Chapter 1 1998
“As the wooden door creaks open, you catch a whiff of sulfur. The dank cavern opens before you,” Sidney flipped a lock of long, blond hair out of his eyes. “A dragon is sleeping in the corner of the large cavern.”
A dragon? C’mon! We were only first level characters, barely out of fictitious diapers. We didn’t have a hamster’s chance in a barbecue of getting out of this alive, not against a dragon. There was no balance in his adventures. I loved this game, but as usual, Sid had turned it into us versus him, Dungeon Master against dungeon explorers. Wasn’t it bad enough we weren’t cool enough to have dates?
My character was a first-level paladin, Lord Searail. He should have been able to fight a dragon, but he was inexperienced and new. I already knew what I was going to do.
“Lord Searail is backing out of the cavern slowly and shutting the door before this big ass dragon fries him.”
Cece looked over her paper and nodded at me. “Me too.” She had a character that was an elven thief. If anyone at the table had a chance of backing out of the cavern, it was her.
Guy whispered to himself, “A friggin’ dragon.” He slumped in his chair and propped his head up with his elbow on the table.
Sid was squatted behind his DM screen, rolling dice and not telling us why.
“Are you guys afraid? Well, to leave the cavern quietly, you’re going to have to roll percentile. 01 or 02.” Percentile dice. I picked them up, but this was not fair. We had to roll a 01 or 02 on percentile dice to get out of the room? A two percent chance? He had to be kidding. No bonus at all. Bonuses on dice rolls were something that we were almost never allowed. It was as if Sid was trying to kill our characters most times.
I rolled them, and they clicked on the table before settling on a 76. Not even close.
This whole thing was just like him: we would spend hours making up characters and he would put them in mortal danger right away, but we kept coming back to game at his house, like dorkwads. Dungeons and Dragons took imagination. I loved it because making things up was the most cool part of the game. I loved being a dice jockey. Gaming could be so cool. You could have all of the rule books and dice in the world, and between all of us, we did. The tool you needed was the thing between your ears, but it was hard to play when all we could imagine were our characters, our brand-new characters, charbroiled by a dragon, turned into a chunky salsa or a fine red mist.
And of course, at the head of the travesty, King Sidney Gregory Hammer. He was standing behind his home made table screen, leaned over the hard, oak table with a look of glee. Glee!
We spent most of our summers in the same spot, doing the same thing. It had stopped being fun a long time ago. Just like the summers were hot and never seemed to get less hot, these games were boring and never seemed to get less boring.
I grabbed my colored percentile dice off the table and flicked them into the air to land on the table. I set them on the table and flicked them back into the pile of dice with my thumb, partly because the sound of the clattering on the table sounded sweet to me, and partly because I knew how pissed off Sid got when I did it. One night, I was being pretty obnoxious with a pile of dice while Sid was trying to describe a town on his map. He kept telling me to stop, but I didn’t. He ended up screaming at me for the next half an hour. “I can’t concentrate when you’re making all that racket, you simpleton!” he’d said that night.
Racket.
Sometimes he sounded like his Mom.
It made me want to do it more often, like right then.
