(people cheering)
- So I've got a bit of a reputation
among our group of friends as a gamesman.
- You're a bit of a gamesman for sure.
- Yeah.
- A bit of a metagamer.
- I make characters that make game masters
for table top role playing, RPGs sad.
- Yeah, you want to make them sad and mad
and feel like they've done a bad job.
- Yeah, I want to make the game easy
for myself and do cool things
(mechanical whirring)
with bending the rules
to my whim, of course.
But it wasn't always that way.
- Are we going back in history?
- We're gonna take a
little historical dive.
(peaceful harp music)
I want to tell you
about the first ever D&D character I made.
- Oh, boy!
- This was in middle school.
It was the first time I ever played D&D.
I was visiting my cousin
over summer vacation,
and he played D&D,
and I didn't know what
to expect, what to do,
so my cousin very generously
offered to help me make a character.
We random picked my character race.
I got wild elf.
We rolled my stats, random
rolled stats, and I rolled bad.
(people cheering)
- That's the problem
with random roll stats.
- I rolled really bad, I don't think.
I think my highest bonus
to any stat was plus one.
- Ew.
- And I had a fair amount of
zeros and minuses in there too.
And I didn't know,
I didn't know what like the
standard array of stats was.
I didn't know what the norm was.
I was just like, okay these are my stats?
And my cousin was like, yeah.
(giggles)
- There ya go, sorry bud.
- Yeah, so I made a druid, a
wild-elf druid named Laucian.
- Oh boy.
- Yeah.
- Was there a last name?
- Yeah, I believe it was
like Melodica or some--
- Laucian Melodica?
- Yeah, something like that.
So like, Elvor or something.
- Sure.
- Greenshins or whatever.
- Elvor Greenshins?
- Yes, something like that.
(giggles)
- I think my name was Laucian though.
I don't super remember
what the last name was,
that's not important.
- Okay.
- What's important is
my character was bad.
- (giggles) A bad dude
going on a bad adventure?
- Yeah, my alignment was true
neutral, just neutral neutral.
(laughs)
And so I came into school
with my new character.
Asked to join my friends adventure and
in trying to keep with
my character's alignment,
I just didn't participate
in a lot of the stuff
that my friends we're doing.
Like I remember being in
a tavern where we all were
and some guards came in
chasing someone up the stairs.
And all the other members of the party
went to see what was going
on, they ended up in a fight.
I was just chilling at the bar.
- You're like, no thanks.
- No, I'm good.
This is nothing to do
with animals and nature.
That's sort of what I'm about.
- Yeah.
- Basically all I wanted
to do with this character
was a mass sort of a collection,
a menagerie of animal companions.
So I started with an eagle but
I wanted an eagle and a wolf.
(howling)
- As you do.
- So my friend Mike, still
friends with him to this day.
He was our dungeon master,
He had built this
beautiful, fantastical world
for us to adventure in,
lots of warring factions.
I remember there were
these rangers in the forest
and they were having a big
fight with a war tribe of orcs.
- Sure.
- And our friends were all
getting mixed up in that.
And I was off in a cave
trying to befriend a wolf.
(giggles)
- So once again you're
just not, not involved.
(giggles)
- Like this is the first time
that I ever was able to
just do that in a game.
Like most games, there's a story
and you play through the story.
This was before your Skyrims and whatnot.
So if was my first time
dealing with an open world.
And all I wanted to do was pet the dog.
- Yeah, you can pet the dog in D&D--
- I just wanted to pet the dog.
I did a really bad job though.
The wolf almost killed me.
(laughing)
- And so you were alone dying--
- I was alone in a cave dying to a wolf
while my friends were having
an epic adventure in the woods.
I will say that though even
though my character was bad
and I was also bad.
- Yeah.
- I still have very fond
memories of that adventure.
My character was objectively weak
and there was a real sense of
danger to everything I did.
I don't know, it was my
first ever time playing
anything like that and it blew my mind.
It blew my mind that if I
didn't want to participate
in the adventure, I didn't have to.
- No one could make you do that.
- No one could make me.
It was much to the lament
of my fellow party members.
Since then I've made better characters
that actually learn the game
and I try to be a helpful party member.
But I'll always have a
special place in my heart
for my big dumb idiot who
just wanted to pet a wolf.
- You know, I think we can all
relate to that a little bit.
(ping)
