“Trust me. It’s important.”
“I don’t play kids’ games, and I definitely don’t sit on floors.”
Marion patted the desk top beside her. “You can come and sit beside me. I’ll even explain the game to you.”
Ayhan consulted his watch. “I’ll consider this a coffee break.” He hoisted himself up on the desk beside Marion.
“I’ll have to whisper, so that we don’t disturb the game, Lieutenant. What do you want to know?”
Ayhan studied the scene in front of him. “I see a bunch of kids sitting around on the floor wearing funny outfits and playing with dice. What’s to know?”
“Plenty. It’s a role-playing game. All the action is imaginary.”
“Where’s the board?”
“There isn’t one. Jay has a script of the adventure, but it all takes place in the imagination.”
Ayhan sighed. “Then what am I supposed to watch?”
Marion smiled. “Get into the spirit of it, Lieutenant. If Jay does a good job of describing things, it can come to seem very real after a while.”
“So who’s Dr. Omega supposed to be?”
“He’s called the Dungeon Master. He’s like the stage manager in
Our Town.”
“Thanks for the clarification,” said Ayhan, stifling a yawn.
Marion sighed.” How can I put it? He tells them where they are and what they see, and they tell him what their reactions are. For example, he could say: ‘You see a stone with a gold statue sitting on it.’ And then the players talk it over, and decide whether to leave the statue alone, in case
it’s a trap, or to risk taking it.”
“Okay. Suppose they decide to pick it up.”
“Then they relay that information to the Dungeon Master. And he tells them what happens next, like: you have just triggered an earthquake, or an alarm goes off, or whatever.”
“What are the dice for?”
“There’s a whole bunch. Four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, ten-sided, twelve-sided, twenty-sided … even one-hundred-sided nowadays, or you can just throw two D-10’s, which we in the know call a ‘percentile.’ Had enough?” she asked, noticing Ayhan’s mystified expression. “Relax. All you need to know is that a throw of the dice—whichever dice—determines the outcome of something that depends on chance. If a rope breaks and you fall, how badly did you get hurt? In real life, it will depend on whether you fell on your head or not, whether you hit a rock or soft ground, and all the other variables. In the game, the dice take care of all of life’s possibilities.”
Lieutenant Ayhan digested this information. “So you sit on the floor and imagine an adventure, and you throw dice. —Does this sound boring to you?”
“Yes,” smiled Marion. “Unless you are playing with very creative people, it can be stupefying. Young male players tend to invent adventures that are all combat, and those are especially monotonous. This one should be better than that.”
“Why?”
“Because I helped to write it.”
“And why am I here?” asked Ayhan.
“Command performance,” Marion replied. “The Dungeon Master insisted.” She had wondered about that herself, though.
The adventurers were looking up at Jay Omega with eager faces. Several of them had produced pads and pencils so that they could make notes about the things he described for future reference. It was a good idea to draw a map, too, so that when the adventure was over, the party could find its way back.
Jay Omega consulted his notes. “Okay, the adventure begins. —No, that’s not right.” He read the pencil notes in the margin. “We have to do something else first.” What did “gen. char.” and “leg” mean? His learning capacities did not function well at 2
A.M.,
which is when Marion had explained it all, and he had scribbled reminders to himself.
He tried not to look at the row of earnest players in front of him. He was rattled enough. In the audience, somebody giggled. “Gen. char”—“Generate characters!” he cried, just as the silence was becoming ominous. “First, you have to generate your characters, and then I’m going to distribute legends to some of you.” Legend cards were sort of house rules; Omega held up the hand-printed note cards which bore extra information about the adventure and which would augment the more usual procedures. “After that, I will explain the adventure.”
Marion didn’t wait for Ayhan to ask. “Generating characters. Each member of the expedition will have certain skills, like strength, dexterity, intelligence, and so on. They’re rolling the dice to see what their attributes are. Think of it as a gene pool.”
“Suppose you get lousy marks in everything?”
“Then you start over. Better than life, huh? —
And your dice scores determine who you are. If you are high in intelligence, but low in strength, you might be an elf, for example. Someone high in dexterity might choose to become a thief.”
Ayhan frowned. “Thief, huh? There wouldn’t be any murderers in this game, would there?”
Marion hesitated. “That’s a rather philosophical question, Lieutenant. All the adventurers are soldiers of fortune, and as such, they might be forced to kill in self-defense, or in order to complete their mission, or—”
“Okay! Okay!” Ayhan made the football time-out signal. “It’s bad enough I have to watch this without getting commercials in metaphysics.”
More than twenty minutes later, the eight players had been transformed into elf fighters, clerics, human warriors, thieves, and the other usual components of a fantasy
A-Team
. They had used imaginary gold to buy imaginary weapons, and each knew his strength and other abilities, because they had been determined by a roll of the dice.
“This is, of course, a Celtic adventure,” Jay Omega told the party. “Your leader is Tratyn Runewind himself.”
Scattered applause came from the audience.
“Your mission, should you decide to accept it—” Jay saw Marion frown and shake her head. Get serious, he told himself, this has to be believable. He tried again:
“The adventure is to … er …” He glanced at the notes on the first page of his plot outline. “Oh, yes! You have to fight a group of Norsemen who have taken over Scotland’s sacred island of lona. That’s where the Scottish kings are buried, and there’s a monastery there.”
“It ought to be dynamite for magic,” Bill Fox remarked.
“Okay … You’re standing on a rocky beach on the west coast of the Scottish mainland …”
Marion leaned over and whispered to the lieutenant. “You probably understand this already, but he has given them their assignment, and he has just told them where they are. Now they decide how to proceed.”
