It’s been a slow weekend here at The Dice Bag. I’m off to Sweden for a few days this coming week so I’ve had a lot of prep for that but every time I thing about roleplaying I keep getting the same image in my head and I have a slow chuckle to myself.

I’m told everyone has moments like this during games but I swear I’m sure it’s only me that gets hit with them.

The prime example is the memory that keeps coming back to me this weekend. It was a Saturday afternoon, I was 15 and and staying over at my friend Frank’s house. We didn’t have a game planned for that weekend so I was working out a quick single-shot game based Terry Pratchett’s Discworld that had been published in a short lived RPG magazine. The plan was to get some characters drawn up and run the game once one of our other friends turned up later that night. Anyway there was a knock at the back door and who should enter but Frank’s cousin who had been our first DM all those years before. He was on leave from the army again and had heard we were about and so he’d brought his Rolemaster books and our characters along to see if we fancied a game that night. We settled down with our bottles of juice and our sweets and waited for him to start the game.

Frank’s cousin always played with the strangest music playing in the background. This night we were in for something different though as he put on his most prized possession. He carefully placed the tape into the player and when he pressed play Jim Morrison was giving us a spoken word tour of his drug addled brain. Several joints later our DM was struggling to keep the game from becoming real in his head and constantly stopping mid-sentence to let us hear his favourite bit of the tape. Usually when our illustrious DM was in these states we enjoyed the ride as we usually ended up with homosexual dungeonmasters from the cartoon that could chop their head off and heal it back up without magic or other weird and wonderful things that only drugs could produce. In this case we just sat staring at each other as he worked himself into a fever over the meaning of every second line on the tape.

We were just getting to the point in the game where you would usually start tooling up and getting ready for the final monster when the sound started to break up. Our DM sat bolt upright, spun around to the tape player and burst into tears. The machine started to eat his precious tape and he was in tears as he tried to press the eject button with little success. Frank tried to help and after a few more minutes they both just gave up and our DM collapsed onto the floor in the foetal position crying to himself. There was nothing we could do for him so we left him to it and went through to watch some TV. We were two 15 year old boys that spent our weekends playing Dungeons and Dragons. We had no social skills so I’m not surprised we left him to it. We went back through to the kitchen about 30 minutes later to find him asleep on the floor so again we left him to it.

About an hour later Joe turned up so we retired to Franks bedroom and started the one-shot game I’d been writing. It was great fun and when you have skills such as ‘hang upside down from chandilier and swing axe’ you can’t go wrong. About half way through the game our dopehead DM came and joined us. You would never have thought that a few hours previously his world had ended. He was laughing away and really enjoying the game and to this day I do not think anyone of us has actually mentioned the tape incident to him whenever we’ve came across him.