Since 1979 the role-playing industry has put a few more clothes on female characters, granted them a modicum of agency, and also learned a bit more about apostrophes.
One of the early motivating factors for my personal interest in Dungeons & Dragons was a cousin of mine, ten years older than I, who owned most of the original hardcover books—by which I mean Advanced D&D, before the onset of editions—and was a victim of my ceaseless harassment. All I ever wanted was to borrow or read through said books, and so he was the target of more than a little impatience.
Given the chance, I would pore over them voraciously, knowing every moment counted. I would blow off any and all other offerings, sit down with all those words and charts and bizarre ‘70s pictures and get to work hard-coding its data into my brain for later recollection.
This process was the genesis of a life-long love of role-playing games, one which has afforded me some of my most treasured memories, most exciting moments, and has engineered some of my life’s greatest joys and satisfactions. But the obsession had to begin somewhere.
One Christmas, when my cousin returned to Melbourne from Sydney, I remember awaiting his arrival with particular trepidation. The event was in Melbourne, but he had been deployed northward since joining the Royal Australian Air Force; the Australian military has little interest in the even-more-antipodean southern regions of the country. What we lack in strategic significance, we have more than made up for in culture and taste.
On reflection it therefore still seems surprising whence, of all things, he taught me the meaning of au fait, a phrase I knew only phonetically for many years until I stumbled across the term written in a book or article and put two and two together. He had learned it in his unit, where it was yet another way of offering obeisance to a superior; “yes, sir, I am au fait with that, thank you, sir.”
Another recent discovery of mine, in proximity to that time, was that it’s polite not to annoy the shit out of someone just to get what you want. So, I’d bitten my tongue for a month or so, hoping that he’d remembered to bring his D&D collection with him so I could entertain my bi-annual absorption of material.
Looking at this now, words that leap to mind are ‘cryptic’, ‘arcane’, ‘impenetrable, ‘dense’ and perhaps most of all, ‘unnecessary’. Yet it was not always so.
To my immense relief, he had brought them, though for some reason he wouldn’t hand them over right away (as my well-nurtured impatience assumed, or at least fantasised, he would). It should be noted at this juncture that my sister and I were very close to him at this time—he is an only child—and we spent countless hours as children playing together. He was a pseudo-sibling in many respects, and more than a few of my habits and behaviours are modelled from his own. Not least of which is being prepared to appear somewhat childish, goofing around for hours, even as an adult. To the extraordinary delight, of course, of younger company.
So I had to believe this was one of those older almost-sibling lessons I was required to learn from him, where he, the wise sage of twenty-two, would school his twelve-year old cousin in the ways of perseverance and discipline. Qualities I expect he himself had learned only recently. But, I knew it would be worth it, and so I endured the torturous wait: my stoicism would be rewarded. That was the deal, right? The point of patience was to receive an offering with dignity, rather than inflicting enough irritation to induce a frustrated and premature capitulation. I would learn this lesson.
And so it went, for so long that I can no longer recall the specific span he made me wait. Was this some kind of purgatorial torture? An existential confrontation with the nature of time itself? I still remember being uncertain about what kind of behaviour might be appropriate while I waited. Should I retire to a bedroom and try to sleep the time off? No—there’s no way I could rest my mind. Perhaps talk to my family instead? No—I had nothing on my mind but the stack of D&D books sitting in a bag somewhere in my grandparent’s home, where this communal gathering occurred.
The time dragged on and on and on, burdened by a gnawing sensation of impatience. Every minute was like a doddering elder wandering nearby, knowing and taunting, consciously delaying their approach because as a child you have no recourse to insist on haste. It remains as painfully fresh to me now as if I’d endured it only last year. I employed countless methods to satiate my restlessness, yet none proved effective.
There are two common means of responding to an abstraction of time; we bide our time and patiently remain, perhaps sitting with the discomfort of our impatience or practicing discipline and putting particular thoughts out of our mind. Or, we kill time and seek a swift resolution. On that day, I learned why the second iteration is so appealing, and why it involves cold blooded murder. Time may wait for no one but—by the entire D&D pantheon—I sure had to. If I had to guess, my cousin made me wait at least fifteen minutes.
And so the time came, and he sat me down to hand over the books. The lesson about patience was becoming a little sore, and I couldn’t understand what the point of the sudden ritual was. Why not hand them over and be done with it? Now that I am a father, it occurs to me that I train my son the same way; dangle something in front of him which he wants and—lo and behold—I receive the desired behaviour in return. So it was for me, sitting patiently, pondering to myself whether I would break from tradition and read the Player’s Handbook first, or even one of the Monster Manuals, before my most beloved Dungeon Master’s Guide.
If I’m truthful, it isn’t really the wait that I remember from that day, though I can still recall my cousin’s arrival up the front stairs of my grandparents’ house as though it is a photograph sitting in front of me. That’s how much the anticipation of his arrival has been burned into my recollection. But it was what happened next which truly enshrined that day in my memory. He said—and bizarrely I can’t even remember his precise words—that because he never got time to play any more, I should hold on to them.
Hold on to them. It may not even have been that exact phrase, but it meant… they were mine. Not permanently, he stressed, but after that I could only nod, and agree, and there may have in fact been some deal with Mephistopheles or a requirement to endure the Ninth Circle of Hell or something which would see me haunted by the Hound of Ill-Omen for the rest of my waking days but I was up for it because these books would stay with me.
At last, I had unfettered access to what in my pre-teen mind were several tomes which contained the most important knowledge civilisation had ever produced. That Christmas remains—hands down, without peer—the greatest ever Christmas I’ve ever experienced. I remember nothing else about it. And, the books weren’t even, technically, a present. And, I had a Christmas as an eight-year-old for which my entire extended family chipped in to get me all five or six sets of the lion-Voltron toys in one overwhelming blast of awesome. So it has stiff competition.
But nothing else comes close. That was the day which, for me, the apex of gift-giving had come and subsequently gone. I knew it; my expectations hence have been inexorably lowered and for good reason. That’s the power of Dungeons & Dragons.