[caption id=”attachment_266” align=”aligncenter” width=”195” caption=”For Every Dungeon There’s a Master”][/caption] Dark Elf of Starbucks So I’m waiting for my Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks when a black lady comes up beside me. I don’t mean an African American lady, I mean a girl painted black all over with pointy ears, snow white hair and a bikini-like outfit from a Conan movie. That’s not the weird part.

The weird part is that the two young baristas ask her what she wants without batting so much as a single eye lid. You see, the customer is dressed up as a Drow (it rhymes with cow and means Dark Elf.)

It’s August in Indianapolis, which means it’s GenCon and the geeks are in town taking up all the hotel rooms and cramming into the convention center to the tune of 20,000 people or so I’ve been told. This is my fourth year at the Con, which touts itself as “The Best Four Days in Gaming.” They have every game you can imagine from Monopoly to Video Games to yes Dungeons and Dragons. Walking around town are Storm Troopers, Anime Vixens, men in kilts (with t-shirts that say “If I was wearing anything underneath, it would be a skirt instead of a kilt”) and women in corsets and fishnet stockings trying to look like the women you see drawn in most comics… you know what I mean. Some can pull it off, most cannot, but it’s all for fun and just about anything goes. [caption id=”attachment_268” align=”aligncenter” width=”240” caption=”Rolling with my homies”][/caption] I’m there for the Convention (why else would I go to Indianapolis?) but my view is very skewed. There are entire jet-plane hangar sized rooms filled with games I’ve never heard of and will never play. My thing is table top RPGs. D&D, some Star Wars and a few others. It’s a chance to get my game on for days at a time, late into the night with like minded strangers from around the world. [caption id=”attachment_265” align=”aligncenter” width=”280” caption=”The 20-sided die is at the heart of Dungeons and Dragons”][/caption] Championship! First up for me is the D&D Open Championship. That’s right, they have a championship for the geekiest of the geeky games. With some friends I make my way to one of the more massive rooms (about the size of a football field) filled with hundreds of tables dedicated to D&D play, where I and my fellow players are sorted into teams, assigned a sanctioned Dungeon Master from the RPGA (Role Playing Gamers Association and indeed he did have to pass a test) and told the rules of the championship. It’s a timed challenge and all we need to do is achieve a series of objectives while not getting killed and not taking more than 45 minutes per challenge. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then I can’t explain it to you easily and if you do know what I’m talking about then you’ll understand when I say it was an absolute meat grinder. Our DM (Dungeon Master) from the Netherlands took great glee in decimating our hastily constructed band of players. We did EVERYTHING wrong and while no one died, I watched in horror as the clock ticked down our final seconds with only one bad guy killed. We were allowed to finish the challenge just for “fun” and an hour later we had finished killing the monsters and completed the task, but at that point it was academic. I’d like to say I had fun, but I did not. It was stressful and I was supposed to be on vacation dammit. I ran several games of my own and soaked up the atmosphere for a few days. It’s a surreal experience watching 20,000+ people, who look pretty much like that comic shop geek from the Simpsons stroll around. There are thousands of events, so many that the event listings are the size of a small phone book. And most of those events are sold out months in advance. This is a motivated fan base with purpose. Unlike ComicCon, GenCon has not yet found a mainstream outlet. This is still by Geeks and for Geeks. There aren’t any famous people there (I don’t count Wil Wheaton; he was there, but I didn’t see him), just gamers and the merchants who sell them things. [caption id=”attachment_269” align=”aligncenter” width=”400” caption=”Graph Paper… it’s not just for math geeks anymore.”][/caption] This year was a bit of a letdown for me. It was my fourth year in a row and perhaps the bloom is off the rose, but despite thousands of things to do, I had a hard time getting my game on. It seems to me that fewer people are running games and that’s an overall trend for the industry I think. The biggest tabletop RPGs ever got was in the 80s and it’s been on the decline since then.  Dungeons and Dragons is still the largest game in the industry it created and to my eye the players are mostly in their thirties and forties, which means it’s all the same players minus the ones who’ve died off (R.I.P. Gary and Dave). Some younger players are present, but for them RPG means a video game. It irritates me to no end that I have to say “tabletop RPG” so people will know what the hell I’m talking about. In my book if you’re not rolling dice it isn’t an RPG. [caption id=”attachment_272” align=”aligncenter” width=”470” caption=”Because sometimes just playing D&D isn’t geeky enough.”][/caption] Geekapalooza Despite being the ultimate geeky pastime, RPGs are a social experience. They can’t be played by yourself. In fact, they work best with four to six players sitting around a table to create a shared experience. This is how I grew up and nothing is as satisfying as playing games together. For my uncles and grandpa it was nickel and dime poker. No one made any money, but they talked a lot of crap and made fun of each other and drank a lot of beer. That’s what it’s like at my game tables too. You get to ply a skill at gamesmanship, but not take it seriously and do it purely for fun. GenCon is like that, but to the extreme. Sometimes the fun gets lost amidst the games and their rules. This year more so than normal. People who don’t understand RPGs always ask how you win. The answer is you don’t (I hate when people say “everyone wins” - that’s just stupid.) The question misses the point. It’s not about the destination. The point, like anything else on the planet, is to have fun while not messing up anyone else’s fun. The trick is not to judge. But it happens to the best of us. When the lady dressed up as a Drow got to the counter at Starbucks she ordered a decaf Iced Green Tea. I thought to myself that’s just ridiculous. Drow don’t drink fucking decaf.