in the world that I most wanted.
Ten-Second Ted
Years later, I had eventually worn down the resistance of the others, and was admitted to the game. We gathered in Jeff’s basement and geeked out on Mountain Dew, Cheetos and D&D. There was one other group of D&D players at our school, people we knew and liked. Some of them were even in our boy scout troop, but somehow we never played D&D together. One member of the other group decided that time had come for a D&D tournament, to decide who was the best of the best.
This tournament was simple in outline. Every player would receive a large amount of gold pieces and experience points with which to create and equip their entry. Let your imagination run wild, subject only to the basic rules of character creation. Also, every player would get several random magical items – and if you received something that was completely unusable by your character due to your choice of character class, you could roll again for a different magical item. Everyone was to contribute ten dollars for the winner-take-all prize.
I labored for almost a month preparing for the tournament. I considered and discarded hundreds of different ways of spending those experience points. Fighter/Mage? Assassin/Illusionist? Straight-up Paladin? Druid? Elf, Dwarf or Hobbit? I ignored sleep, schoolwork and meals as I pored over the manuals looking for the perfect combination, and for loopholes to exploit. I pondered what equipment to take. I added and crossed off items from my panoply, honing and perfecting the list. Can’t take too much, or you’ll be too slow. Do I get a pack horse? Hirelings? What kind of armor, what weapons to take? Will I need rations?
Finally, I settled on a stealth approach. A human illusionist-assassin. A couple levels of Illusionist for some useful concealing spells, and all the rest on assassin – because a simple dice roll can kill even the most powerful character, and if I botched it, my stealthiness would allow me to beat a quick retreat. Sneakiness was to be the order of the day.
Once everyone had created their entry, and tossed ten dollars into the pot, we were ready to go. Everyone materialized in a giant hall. I had my plan of action set – immediately run for the nearest exit and begin my hunt. We rolled for initiative, and I would be going third! Excellent! Maybe I could even get in a hit before I split.
The Steve N. went first. He disappeared. Ah! somebody thinking like me – I’ll have to be wary of him. Then Thad was up. A donkey over toward the side of the hall sprouted a five foot long rod on its back. From the rod’s tip shot immense balls of magical fire. Lots of them, right into the center of the rest of us. The DM, Brian, called out, “everyone save vs. magic.” I missed my roll. I was hit by three different fireballs. I took seventy points of damage. I was crispy before I could even move.
Ten seconds into the tournament and months of labor was wasted, along with my ten bucks. An Illusionist/Assassin has about the lowest average hit points (ability to take damage) of any possible character class except for a pure mage. And I hadn’t rolled well. The only ones who survived that initial holocaust were a couple fighters and one cleric. Who were all killed the next round by the invisible mage behind the donkey. Who was eventually killed by the Assassin who disappeared. The final battle apparently took seven hours, but I was long gone by then, having left with my tail between my legs shortly after having been carbonized.
[wik]
Buckethead has spoken; Johno must now rebut. The war of ages careens toward its grim end. This is our Pelennor Fields, our forest moon of Endor. Our Aigincourt, our Yorktown, our Flanders, our Carthage, our Waterloo.
Two dorks dug into their metaphorical trenches. Two dorks, exhausted, dirty, and suffering from encroaching swamp-ass. Enervated, disheartened, and completely out of ammo they hunker in the rain, scrabbling in the mud for sharp rocks to hurl at the enemy in lieu of the lethal measures that so far failed to strike true. Everyone else went home for supper long since; they remain, though whether out of dedication, petulance, or sheer bloody-mindedness it is hard to tell. Two dorks, hands red and chapped from slap-fighting and bleeding from innumerable paper cuts (those rule books, you know!), panting toward the finish.
Hopefully I will finish my final tale of dorkdom sometime early tomorrow morning for you to enjoy. In the meantime, I will repeat here what I told Buckethead at the end of last round: "Bring that weak shit again and I will beat you so hard you'll be crapping twenty-sided dice for a week."
Stay tuned to see if my threat of dodecahedral excrementia comes to pass.
Pass. Get it? "Pass?"
