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Post by Rob G on Aug 26, 2007 11:38:14 GMT -5
For the past two years, Stephen Colbert has served as correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His career began at the Second City improv troupe in Chicago. There he met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, with whom he later developed the sketch comedy series, Exit 57. Recently, he reunited with them to create Comedy Central's first-ever live-action narrative series, Strangers With Candy. Below he captures his memories of Dungeons & Dragons, detailing what the game meant to him and how it changed his life.
In the spring of 1976 I was in seventh grade. I had been reading science fiction for two years and had just started bleeding over into fantasy.
One day at lunch I overheard my friend Keith saying, "I listened at the door, and I didn't hear anything, so I went inside and got attacked by a giant rat!"
I said, "What do you mean, you listened at the door? What are you talking about?"
They said, "Well, it's kind of hard to explain, but in this game called Dungeons & Dragons there's a probability that you'll hear something through a door, and my character's a thief so he can hear better. The game just came out. Come over Friday and we'll play."
I did and was instantly hooked. A whole new kind of game. No board -- just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.
We were all complete outcasts in school -- beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school. I'm not even sure we were on the rolls of any of the classes; that's how outcast we were.
D&D made quite a little explosion when it first came out. We were close to the Bible Belt, and ministers were preaching on TV against it, saying that it was a cult, telling stories about kids going too far, playing in the sewers and getting swept away when it rained or getting carried away and believing that the games were real and hurting each other with swords or trying to do incantations, demon worship. I remember thinking, "Who'd be stupid enough to believe this was real?" And, while I certainly wished it was real at times, I was sure these were boogyman stories made up by preachers who didn't like the implications of stories like Tolkein's, and by what they believed to be dabbling in the occult.
We would do huge campaigns where we had multiple characters and would take them through dungeons, one person running multiple characters. I created characters based on the personalities of my eleven brothers and sisters. I included myself and my mother and my father.
I took them through an old Judge's Guild module called The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor. They were all killed, except my sister, whose name is Lulu. She was a witch, a variant of a magic user that was described in <i>Dragon</i> magazine. She had powers like a dance of seduction and love potions -- stuff like that. She survived quite well, and she ended up being my character for years. All my friends bugged me that my favorite character was female, but I thought it was kind of cool that it didn't matter what sex your character was.
When she was twenty-third level one of the Dungeon Masters (DMs) that I played with all the time just, I guess, got tired of her, and he killed her. She was riding on her dragon's back above the clouds, and he made it rain acid upwards.
Those old "Giants" modules, those were tremendous. Those are some of my favorite memories: working my way through fire giant, frost giant, and storm giant castles. But the best campaign to me was Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, a sci-fi/fantasy mix.
I had an eleventh-level paladin (it took me years to advance those levels) whom I took on Expedition, and he got the Power Armor, which was the big thing to get in that module. But he also went a little power mad. On the next campaign we saw merchant caravans crossing the desert, and my character flew down and landed next to a merchant and tore off the guy's head.
The DM informed me that I was not a paladin anymore.
I said, "Oh, shit, I forgot. I'm lawful good!"
DM: "Yeah, and the gods are angry. So you're not a paladin anymore. You can start again as anything you want, but that character's done."
Eventually, we started to judge each other based on how our characters behaved. One DM seemed to believe we were too greedy. We wanted too much. We wanted our characters to be too strong. But, you know, within the culture of high school we were the weak puppies and were looking for power, albeit imagined. Well this one DM, Haskell, started using his dungeon mastering as a critique of that. He would tempt us with ways to get seemingly unlimited power (say, a poison with no saving throw) and then throw huge roadblocks in the way to keep us from achieving it. I may remembering wrong, but I think by the end we were using the game to express how we felt about each other.
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Post by Rob G on Aug 26, 2007 12:09:38 GMT -5
And Vin Diesel on D&D:
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From an Interveiw:
Question: Is it true you're really into Dungeons and Dragons?
VIN: No. I never play D&D. For some reason, they thought that I played D&D for 20 years. They thought that I spent years playing Barbarians, Witchunters, The Arcanum. They thought I played D&D back in the '70s when it's just the basic D&D set. They thought I continued to play D&D when it became Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. They thought I played D&D when there were only three books - the "Player's Handbook," the "Monster's Manual" and the "Dungeon Master's Guide." They thought I played D&D as it continued onto the Unearthed Arcanum, Oriental Adventures, Sea Adventures, Wilderness Adventures. THEY thought I played D&D at the time when "Deities and Demigods" was the brand new book. THEY thought I played D&D when I used to get up to a place called The Complete Strategist in New York.
