Saturday, December 25, 2010

We role-played Dungeons and Dragons when we were kids.

10:02 PM 12/25/10

When we were little, we played Dungeons and Dragons outdoors. My neighbor Jeremy, his little sister Billie, my brother John, and I all played together. It wasn't always all four of us.

We called it Dungeons and Dragons because it was a fantasy situation in a more primitive world with more primitive weapons - no guns, just swords and things like that, and magic, and there were monsters and dragons and evil creatures to fight.

Each of us had a role in the group.

Jeremy called himself the Weapons Expert. His skill was having a special weapon for every situation and knowing the right ones to use. He had a plastic He-Man sword. I don't recall all his other weapons and armor. But he was a fighter.

I was the Healer. I had a staff, which was actually a metal pole used to prop up the laundry line. (I once tried to use it for pole vaulting, but I couldn't get myself up very high off the ground.) I had a circle-shaped zipper bag with a strap, and in the bag I had magical healing items. There were lots of plastic jewels and marbles, bits of jewelry, feathers, miscellaneous objects, and other beautiful bright colored things. I wasn't a very strong fighter, so I was vulnerable to attack and had to call for help if anything was going on.

My brother John, if I recall correctly, was The Ninja. He was secretive, stealthy, skillful, and highly trained in advanced fighting. He was also the oldest. He had real Chinese throwing stars that he could throw at a target down in the basement. He knew how to climb over the side of the family room porch to get down to the basement porch. He had camouflage clothing. (I think we all had camo after a while, but I can't recall for sure if Jeremy and Billie had their own too.)

Billie was the youngest, and she was the Bondage Fetishist. No matter what was going on, it was likely that Billie would somehow end up getting kidnapped, and tied up, and would expect to be rescued. The Damsel in Distress. This was her favorite thing to play, and she was only about six years old at the time. She played this same thing over and over again. It kind of annoyed us sometimes. :) I'm not sure what her official title was, I can't recall. She was also The Copycat: If I had a particular toy, then she HAD to go out and buy that very same toy. I was irritated about it, but my mom said that she did it because she admired me. So it's possible that she was a Healer sometimes too, because I was. I don't remember. I think she might have been a fighter, too. She probably liked Wonder Woman, since Wonder Woman is all about ropes and being tied up and that kind of thing.

We didn't have another group to fight against, but whoever they were, they would have been The Bad Guys. But most of the time, our enemies were monsters. We sometimes fought dragons, or we hid from them if they were flying overhead. Airplanes were dragons. If an airplane flew over, it was a flying dragon and we would try to see what color it was. Black dragons were the strongest. Red dragons were less dangerous. Blue dragons were common, the weakest ones, but I don't recall for sure. (It didn't matter what color the plane really was. Somebody would 'declare' that the dragon was red, and we all agreed. Any changes or disagreements would have to be part of the plot. We tried not to step out of character too much, but we could say, 'I wanted it to be black. I have an idea for something I want us to do with a black dragon.' So we might settle the disagreement.) Some dragons were friendly. It might have landed in a nearby field, and we would have to go confront it, or avoid it. So we might have been more like hunters going after large animals as a group. But it didn't occur to us to kill the dragons and then eat them!

Other times there were supernatural monsters with magical powers. In our basement, there were Freakabomps. Freakabomps were created as kind of a cruel joke on Jeremy, but they continued to exist after the joke was over. I remember we were making fun of Jeremy because he said the word 'Bomp' instead of 'Bump.' It was just the way he talked. Then, the song 'Freakazoid' was on the radio (this was the 1980s), so we put these two things together and got Freakabomps. My brother and I told Jeremy that the Freakabomps lived in the basement. They lived in dark places, like The Grue in the Zork text adventure game.

We made masks out of construction paper, with ugly pig snout noses and horns on top of the head, and we put them on and tried to get Jeremy to come down to the basement so we could jump out and scare him. But he was already scared before he got all the way down the stairs, and he didn't want to walk down into our trap, in the dark basement with the lights off. He called our names, but nobody answered. He went back upstairs. And so I don't think he ever got bomped.

Afterwards, we were all scared of Freakabomps together, and it wasn't a joke on Jeremy anymore. When we played Freakabomps, we played on the same team, and we became more like The Ghostbusters, fighting against the basement monsters. Even though he knew it was just a mean joke that was played on him, Jeremy would still say that he was scared of the Freakabomps if we were going down to the basement. Once you've imagined them, they're hard to forget. A lot of things are like that!

I remembered all this while I was thinking about Pretending. I wanted to remember what kinds of things we pretended when we were playing as kids. Knowing what I know now, I could have more insight into how to make more interesting adventures and more complex plotlines. It could be more exciting and we wouldn't run out of ideas.

The comforting theme was that we were cooperating, working together for a purpose, working to do something, and taking care of each other, protecting and helping each other. That's why we did it.

1 comment:

John said...

WOW! I had forgotten nearly all of this!