...and Everything New is Old Again

The next time I picked up the dice I had doubled in age. 

I had also graduated from college, gotten married, finished a strenuous and competitive graduate program and given birth to my first child. I had gone through a lot of therapy to sort out the mess of my childhood and its impact on my adult life. I had decided to change careers and was thinking about expanding our family. It was a new millennium, a new me, and I thought it was time for a new game.

3rd Edition D&D had just been released a year or so prior. 3e was a complete rewrite of D&D, merging basic and advanced versions of the game all into one, completely rewriting the rules and making the d20 supreme. I came back into gaming just as people were getting comfortable with this new monolithic way of playing D&D. I found an established group looking for new gamers through a game store about 30 minutes from my home. All my old books were woefully out of date, so I bought a few new. I was just going to play, after all, and not DM. I sweet talked a friend from grad school into joining me. Once again, I was one of two females in a room full of guys. 

We actually all got along great. I had an ace in the hole that worked really well. Occasionally someone would veer off into grossly inappropriate territory (I’m no prude, rules are simple - sex can be funny, rape can’t). I would then use my verbal skills to remind them subtly that I was a mother - a lactating mother for shit’s sake. I kept it authentic and held back on the venom, and they would get sheepish and we would move on. In fact, I noticed that this pattern of staying mellow but holding boundaries had a long-term effect, a bunch of the guys ultimately really relaxed about that stuff and became much more thoughtful over time about how they approached female characters, PC or NPC. It became less of an issue the longer we played. I bought the 3.5 update to the Players Hand Book. I had a second child. I knit myself a new dice bag. 

But then, that relaxation led to more difficult terrain. One person in particular - the DM - had a really difficult time. By this time in my life I’d had a lot of miles on my psyche. I never had been about keeping up with the Jones’, but my delve into motherhood made me value authenticity to an even greater degree. I kept shit real, and because I had seen a lot of unkindness, I tried to keep my shit kind and empathetic, too. Most people are trying pretty damn hard. In after-game conversations I ultimately found out that this guy had suffered some serious abuse in childhood. I was the first person he had ever interacted with who wasn’t full of barriers, who had dealt with their own significant pile of shit head on. Who had come through hell, but didn’t use “white knuckling” or maladaptive techniques as their primary means of action. In other words, I had been traumatized, but had gone through therapy enough to heal and be functional. He began to trust me.

Understandably this dude was fascinated by how I handled nastiness. It started as a game. He’d do something aggressive in-game to my character. And I would calmly call him on his bullshit. He would try and make a joke out of it, or he would try and deflect, and I would undercut him. Sometimes I would resort to light humor to take any momentum away from him, but I would always follow up with something to pull the conversation back out of the humor zone and back onto the ethics and health of the interaction. It was as if he was poking a bear with a stick, and was astonished when the bear grabbed the stick and whittled a key out of it. With each round of this, he’d ask me questions about the whittling. About the key. It was clear he was going somewhere with this. It really helped that the group had a rapport that had been established over time. Although not everyone actively rose to my aid, I can’t recall a single time when the others in the group sided with the DM.

Like I said, I had plenty of therapy under my belt by this time. My “danger radar” was pinging like crazy. I had a feeling this was much larger than anything I could handle. I started to encourage him to use some of his income to pay for a good quality therapist. I made it very clear that I was happy to point the way, but that I couldn’t walk with him on his path. I had a husband and children. He did not want to hear this. For months we were in detente. At every turn I encouraged him to seek professional help and gave him phone numbers for therapists in his area.

He began to try and tell me things about the abuse he suffered from his family. I would plead with him to get therapy. I would plead with him to not tell me these things - that by involving me, an unqualified layperson, in his unburdening he was actually denying himself the quality of help that he needed, that he deserved. That he was miring his social life with his legitimate health care needs. The horrific nature of the abuse was such that even an experienced and qualified professional would have a hard time, much less someone who was merely the recipient of therapy. But the floodgates had finally opened for him. Decades after his violation, he could not reverse course. He wanted an ear, and he wanted it right now. He became enraged that I refused to be that ear. I remember one night after a game session I was in the driver’s seat of my car and he was outside, sobbing, screaming at me, pounding on my door because I would not stay to listen, because I wanted him to get professional therapy. He threatened to kill me. Kill me because I knew of his violation, of the betrayal he had suffered at the hands of his relatives. I felt terrible for him. But more than that, I felt terrified. This guy was easily 6’ 3” and massive, and all the anger and hurt from those years past we’re now shifted onto me. I knew why it happened. I didn’t blame the guy. But I also knew that the emotions were strong enough that I was in real danger.

I drove away, frightened that he would follow me home. For the next few weeks I was too scared to leave the house alone. Once again the books were put in a box. The dice bag snugged in next to them.