[alsø wik] Having used all my good gaming ammo on prior rounds, I am left with nothing in that genre except dull and pathetic little vignettes which would gain me nothing to tell here. Buckethead has agreed that I don't have to parry with gaming stories, and to be perfectly honest I have already shared my best dork-in-groups stories (viz. Penguin Patrol and Space Camp, and I suppose my Magical Mystery Tour of England would qualify). The Space Camp story was my nuclear option; I needed it just to stay alive to get this far, having also used up a lot of ammo putting GeekLethal down. So, in a final attempt to "win" this competetion, I need to fechez le vache, load up the catapult with whatever will fit, and fling it in the direction of my elderberrically paternoscented opponent.
Buckethead wrote,
The true dork nature has many aspects. Ineptness, lack of social graces, monomania, unjustified arrogance, obsessive pursuit of minutia, vainglory, well-timed bad luck, and fear are the names we give them.
In this, he is dead right. However, he is wrong that role playing games in and of themselves are where dorkiness achieves its apex. I would argue that truly dorky behavior - ur-dorkiness - is carried out in public, outside of the circle of your dork friends, as a result of striving for greatness and failing thanks to the staggering limitations you didn't even know you had. With that counter-argument in mind, I offer the following.
If You Want To See Me Pull It Out, Just Wear Your Cub Scout Suit With The Butt Cut Out (with apologies to Mr. Chuck E. Weiss)
I wasn't always the snazzy dresser I am now. Today, for example, I'm sporting charcoal grey Italian wool slacks with a richly colored red shirt and a dark tie with red and grey stripes (and blue and bronze and black and brown) that is juuust this side of ugly. My hoofs sport Italian leather monkstraps. It might sound fey and overdone on the page, but people, I gotta tell you... I look good today. Not GQ good (too broke for that!), but good. I've come far.
For years - in fact until I was well into my twenties, I dressed like a colorblind retard. This in itself is not so remarkable, and many potential voters will already be scrolling to the end to cast their votes for Buckethead. Not so fast. What makes this saga dork-tragic is the inordinate pride I took in trying very hard to dress in a clever, cool, and generally awesome way for much longer than common sense and abundant evidence to the contrary would suggest - all the way through college, in fact.
In a previous round, I alluded to some of the various wardrobian missteps that mar my personal past. In and of themselves, they are not so bad. Plenty of people have agonized over what to wear only to make bad decisions. But I remind you of these incidents here to set the table for a rich tale or two about managing to publicly, even enthusiastically make a big dork of myself thanks to what I was wearing, once over a period of years.
Scene The First: Crass Times At Ridgemont High
The year: 1988. George Bush was challenging Michael Dukakis for the Presidency. Me, I was in the ninth grade and my nascent political views were shaped entirely by Time Magazine and Bloom County, both of which I read religiously. God, I loved Bloom County. I used to read Bloom County compilation books in the lunchroom and laugh out loud at the timely antics of Portnoy, Milo, Steve Dallas and that crazy, lovable lug Opus. Sometimes people would ask me what my problem was, at which time I shut up. Other times, they would ask me what was so funny, at which time I showed them a couple strips and then they shut up and went away.
At some point during Reagan's second term, I had obtained a t-shirt with a picture of the Bloom County character Bill The Cat, an American flag, and a slogan that read, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Bill The Cat!" I treasured this shirt dearly. By the time the '88 elections rolled around, it had seen better days. It was now a size or three too small, the fabric had worn thin (did my nipples show?), the graphic was starting to wear off, and since it was white my 30-year-old mind is sure that there must have been visible pit and food stains. Nevertheless, with this clever garment I was determined to make my wit and savvy known to all when Election Day rolled around.
On the appointed November day, I crammed my pudge into the prized shirt and set out for school. All day, I made a point of walking around with my chest out, saying to teachers and students, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Bill The Cat!," assuming that since most of the teachers and Seniors would be voting, this would go over as a trenchant yet wacky commentary on the ludicrousness of our modern American political system. To my great consternation, nobody seemed to think this was half as funny as I did, and I in fact got a lot of perplexed and irritated responses. Never one to let a good joke die young, I persisted. Toward the end of the day, I did the whole routine for my friend Kevin and, trying to stay cool about my incredible sense of topical humor, let it drop that, yeah, I'm wearing this shirt because it's election day and I think it's a riot. Don't blame me!I voted for Bill The Cat! Kevin gave me a... look... and changed the subject.
