That Which Endures

I started playing RPGs in my sophomore year in high school. Two buddies, who were and are, my two closest friends (more like brothers really) had tried to get me to play D&D for a long while but, because of my rather strict religious upbringing, the idea of magic, swords, and sorcery caused me not a little trepidation. Besides, I was a hard-core sci-fi fan, and unicorns and faeries seemed passé. The three of us would hang out, but I resisted their attempts to make a dungeon-crawler out of me.

Then, during lunch at our high school’s cafeteria one day, my buddies were working on their “Traveler” campaign. I looked down at the already use-worn game-book on the cafeteria table and saw pictures of various weapons on the pages. Swords were one thing, but guns (the greatest invention ever!) were another. “That looks like a Walther PPK” I said, pointing down at drawing of ‘body pistol,’ as it was known in the game. Reading the description of the body pistol out-loud, one of my friends saw that the body pistol was indeed based upon the PPK. A sci-fi roll playing game with weapons that were at least partially based on reality got my attention. Sci-fi and guns: my favorite combo. I was hooked.

I rolled up my first RPG character a few days later. His name was Logan (yes I ripped it off from the X-Men.) and he got vaporized by a force field in his first adventure, but it was an adventure. I had always been imaginative, perhaps even over imaginative, and I now saw a vehicle for focusing that imagination, and for feeding it. From there, I went on to the old Marvel Comics RPG, but it still took some time to get me into D&D. I did finally embrace D&D, and tried everything from “Twilight 2000” to “Toon.”


However, the games were not as important as the people I gamed with. I have been blessed with friends who were imaginative, creative, and perhaps more loyal than I deserve. We played dozens of games over the years, most were abandoned after a few sessions, some we played for years, and some we still play to this day, but it was the friendships that remained, and it was what I treasure the most. Over time, adult responsibilities and distance came to separate us, but we stayed in touch. There were gaps in communication at times, but we always managed bridge those gaps.

Some people tend to get wrapped up in the minutia of rules, and the idea of winning their RPG of choice (can you really win an RPG?) and forget that the whole idea is getting together with friends, bouncing dice, consuming copious amounts of junk food and sugary beverages, and having fun. Gamers (and by gamers I mean dice bouncing, character rolling, hit-point counting role playing gamers, not the guys with an X-box controller permanently attached to their hands) share a camaraderie; a camaraderie based on a love a hobby that most people find rather odd or even frightening.

In the case of me and my gaming buddies, (The Foaming Flagons) The camaraderie I speak of wasn’t the only thing that made us so close, but it did give us something that helped us define our friendship for the outside world. Let me be clear, there is much more that binds us than just our mutual love of gaming, but our shared hobby gave us a way to express some of the commonalities that we shared as people: creativity, intelligence and, above all, imagination.

I have three brothers by birth, and I love them wholeheartedly, but I chose the members of the Foaming Flagons to be my friends, and they chose me. That is what I think of when I see gaming dice, a stack of game books, or some yellow-with-age character sheets: friendship: simple, old fashioned, precious beyond words, friendship. Various games have come and gone, I have had several jobs and moved many times over the years, and times have, of course, changed. It is friendship that has really mattered. It is friendship has endured.