This year, as readers (anyone? anyone there??) will know, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons with LDB,BL co-creater Chris Santee, who serves as my esteemed Dungeon Master. If memory serves me right, we started around January or February which makes it almost a year. But just because it has been a year, doesn't mean I am remotely close to being a Dungeon Master myself. I still never remember which die to roll for damage most of the time or which abilities my character has. Not for lack of interest, it's just simply a lot of stats and figures to remember and I am terrible at math. And memory. And props to DM Sitmo because those books are dense, there's no way I would ever be able to break all that stuff down and wrangle it into a cohesive game that 5 or 6 people can play at the same time. I of course started as a human ranger named Leoendrithas Droverson, an archer raised by elves. This was a whole new world for me, elves and dwarves and XP and hit dice...it was all foreign. Frankly, I wasn't nerdy enough to understand it at first. I mean, I've seen Lord Of The Rings once but I am no means a fantasy genre enthusiast and have never played table games beyond Monopoly and Candy Land. I've never played Skyrim or seen Game Of Thrones. That became evident when we tried to play a Star Wars role playing game, for which I had to be schooled in the basics of the Star Wars world, which drew the ire and laughs of my fellow gamers. Truth be told, I feel like a complete outsider in the D&D group but that's okay. The more the game goes on, the more I am immersed in the fantasy genre world, the more I learn the lingo and character archetypes, the more enjoyable it becomes.
Of course, the aforementioned Star Wars debacle continues to haunt me and I made an effort earlier this year to right that oversight. And I tried, I really tried. This summer, I made the effort, I had all three of the original trilogy in my possession but I just didn't make it. I'm sure it's a fine world that Lucas has created, I'm just not that interested in it. As I've said before, I think I needed to see it about 15 years ago, when it was the height of technological and special effects achievement, not to mention, the height of cool. Now, it just looks hokey, the world not sufficiently interesting enough for me. By now, there's too much in the canon for me to bother catching up with. When people catch wind of me not seeing Star Wars, they give me the same response as when they find out I don't drink. "WHAAAATT!!! I want to be there when you watch it for the first time." I of course don't want to watch it, just like I don't want to go out and get drunk, but it doesn't stop people from expressing the interest in wanting me to do so. As noted in previous posts here, my interests lie elsewhere but this year and from here on out, I hope to expand my nerdy oeuvre. My collection of comics is growing, I'm going to see The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, and I've tried to limit the amount that I talk about football and Jason Statham among people whose eyes will glaze over when I do so. Gotta know your audience.
Every time a comic book movie comes out, I go to my friends to get the background on what I missed out on in decades of comics and movies. I'm slowly catching up, but every time a new character pops up in a Marvel film, I always require a primer to get the basics. I'm excited in theory about these four new series that Netflix and Marvel are collaborating on but I know absolutely nothing about any of those characters. I think Ben Affleck was Daredevil once upon a time but that's as much as I could tell you. After watching the new Thor film, I needed Chris to tell me what the deal was with The Collector and how he fits into the universe. And watching Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. has opened a whole new round of questions about what it is they do and how they fit in. And apparently the new Superman film will be Batman versus Superman, which is a mystery to me because I thought Batman and Superman were allies. But again, I enjoy delving more into these worlds because I feel like I'm catching up on what I missed out on as a child, when I was doing who knows what instead. I just need time to catch up because right now I'm pretty busy with the NFL and NBA seasons.
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