Later that afternoon I got home from school eager to spring my jollies on the easiest of audiences, my parents. I set it up by 'casually' asking my dad who he'd voted for. He paused, cocked his head, and said "John, the election's next week."
Scene The Second: "False Consciousness, Punk Mock, and the Semiotics of Green Tape: Johno's College Years, 1992-1996."
Lest you think the Bill The Cat incident was my nadir as fashion plate I hasten to assure you that my aggressive wrongheadedness continued on into college. Toward the end of high school I grew my hair into a mullet and shellacked the top down good with generous squirts of "The Dry Look" hairspray. It was only halfway through my freshman year at college that I came to understand that this hairstyle, which was de rigeur where I grew up, was considered in college an act of tonsorial gaucherie. Clearly, if I was to become a Kool Kollege Kat I was going to have to make some big changes.
I first compensated by clipping the back and growing all my hair out into a sort of helmet-mushroom-shag shape that became greasy about an hour after washing and which absorbed ambient static electricy at a furious clip.
I then made some changes in the way I dressed. Grunge was big then, and indie/skate punk was making a big resurgence on college campuses. Out went my treasured university sweatshirts, acid-washed jeans and white K-Swiss. In came very baggy jeans, gigantic t-shirts, several red plaid flannel shirts, a leather biker jacket, a pair of black 10-eyelet Doc Martens, and a baseball cap from the Alien Workshop skate company. The plastic size tab thingy at the back of the cap quickly broke: I repaired it with a few turns of green electrical tape. I insisted on always wearing the hat backwards in the theory that wearing caps the right way around brought the hick-ness latent in my facial structure right to the surface, so the whimsical accent of green tape was ever-present in the middle of my forehead.
All these efforts, plus a summer spent wrangling 300-lb railroad ties, combined with the midnight pizzas of the mythic "freshman fifteen," transformed my appearance from "pudgy high school dork" to "hulking punk rock fashion plate." My metamorphosis was complete! Goodbye small town, hello college cool! Dork no more! I was most pleased.
The cap became my especial friend after I tried to change my haircut again. A girl in my dorm had cut my hair at the end of my freshman year into a sort of skater-boy shag that made me look even younger than I was but was, it was generally agreed, pretty darned cute. That summer, I mentioned to a (former) friend of mine that my hair wanted cutting, and she volunteered to do it, assuring me that she had cut plenty of hair. Did I mention that this person was later revealed to be an actual for-real pathological liar? My first sign that things would not go well was when she made her first cut and said "oops." My sign that I should have heeded the first sign came when I felt the cold steel of scissors against my skin as she cut a line all the way across the back of my head down to the bare scalp. My stylist/liar paused, took a deep breath, and in a more definitive tone said again, "Oops."
Rather than do the smart thing and go to a professional to salvage what remained of my crop of hair, I chose to wear my Alien Workshop cap backwards every single day for one year. I didn't cut my hair once in the entire time. Meanwhile, I wore my updated cool wardrobe religiously, joined a punk band, wrote the music column for the school paper, and generally considered myself quite the Big Man On Campus In A Punk Rock And Certainly Cool As Hell Way. I was in my element! I was awesome! Look at this jacket! These boots! This hat! Punk Fucking Rock, Baby!
It was in my senior year that a new term was introduced into my vocabulary: "The Uniform." "The Uniform" came up one day when most of my clothes were dirty and I was late for class. I picked out some random items from the back of the closet, threw them on, put a hat over my dirty hair, and went out the door. Later, at lunch, someone commented to me that today was the first time in a while that they'd seen me wear the uniform. The what? "The Uniform. Jeans, red flannel, giant t-shirt, Docs, and that gross hat with the green tape on it. What you're wearing. Everyone always called that 'The Johno Uniform.' Why'd you used to do that, anyway?"
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