[Mouths: "I'm into D&D a lot."]
------------------------------
From Some guys investigation into Vin diesel gaming credits:
It turns out that Vin Diesel is a true gamer, not just a wanna-be. He is a game geek. A nerd and a big one at that. So big a nerd that the tattoo of the name “Melkor ” on his stomach isn’t in tribute to the Dark God from LOTR, but for his favorite Dungeons & Dragons character. He was seen recently at a Wizard’s of the Coast shop in the Beverly Center mall, Los Angeles purchasing around $800 worth of D&D materials. He chatted up the local clientele, asking about campaigns, and discussing the cultural issues related to half-orc player characters in the 3rd Edition. What was the $800 in books for? Contributions for the Orphans Without Dice Fund? Boosting the economy single-handedly? Nope: research. “Research for one of my secret projects,” he claimed. A project so large he brought his “childhood friend and Dungeon Master” Marcus Abularach from New York out to help him write it.
Vin’s relationship with gaming goes way back. At age 12, Vin (then known as Mark Vincent) became involved in a Sunday night game of D&D organized by a friend’s mother. “He became heavily involved in the game and was still, 20 years later, when role-playing had become his career as well as his hobby.” He admits to still using that role-playing ethos in his approach to acting today. “I’ve used that part of me, which was a huge fan of [D&D] as a child, in the storytelling aspect of movie making”. Although he was a card-carrying gamer, Vin insists that he “wasn’t a nerd. I played with creative people. I played with potheads. There was always a bottle of whiskey on the table. One guy was a cop, and it was my night off from bouncing at The Tunnel.”
You have to wonder how much all of that late-night D&D and Jolt Cola must have scarred a man who goes on the record stating that “Rocky is one of the best movies of all time” and “Schwarzenegger made movies that empowered me as a kid”.
Vin: I’ve played D&D since I was about 12 years old, and we would get to a point, after about two hours, where we’d all start to assume our roles and talk like the characters we were playing. It was great because it kept me out of drugs and being reckless, like a kid can become. It was a great hobby that was thought provoking. If you play a pure sense of D&D, you are playing strategies. That’s the role-playing game I’ve played the most and been a strong advocate for.
-----------------------
From an interview on Conan O'Brien:
Conan: You have this image right now, of an action star, tough guy, but there is, for lack of a better term, maybe a slightly nerdy side to Vin Diesel, is that fair to say?
audience: *laughs*
Conan: Please don't rip my head off, reach into my neck, and pull my heart out, but... You can do that later, but.., let's just say a side of you that people might not expect.
Vin: I spent a lot of years playing a game called Dungeons and Dragons.
audience: *laughs*
Vin: Very few people know that I was rolling 20-sided dice and talking like a half-orc
Conan: You would talk in the voice when you played the game?
Vin: Oh, we completely role-played, yea.
Conan: *laughs* you're kidding?!
Vin: (in the voice of a half-orc) "How dare you!?"
Conan: That's amazing! (in a nerdy voice) "Fear not, Gandalf is on the way!"
audience: *laughs*
Conan: That's what I would be, if I was playing with you. You would not let me play with you, probably. You'd be like "that guy's too nerdy, he's gotta go."
audience: *laughs*
Conan: So you played this for like how long?
Vin: For like 24 years.
Conan: For 24 years?! *laughs* I know...
audience: *laughs*
Vin: Now I call it the training ground for imagination.
Conan: Right, well that's very...
Vin: But this was before video games. I started playing in the 70s. And, this was, I mean, I could have played Risk, Monopoly, or D&D.
Conan: Right, which was probably the cooler of those games.
Vin: I think, yea.
Conan: And you created a character for youself, didn't you?
Vin: I created a character... No one knows this, but in Triple-X, one of the tattoos, right above my belly-button, or below my belly button, I don't know why I'm saying this *hoots from audience*, was the name Melkor. And that came from a character that I had, uh..
Conan: That you created in Dungeons and Dragons?
