Braken

Another character sheet from the early 90's. Level 14 Thri-Kreen Cleric. I assume we used the Dark Sun method for rolling stats, because this cat is off the charts. That said, I think this was a Forgotten Realms campaign. Ran the old "can I be from Dark Sun" hack. Those who gamed in this era may remember that guy. I do, but I don't remember being that guy. So much for my nostalgic illusions.
Learned how broken Clerics were with this character. I had never seen, let alone played, a high level PC cleric at this point.

Braken illuminates one of the gaming philosophies I maintained at the time: "people, monsters, keep trying to cave in my skull with hammers, set me on fire, and swallow my soul. And that's all before lunch. If I'm going to, you know, NOT DIE, I might want to strive to be as dangerous as possible."  I knew plenty of people who were very hostile to any kind of min-maxing. In part this was a reaction to the maladjusted high-school kids we were/played-with forever trying to build a better bastard. A non-zero number of folks acted competitively against the other players, and not quite as cooperatively as the hobby would normally encourage. They were grandstanding and trying to out do one another in-game to try to prove something outside of game. Playing the bullies they spent their days giving the slip down D-Hall.

While this is anti-social, it's not that I was wrong. Conan never took no damn ceramics class. But here my friends were trying to suggest I do that very same thing. I figured someone who could very well just die in an avalanche of ghoul guts might just, yeah... fuck it, memorize Pillar of Flame x4 for the day.

H.G. Wells

I like old documents. Letters, flyers, even receipts. I guess it's natural, being a gamer, that I would like old character sheets. They are the same sort of thing, a direct source, a record of the past. Much how a retired transit employee could look at a bus schedule from the 60's and read it like a book, gamers who are familiar with the system will recognize and infer far more than the sheet would at first reveal. Similarly it is also utterly meaningless to an outsider.

H.G. Wells: AD&D 2nd Edition Human Figher:


I figure H.G. Wells here is as good a place as any to start. Me and my buddy Mike were 14? 15? Something like that. We had never really played RPG's together, we played Magic all the time, but we wanted to play D&D but were devoid of a group that particular morning. We decided that had no business stopping us, and I arbitrarily took the roll of player and Mike DM. I think we played for seven hours before we called it. I think I killed a bear with a bow.

A few things stand out. The stats reflect the origin as a one player game. Believing that I would have no help from other players I just picked my stats, perfect physical attributes, neutral mental ones, and... um... 3 charisma? for balance. Seemed fair. We had no idea that we would keep playing for years. Mike had creative ways of making people feel included, despite my obviously hacked stats. Someone played a Manelephant. A level one Manelephant anything is quite something. You can also see that Mike was very conservative with treasure. Considering the destruction that resulted from that ring of fire resistance, never mind a Fighter with those stats, he had to be.

I don't remember even noticing how thin the loot was.

We never set foot in a dungeon.

I played him from level one on.

Wells also has a statistically average number of hit points. 50 from that absurd constitution, and another 60 from 10 random rolls on a D10.

I don't remember the context of the title overlord.

I'm not sure where he picked up a permanent +1 to CON.

He has fifty pounds of opium in his inventory.

And, lest the point be missed, you can seriously pull some shit with a ring of fire resistance, outside, chaotic neutral.

I was not new to the game but I had only played with my man Justin at this point, and we played very differently. Usually controlling 2 characters or more, never much regarding them as people with desires. They were pieces in an abstract war-game. A war-game where the goal was to crawl a dungeon, subdue a dragon, collect exp, gear, etc. Mike ran a narrative game, and Wells personality mattered and effected the course of things. It was call and response gaming. Necessarily cooperative, rather than necessarily oppositional. I would fall into storyteller games in the future, but were it not for that empty Vermont Saturday morning and the game that ensued, I may have never appreciated them. Which, when I consider the multitude of friends I still enjoy thanks to Vampire, would have been personally catastrophic.