Drunk Dungeons & Dragons (DD&D)

It had been a long campaign but finally the companions arrived back at the town of their birth, Sandpoint. The relief on the townspeople’s faces was overwhelming and the clear pride they felt was something beautiful to behold. Surely, these strapping men couldn’t be the same unsure boys that left the land of the birth a mere three months ago? Surely no transformation could be this fast or total.

“Guys, hold on a second, I have to do something real fast.”

That was me. I’d been playing D&D via Skype using Maptools for the last few months with a couple of childhood friends. We all live in different cities and this was the best way to get together and we did it every Sunday from 5 in the evening until roughly 11 at night. It was a great way to keep in touch and it was a great way to keep imaginative childhood habits alive. Every Sunday I was excited to “play.”

“Ok,” George said. “Let’s just take five then.”

I went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. Behold! Two bottles of white wine donated from my neighbor who’s a liquor distributor. He’s liquor flush at all times. I am the grateful receiver of that overflow. I chose a bottle, Chardonnay maybe? I don’t recall. I open it. I pour a glass. The five minute break comes to an end and we reconvene. The adventure begins in earnest.

Two hours later, I’m having an amazing time. Everything is funny. The roleplaying banter is at an all time high. Characterization of my fighter is really coming along. We’ve built up some back story out of nowhere. Everyone is happy. I go to pour myself another glass of RPG fuel and lo the well is dry.

“Guys, hold on a second, I have to do something real fast.”

“Ok,” George says. “Let’s take another five minute break.”

I open the fridge and see that it’s going to be Reisling this time. Usually not good to end the night with a sweet wine because it gives me indigestion but what the hell, I’m a 10th level fighter and I just picked up the Great Cleave feat. I cannot be stopped.

About another hour into playing and I start to get tired and George and Brad start to notice my speech isn’t what it was just a few hours ago.

“Eric, are you drinking?” This is George asking me this. For some reason I lie even though he’s known me since I was 12 and will absolutely know that I’m lying.

“Nah dude. I’m just getting tired.”

It was after the second half of the second bottle that things started to get pretty choppy. I hadn’t really eaten much for dinner because I hadn’t been hungry before we started playing. I’d pretty much just been noshing on cheddar for the last few hours to fight the pangs. It was also at this point that the culmination of our entire evening occurred. Some background.

In this campaign we were fighting Frost Giants and in this particular campaign world (Pathfinder) these Frost Giants were the descendants of slaves who had been also been experimented on with cruel magics to both make them more maleable and more powerful. As a result, what had been a wise, gentle, and creative race only 1,000 years ago was now one of the more brutish and cruel races in the world. We’d been fighting them the last two playing sessions and I’d already killed probably 20 of them on my own but when a group of them approached the gates of our home town of Sandpoint and began attacking the main gate I just didn’t have the heart to really go out and fight them.

George was noticeably annoyed.

“It’s not their fault,” I insisted. “They’re not really like this. They’re just trying to do right by their people and we went and invaded their land and took some of their stuff and they want it back.”

Imagine that slurred horribly as the evening’s game time is coming to a close and George’s wife is expecting him to sign off and come to bed. George was patient though, he was.

“Well Eric, there’s nothing you can do about that right now. They’re at the gate and the magic used to change them 1,000 years ago is way more powerful than anything the group is capable of. You’re going to have to kill them or they’ll kill you.”

I insisted we try to speak with them, reason with them, remind them who they are in their core. In reply, I get a boulder thrown at me while I stand atop the town battlements.

“This is so unfair to them. It’s not right!”

George gets over his patience. He has them break the gate down. They kill two lesser town guards, 1 hit die peeps with no importance whatsoever.

“Well, now they’re killing your townspeople so what are you going to do.”

I just know he’s going to force the issue by bringing my fighter’s love interest onto the scene any minute or something equally implausible. She’s only third level. She’d be dead in seconds. I go down off the battlements. I tell the Frost Giants that I’m sorry. I kill one while Brad’s wizard kills the other two with a fireball. There they lay, two are burned to a crisp, the third is disemboweled.

George and Brad say good night and log off. I get up, realize how drunk I am and go throw up in the toilet. I have to call in the next day. George fills me in on what happened because I can’t remember a good chunk of it.

“You were really relating to those Frost Giants last night, man.” He laughs. “To tell you the truth though, I knew where you were coming from.”

“Yeah, I really felt like we should have freed them somehow.”

Two months on into the campaign we do free them, all of them. It’s glorious. Unfortunately we killed like 500 of them in order to free them. I didn’t drink anymore when we played. I just get too worked up.