Vin: that I created. That was a Drow witch-hunter. Double-specialized witch-hunter. but this is all
Conan: There are so many nerds watching right now who are just thrilled. Cause you're making them cool, suddenly. All these guys are watching going "Go, Vin Diesel, Go! Go!" All hail, Melkor, you know?
audience: *applause and laughter*
Conan: I think that's neat though. See that you did, see that you'll talk about it
-----------------------------
From the forward of the coffee table novel "Dungeons and Dragons: 30 years of Adventure"
From an interview on Conan O'Brien:
Conan: You have this image right now, of an action star, tough guy, but there is, for lack of a better term, maybe a slightly nerdy side to Vin Diesel, is that fair to say?
audience: *laughs*
Conan: Please don't rip my head off, reach into my neck, and pull my heart out, but... You can do that later, but.., let's just say a side of you that people might not expect.
Vin: I spent a lot of years playing a game called Dungeons and Dragons.
audience: *laughs*
Vin: Very few people know that I was rolling 20-sided dice and talking like a half-orc
Conan: You would talk in the voice when you played the game?
Vin: Oh, we completely role-played, yea.
Conan: *laughs* you're kidding?!
Vin: (in the voice of a half-orc) "How dare you!?"
Conan: That's amazing! (in a nerdy voice) "Fear not, Gandalf is on the way!"
audience: *laughs*
Conan: That's what I would be, if I was playing with you. You would not let me play with you, probably. You'd be like "that guy's too nerdy, he's gotta go."
audience: *laughs*
Conan: So you played this for like how long?
Vin: For like 24 years.
Conan: For 24 years?! *laughs* I know...
audience: *laughs*
Vin: Now I call it the training ground for imagination.
Conan: Right, well that's very...
Vin: But this was before video games. I started playing in the 70s. And, this was, I mean, I could have played Risk, Monopoly, or D&D.
Conan: Right, which was probably the cooler of those games.
Vin: I think, yea.
Conan: And you created a character for youself, didn't you?
Vin: I created a character... No one knows this, but in Triple-X, one of the tattoos, right above my belly-button, or below my belly button, I don't know why I'm saying this *hoots from audience*, was the name Melkor. And that came from a character that I had, uh..
Conan: That you created in Dungeons and Dragons?
Vin: that I created. That was a Drow witch-hunter. Double-specialized witch-hunter. but this is all
Conan: There are so many nerds watching right now who are just thrilled. Cause you're making them cool, suddenly. All these guys are watching going "Go, Vin Diesel, Go! Go!" All hail, Melkor, you know?
audience: *applause and laughter*
Conan: I think that's neat though. See that you did, see that you'll talk about it
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Post by Rob G on Aug 26, 2007 12:10:46 GMT -5
And Vin Diesel on D&D:
----------------
From an Interveiw:
Question: Is it true you're really into Dungeons and Dragons?
VIN: No. I never play D&D. For some reason, they thought that I played D&D for 20 years. They thought that I spent years playing Barbarians, Witchunters, The Arcanum. They thought I played D&D back in the '70s when it's just the basic D&D set. They thought I continued to play D&D when it became Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. They thought I played D&D when there were only three books - the "Player's Handbook," the "Monster's Manual" and the "Dungeon Master's Guide." They thought I played D&D as it continued onto the Unearthed Arcanum, Oriental Adventures, Sea Adventures, Wilderness Adventures. THEY thought I played D&D at the time when "Deities and Demigods" was the brand new book. THEY thought I played D&D when I used to get up to a place called The Complete Strategist in New York.
[Mouths: "I'm into D&D a lot."]
------------------------------
From Some guys investigation into Vin diesel gaming credits:
It turns out that Vin Diesel is a true gamer, not just a wanna-be. He is a game geek. A nerd and a big one at that. So big a nerd that the tattoo of the name “Melkor ” on his stomach isn’t in tribute to the Dark God from LOTR, but for his favorite Dungeons & Dragons character. He was seen recently at a Wizard’s of the Coast shop in the Beverly Center mall, Los Angeles purchasing around $800 worth of D&D materials. He chatted up the local clientele, asking about campaigns, and discussing the cultural issues related to half-orc player characters in the 3rd Edition. What was the $800 in books for? Contributions for the Orphans Without Dice Fund? Boosting the economy single-handedly? Nope: research. “Research for one of my secret projects,” he claimed. A project so large he brought his “childhood friend and Dungeon Master” Marcus Abularach from New York out to help him write it.
