Traveling down memory lane isn't always easy. Sometimes one has to think really hard to remember long-forgotten skills. Even with help (and books), it was a slow process to revive the particular ability we attempted just now. When I was a young nerd, I was once quite good at role-playing games. I spent months on D&D campaigns with my like-minded friends in high school, and when Mr S-P and I got together in college, we played a few RPGs then too. A couple of times in the decades since, we mused out loud what it would be like to dip a toe into that world again, but we never did it. Tonight, our neighbor came over with a "starter kit" for D&D, and asked us to go over it with him, so that he had an idea what to do to get his circle of friends playing it. He wanted to have at least one experience with it under his belt before he tried it out on more people who had also never done it.
The starter kit had pre-made characters and very limited explanation of how to play. There was almost no room for personalization. That is most of the fun, in my mind--building a character yourself, and really emphasizing strengths and weaknesses. I knew who to call to borrow a real player's manual, and I dashed out to get it before we started. We rolled dice to create a base set of statistics for our characters, and then took off running from there. Our neighbor created a human female fighter, and named her Carol from HR. I was a very strong dwarf who is exceptionally clumsy, and after learning that the only career type he could have was a cleric (because of his horrid lack of dexterity), I dressed him in all pink, said that he looked just like Dolores Umbridge (with the addition of a gloriously curly beard), and made his order one that worships kittens.
We had no plan, no carefully thought-out campaign ready to go. Mr S-P just made it up as we went along, to get us learning how to ask questions and roll dice to randomly assign successes and failures. On two separate occasions, "Carol" and I rolled critical failures at the same time, that resulted in us literally tripping over each other. We failed at life, the two of us, and ended up arrested, about to be hanged for a crime we didn't commit, when we decided we had been up late enough for the first time out, and we went our separate ways for the night. (Conveniently, all three of us were already in jammies -- there is no formality between neighbors here.) It's possible that with planning and a slightly larger party, we could actually take this activity up again in earnest. For a one-off entertainment, on the fly, on a holiday weekend, it was a wonderful blast from the past.
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