Eventually, all things come to an end. And as glorious as college was from a gaming standpoint, eventually you have to move on and get a real job. This is what I did as well, taking my show on the road to Dallas where I got a job doing Tech Support. Clay, who was heading south for the same job and had gotten me the interview in the first place, was heading there as well, but no one else was. Thus, I ended up basically having to build a whole new group from scratch.
That worked out, though, because one assembled pretty easily. There was Robert, one of my co-workers who went on to found Pen & Paper Games, and Anna, who knitted at every game but paid more attention than most of the other players. I still have the dice bag she knitted me. Clay, of course, and Jen who filled the awkward outsider role in the group.
I don't know why that is, but in every gaming group there's always someone who's the least comfortable at the table. Sometimes it's overt, as it was with Jen and sometimes it's subtle, but somehow one person always gets marked out as the one who ends up the butt of the jokes or the one who exasperates the others. Even at a table where everyone's known each other for years, there's always one player who seems to get singled out the most. I'm not sure why that should be, but I've seen enough games to know that it's true.
The final ingredient to our gamer stew was Mick Mick was probably the best player I've ever had the privilege to GM for. Sadly, when I talked to him last, he'd given up gaming after I left Dallas, which is the waste of a great gamer. You see, my gamemastering style is mostly reactive. I have some basic ideas of what's going on in the world, lay out some potential plot threads, then let the players go where they like.
(This, incidentally, becomes a problem in games like D&D 4E where you're expected to pre-build encounters and then just walk the players into them. It's one of the reasons I've decided to bring my 4E game to a close.)
Mick was the perfect player for a GM like myself. His characters, especially his primary, Ivo the Blade, were always interesting and had a lot of ideas of what to do. What's more the ideas, and the way his character interacted with people, were often offbeat and funny. I can't stress how much more fun it is to play with someone who makes everyone else laugh than it is with someone who annoys everyone. And certainly, it helped that Mick had strong supporting characters, too. Robert's uptight cleric often played the foil to Ivo's antics, while Clay's amoral wizard butted heads with Anna's conscientious Ranger. Mick may have been the spark, but it took all the players to grow it into a fire. Even Jen, awkward as she often was at the table, added something to the mix with her airhead druid who could be relied upon by the gamemaster to do something silly because she wasn't paying attention and thus allow me to throw in more plot complications, which were, in turn, dealt with in an amusing fashion by the group.
It was like a weekly action comedy fantasy TV show that only we few got to participate in. There were a lot of laughs, we had characters (both player controlled and even a couple of NPCs) who were memorable and amusing, and we even managed a halfway decent story along the way. That was probably the best game I've ever been a part of, and I've never quite managed to recreate it in the decade plus since, much to my dismay.
My primary D&D game wasn't, however, the only game I played while down in Big D. There was a D&D game that Robert ran, a short lived Babylon 5 game that I tried to run, a Star Trek game by Robert, even a spin-off D&D game that I ran for Mick and a few of my co-workers once a month or so. Robert even had a home-brewed superhero game that we tried a couple of times. All were more or less decent games, but the Saturday D&D game with Ivo, Ylin, Everett, Evan, and Deanna was the best of the lot, and probably the best I've ever done.
Thus, Dallas. To me it's a city I'll always remember for the mild winters, the unbearably hot summers, and the sudden ferocious rain. I can almost taste the steaks, smell the barbeque, position my hand just so to hold the insane "Lineman's Reward" cheeseburger from Ball's Hamburgers. There was the weekly ritual of chanting "body count, body count" in the corner of Rich's Taphouse with the cluster of other ex-pat Bear's fans watching the Bears lose but tracking the score in the number of players injured on the other team. They were heady days, and I remember them well.
But most of all, I remember the Saturday Game.
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