As I was recently driving home to Ohio from the great city of Chicago, it occurred to me that traveling in Indiana reminded me a lot of playing Dungeons and Dragons. Mainly I felt like I was fighting some kind of horrible undead creature that was slowly draining my life away, which is a common complaint of driving through the “Crossroads of America.”* As fatigue further set in, I started to make jokes to myself about having to make a saving throw (which refers to rolling a set of dice to try and make a specific number, yet is entirely unlike gambling) to see if I’d make it out of the big nothing in one piece, and I started to think about my experiences as a role-playing gamer.

One of my greatest failures as a nerd (aside from some weird inability to do math in my head) is that I was never a competent gamer. Sure I, like so many other teenagers before me, always enjoyed the concept of playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons -- arguably the most popular RPG ("Role-Playing Game," for you people out there that were socially popular) to ever appear on the face of the earth -- but in practice, not only was my enthusiasm for naught, I was almost always a detriment to the game at large.

I could never figure out why either. It certainly couldn't have been a lack of knowledge of the rules or how to play -- I had spent countless hours and dollars buying books and supplemental materials, determined to become the best gamer that I could be. I pored over the books, reading and re-reading pages on character classes and weaponry, items and spells, learning the intricacies of things like Armor Class and saving throws… yet, when I got together with my gaming friends, disaster usually ensued on either a comedic or epic scale.

I tried to play the game by numbers, which may have ultimately been my downfall. Playing by numbers is easy to do in AD&D, because the whole gaming system is based on numbers, most of them generated by rolling the many kinds of dice you need to play. And oh, the dice… everything from the "regular" kind with six sides to three-sided, twelve-sided, and up to twenty-sided. All used to determine everything from the level of your character's attributes -- Strength, Wisdom, Intelligence, Dexterity, Charisma, and Constitution -- to combat and accomplishing actions like trying to run like hell when you're being chased by a creature that had just eaten your favorite sword. I assumed, you see, it made perfect sense that if you could master the numbers aspect of the game, you could achieve great success. Sound in theory, and easily applied when playing an RPG on a computer, but not so much when you're sitting at a card table in your friend's basement. At the table, the game is a living, breathing story, and it can twist and turn at the slightest provocation from the players or, more likely, at the hand of the guy in charge of running the game -- the Dungeon Master.

My group of fellows was fortunate enough to have among us a guy (my friend Mike) who was about as good a Dungeon Master as you could ask for: literate, creative, funny, well-versed in the rules, and not a completely vindictive bastard. On the flip side of the coin, it was the fact that he was so good at his job that brought out all the major flaws in my game. Since I was trying to play by working the numbers, I almost always played with a character type known as a Paladin. Historically, Paladins are holy warriors like the Knights Templar, and that's pretty much the same translation in the game: strong, armored warriors that have some priestly abilities, thanks to their devotion to a deity of their choosing. Frankly, if you're going to play by numbers, that's the way to go, because their abilities in the game are pretty unmatched by any other kind of character.

But being a Paladin comes with a price: they're always good, virtuous, devout, and lawful. Things that I, sheltered as I may have been at the time, had trouble identifying with. So situations like the following would enfold at the table…

It is a cold winter's night in Northeast Ohio. A group of us, Doug, Jon, Joey, myself, and Mike the Dungeon Master are gathered in Mike's basement, in the middle of an all-night game. Things have been off to a rocky start -- Doug has been trying to play as an Algonquin Indian (and Native American tribes don't really exist in the game) all night, and immediately annoyed us all with his obsessive detail in playing the character; Jon has been making us listen to The Beatles' Abbey Road repeatedly; Joey is in a bad mood; and my ability to stay in character and play as a Paladin is repeatedly coming into question. So in an effort to make us stop arguing with each other, Mike decides to have us come under attack by a band of evil, furry half-man/half-dog creatures. We fight them off, and some of the surviving enemy try to make an escape…

Me: Okay, we've got to go after them and kill the survivors.

Jon: (looking confused by this) Why, exactly?

Me: Because they'll come back with reinforcements!

Joey: Look, dipshit, you're playing a Paladin.

Me: So?

Joey: You're religious! You respect life! You don't just go and attack a bunch of things that are running away from you…

Me: Well, I'm a playing militaristic Paladin.

Joey: No, that's bullshit. That doesn't make sense at all.

Me: You're kidding, right? We're letting him play as an Algonquin Indian, but I can't be militaristic?

Doug: At least my guy's acting his part.

Jon: You don't just go killing guys without justification, man,! It's not how a lawfully good person behaves.

Me: But why would I let a bunch of bad guys get away?! That doesn't make sense at all!

Mike: Look, these guys are right… if you're going to play a Paladin like this, he's going to get stripped of some of his abilities for not being devout enough…

Me: Alright, look… he's having a crisis of faith, okay? Can we go kill the damn things now?

The night did not end well. Before the game was to end prematurely due to excessive in-fighting, my Paladin had been forced to remain at a local village, and I had to take over playing a different character. Joey's thief had been killed in battle as well, but at least we'd witness the spectacle of seeing a guy playing an Algonquin successfully roll an impossibly high number that let his character knock out a Lamia -- a creature with the body of a lion and the head and torso of a human -- with a haymaker punch. High fantasy, indeed.

So, as I was flying down I-65, somewhere in the middle of purgatory, I realized that “winning” at AD&D wasn’t really the point of the whole thing. You’re not playing against the other guys at the table; you’re supposed to be working with them,. Thusly, your character should be designed not to win things solo, but as a part of the team. And as every episode of The A-Team pointed out, the team’s always better off with a touch of character, because it makes the story you’re playing more entertaining. As much as I thought my buddy Doug was an idiot for trying to play that stupid Algonquin character that night, he was the guy at the table that “got it” the most, and it showed when his guy ended up being the most memorable part of the night. Playing dry, sterile characters that don’t fit your personality can turn what’s supposed to be fun trip into something like trying to drive across Indiana.

*I firmly believe it is called this because nobody with any sense actually stays there.