The commandeering of a boat to take the adventurers to lona was relatively uneventful. In his role as omnipotent game-controller, Jay Omega gave them a little rough weather to contend with on the crossing, but nothing to really worry about.
“Now,” said Marion. “Try to picture all of them on a little Scottish fishing boat, crossing the choppy sea.”
Jay Omega was also trying to picture the scene. “Let’s see …” he stammered, unnerved by the eight pairs of eyes waiting for his instructions. “It’s a very gray day … sort of spitting rain, windy. The boat is lurching in the waves. …”
Marion leaned over and touched Jay’s shoulder. “Now!” she hissed.
“Tratyn Runewind is seasick,” Jay Omega added, trying to sound casual. “He’s puking over the side.”
Bernard Buchanan looked puzzled. “Tratyn Runewind is
seasick
, but—” He shrugged. Talking back to a DM could be hazardous to your health.
Jay Omega glanced at his notes for “Arrival at lona.” Marion had augmented the original adventure with a few touches of her own, for which her doctorate in folklore had proved very helpful. She sat on the Macintosh table behind the Dungeon Master’s chair, trying to convey no emotion at all in
her expression. Oracles, she felt, should be objective. Lieutenant Ayhan, looking less confused, was equally impassive. While the descriptions were being given, he had waved a dollar bill at a boy in the audience and had pantomimed drinking. The kid nodded his comprehension and took off with the money.
“As the boat comes in to the shallows of the island—I don’t know how far out—” Jay turned to Marion. “Would they have to worry about rocks near the beach?”
Marion scribbled a note and handed it to him. It said: “Don’t be so hesitant! In this game, the truth is whatever you say it is! Be positive!”
Jay Omega folded the note and slid it into his pocket. Mustering up his most commanding expression, the one he used for discussing grades with undergrads, he said, “As the boat nears shore, you see a beautiful black horse wading in the surf.”
“The Sleeping Warriors!” muttered Diefenbaker, remembering yesterday’s adventure. Today he was a middle-aged cleric whose specialty was magic. “Thomas the Rhymer collects black horses to give to King Arthur and his army. That horse should be magic. Catch it!”
The elf with the highest dexterity rating said to Jay Omega: “I leap over the side of the boat and I try to grab the horse’s mane.” He rolled the dice to determine whether probability was on his side. “Did I make it?”
Jay Omega almost said, “How should I know whether you made it or not?” but then he realized that it was up to him to decide things like that, and because he had the notes about the adventure, he
knew something about the horse that the players did not. “Yes,” he nodded. “You have the horse’s mane, but you can’t let go. It starts to swim out to sea. It is now level with the boat.”
“Okay.” Ayhan whispered to Marion. “That kid jumped off the boat to try to catch a horse. Now how did Dr. Omega know that he can’t let go, and that the horse will swim out to sea?”
Marion looked exasperated. “Because! I told you! The Dungeon Master is like God. He can make anything happen if he wants to. In this case, he has the script, which tells him that the horse is really a demon.” She grinned. “I came up with that.”
Sensing the danger to their comrade, the adventurers whispered among themselves on how to effect a rescue. No one offered to dive in after him.
“I consult my magic book,” said Diefenbaker quickly, holding up an imaginary volume. “Do I find Thomas the Rhymer?”
No,” said Jay Omega. “Because … because …”
“You’re six hundred years too early,” said Marion. “Thomas the Rhymer is twelfth century.”
“So I look under Water Horses,” said Diefenbaker, pretending to flip pages.
“They’re using imaginary books?” said Ayhan.
“Sort of. Diefenbaker is a cleric, which means he is also a scholar, so there’s a chance that he’ll be able to find some information that will help with the problem. He pretends to consult the book, and if Jay feels like letting him have the answer, he will pretend to let him find it in the book.”
“This sounds like the way city hall operates,” grinned Ayhan. His Coke arrived just then, and he took it with a smile of thanks, and waved away the change.
Jay Omega decided to give Diefenbaker a break. “Your magic book says ‘See Kelpie.’”
“Kelpie!” Mona, the female warrior, who read nothing but folklore, clutched at Diefenbaker’s arm. “They’re demons. They play around in the water’s edge until somebody gets on their backs, and then they drown them!”
Marion nodded approvingly, pleased at finding another folklore enthusiast present.
“I am running to the side of the boat with my flask of holy water!” cried Diefenbaker. “I throw the holy water on the kelpie.” He rolled the dice.
Jay Omega picked a chart at random and pretended to study it. Real Dungeon Masters actually used charts to determine probability, but Marion had said that he might as well fake it, because otherwise things would get too complicated. “Okay,” he said confidently, as if the chart had settled things, “the kelpie had started to dive into deep water, but you caught him on the rump with your holy water, and he disappears. Now who’s going to rescue the waterlogged elf?”
“Can’t I swim?” asked the elf.
“You’re unconscious.”
“What about Tratyn Runewind?” asked Clifford Morgan. “He swims, and he’s stronger than all of us put together.”
“Which one is he?” asked Ayhan.
“Runewind? None of them. He’s what is called a non-player character. It’s up to Jay to tell them what he does and says. They just imagine his presence.”
“How can you have an imaginary player?” Ayhan demanded.
Marion shrugged. “They’re in an imaginary boat,
aren’t they?”
Jay Omega tossed dice of his own. “Ah, yes. Tratyn Runewind. He tries to get to the side, but the boat lurches in the waves, and he falls and hits his head against the anchor.” He braced himself for a storm of argument from the players, but there was only a stunned silence. Good, thought Jay Omega, maybe this will actually work.
Little gasps came from the adventurers as they realized that their leader had been injured so early in the game. “Roll for damage,” somebody said gravely.
“I get it!” whispered Ayhan, sipping his drink. “They’re checking probability to see how bad he was hurt.”