Vin’s relationship with gaming goes way back. At age 12, Vin (then known as Mark Vincent) became involved in a Sunday night game of D&D organized by a friend’s mother. “He became heavily involved in the game and was still, 20 years later, when role-playing had become his career as well as his hobby.” He admits to still using that role-playing ethos in his approach to acting today. “I’ve used that part of me, which was a huge fan of [D&D] as a child, in the storytelling aspect of movie making”. Although he was a card-carrying gamer, Vin insists that he “wasn’t a nerd. I played with creative people. I played with potheads. There was always a bottle of whiskey on the table. One guy was a cop, and it was my night off from bouncing at The Tunnel.”
You have to wonder how much all of that late-night D&D and Jolt Cola must have scarred a man who goes on the record stating that “Rocky is one of the best movies of all time” and “Schwarzenegger made movies that empowered me as a kid”.
Vin: I’ve played D&D since I was about 12 years old, and we would get to a point, after about two hours, where we’d all start to assume our roles and talk like the characters we were playing. It was great because it kept me out of drugs and being reckless, like a kid can become. It was a great hobby that was thought provoking. If you play a pure sense of D&D, you are playing strategies. That’s the role-playing game I’ve played the most and been a strong advocate for.
-----------------------
From an interview on Conan O'Brien:
Conan: You have this image right now, of an action star, tough guy, but there is, for lack of a better term, maybe a slightly nerdy side to Vin Diesel, is that fair to say?
audience: *laughs*
Conan: Please don't rip my head off, reach into my neck, and pull my heart out, but... You can do that later, but.., let's just say a side of you that people might not expect.
Vin: I spent a lot of years playing a game called Dungeons and Dragons.
audience: *laughs*
Vin: Very few people know that I was rolling 20-sided dice and talking like a half-orc
Conan: You would talk in the voice when you played the game?
Vin: Oh, we completely role-played, yea.
Conan: *laughs* you're kidding?!
Vin: (in the voice of a half-orc) "How dare you!?"
Conan: That's amazing! (in a nerdy voice) "Fear not, Gandalf is on the way!"
audience: *laughs*
Conan: That's what I would be, if I was playing with you. You would not let me play with you, probably. You'd be like "that guy's too nerdy, he's gotta go."
audience: *laughs*
Conan: So you played this for like how long?
Vin: For like 24 years.
Conan: For 24 years?! *laughs* I know...
audience: *laughs*
Vin: Now I call it the training ground for imagination.
Conan: Right, well that's very...
Vin: But this was before video games. I started playing in the 70s. And, this was, I mean, I could have played Risk, Monopoly, or D&D.
Conan: Right, which was probably the cooler of those games.
Vin: I think, yea.
Conan: And you created a character for youself, didn't you?
Vin: I created a character... No one knows this, but in Triple-X, one of the tattoos, right above my belly-button, or below my belly button, I don't know why I'm saying this *hoots from audience*, was the name Melkor. And that came from a character that I had, uh..
Conan: That you created in Dungeons and Dragons?
Vin: that I created. That was a Drow witch-hunter. Double-specialized witch-hunter. but this is all
Conan: There are so many nerds watching right now who are just thrilled. Cause you're making them cool, suddenly. All these guys are watching going "Go, Vin Diesel, Go! Go!" All hail, Melkor, you know?
audience: *applause and laughter*
Conan: I think that's neat though. See that you did, see that you'll talk about it
-----------------------------
From the forward of the coffee table novel "Dungeons and Dragons: 30 years of Adventure"
We were all drawn to the game because it allowed us to become these characters, vastly different in appearance and in actions, but what kept us hooked was the search the character which represented our higher self. Playing D&D was a training ground for our imaginations and an opportunity to explore our own identities.
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Oh and some time bakc Vin bought 800 dollars in D&D stuff from a local hobby store which he said is for research for a secret project. Later he said he was working on a project called Melkor, which is the name of his favorite character, a Drow Elf Witch Hunter. Hmmmmm.
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Post by DKBinNC on Aug 28, 2007 21:22:42 GMT -5
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