Secret Origins

When I was nine years old, my parents purchased a game to enjoy with friends.  The game was called Dungeons & Dragons, and because of this purchase, I am a teacher today.

My parents are not 'normal people' as such.  My father is an old school nerd, one of the pioneers who helped create the image.  He was a radio man in the Navy, and after getting out went straight to work for IBM.  He wore polyester slacks, short sleeve button-up shirts and a pocket protector, which he wore without a trace of irony, for the purpose of protecting his pocket.  He worked on computers before people had computers.  This was before they were personal, and were still massive slabs of metal and moving parts.  I have always suspected that the reason computers lack emotions is not a limitation of the hardware, but is instead due to the fact that my father helped build them.

My mother on the other hand was an artist.  That is all I have to say on the subject.

Oh, and they both read.  A lot.  Like, a lot, a lot.  Mostly science fiction and fantasy, respectively.

As a result, my siblings and I were exposed to a broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes, and an eclectic array of interests.  They were the kind of people who were always looking to try new intellectual pursuits.

So when my dad heard about a new game that was based on discussion and ideas (and math,) rather than moving pieces around a board based on random chance, they both jumped at it.

They purchased the game (the 1981 Basic Set in the purple box with the sweet Erol Otus cover,) and brought it home to play a game with my aunt & uncle.

They did not enjoy it.  It was boring, and too nerdy for most of them.  My mother hated all the math and statistics, my father thought the fantasy aspect was too silly, and my aunt and uncle (who were total straights,) found the whole thing way too geeky for them.

But that box.

They left that box lying on the dining room table.  I found it the next morning as fate had ordained.  The box called to me, with its tantalizing image of the sorceress and warrior locked in mortal combat with a fearsome dragon.

I asked my mom what it was and she explained, "It's a game for grownups.  It's got a lot of reading and imagining things in your head.  It's kind of boring.  Oh, and there's all these funny-looking dice you have to use.  You wouldn't like it."

And that was it.  I don't need to continue the story do I?  I absorbed it like Crusher Creel and it consumed my life.  I found other kids to play with and my life as a Dungeon Master began.

I played whenever I could, and designing dungeons on graph paper replaced such mundane pastimes as  homework and studying (to be fair, there is no alternate timeline where I wasn't a poor student in school, I was that sad combination of smart and stubborn that guarantees F's.)

But it also made me read voraciously.  Not just rulebooks (which I could only rarely afford to add to my collection,) but any fantasy fiction I could get my hands on.  Tolkien, Howard, Anthony, King, Eddings, anyone I could find I consumed.

As a DM, you don't just play the game, you create new realities to share with others.  This, more than anything, is what got me interested in writing.  And to make my stories ring true, I learned how to research my subjects.

D&D was a gateway to other role playing games, which followed in the mother game's wake, and those new games led to new genres of fiction.  Call of Cthulhu (the game,) led me to H.P. Lovecraft, and through the gentleman of Providence I was introduced to the whole circle of mythos writers.

It was in no small part a desire to share ideas that got me interested in teaching.  I figured out in high school I was good at communicating ideas to others, and I didn't spend any time wondering what I would do with my life.

And now I teach high school, and that is because of D&D.  I may not roll D20's when I'm in front of the class, but I learned how to communicate to a group by running bands of adventurers in quests to slay dragons.  At home, I use those skills to teach my own children, showing them all about the world around them with a sense of wonder and revelation I developed describing ten-foot-wide corridors winding through sinister dungeons.  All because my parents forgot to put away the box of D&D some thirty years ago.

And that, dear wife of mine, is why I didn't clean up from the D&D game last night.