Invite the crabman to all your parties

The cardboard box from my original D&D set disintegrated long ago, but I still have the second box set, the blue one with a yellow banner in the upper left corner proclaiming it the “Expert Set” in fancy lettering. It is emblazoned with the figure of a male wizard, fully clad, evidently fantasizing about the female wizard in all her globular glory on the first box set. I also have the book of Player Character Record Sheets with tear out pages. We were on the cusp of the Xerox revolution - when I bought these with my allowance money, the prospect of making and using photocopies was only a couple of years away. And so it is that I have this booklet with about a quarter of the sheets filled out in pencil, complete with portraits drawn in my childlike hand, for characters that I rolled up but never used. Evidently I really liked multi-classing back then. Another quarter were torn out and used for games, and fully half the booklet is blank, because I had begun to use photocopiers. 

I played throughout junior high school and a little bit in high school, and along the way I got a lot of the books: Player’s Hand Book, DM Guide, Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, and Deities and Demigods. The last one has the copyrighted material from the Melnibonéan and H.P. Lovecraft oeuvres in it that got TSR into trouble.  I still have all of these. Leafing through the Fiend Folio, I find myself having a good laugh at the crabman entry. It’s so very... Monty Python. The neutral “oriental dragons” section is intriguing - and not entirely without precedent since there are entire pantheons ripped from multiple cultures around the world. It’s also the first time I recollect seeing the drow - a race that came to figure large in the official “cannon” fantasy book series based on the D&D universe. 

As I slogged my way through high school, my gaming waned. It wasn’t that I had lost interest. I just couldn’t afford it.

I had my own troubles. I don’t want to spend much time at all on the facts of my troubled childhood. I was a child of divorce and my mother had undiagnosed mental illness. She remarried a couple of times, finally to a man who was likewise not a paragon of mental health. I am fortunate in that I had an effective safety net of extended family, but even with their best efforts, it afforded survival, not a surfeit of happiness and productivity.

On top of this, I had rip roaring cases of undiagnosed ADD-inattentive and dyscalculia. I’ve been definitively diagnosed now, but back then? That just didn’t happen. First of all, I was a girl. “Girls don’t have attention deficit disorder.” Second, I had no behavioral/social component to my disorder other than day-dreaming. And given my home life, nobody who knew my situation thought that my day-dreaming was anything other than a much needed survival technique. As a result, I was a contradiction in terms. My grades were an utter disaster, but I demonstrated ability and talent in non-traditional ways that were recognized. The dichotomy between my GPA and all other measures of success could give a person whiplash, but this was an era where the GPA was king and all other data was secondary. 

I desperately wanted to succeed. I knew I needed to escape the madhouse of my home life by getting into a college far away. I hated myself for my failures, and placed myself under enormous stress. I worked off a lot of that stress by spending time in the dance studio, dancing competitively. It was time out of the house. When I had my leotard on, i stopped being me, and became a body in a mirror, another set of legs in a kick line. A good beat drowns out a lot of misery if you play it loud enough. 

And to complicate matters, I stopped looking like a child. As an athletic teen, I started getting asked out on dates. And I also started fielding uncomfortable comments around the gaming table. I was faced with choices I didn’t like: 1) giggling like a fool at my own despoilment, 2) getting righteously indignant, playing the shrew or prude and providing fuel for other people’s fun, or 3) dealing in retaliatory humor laced with venom designed to sting and to scar. And amongst my female peers, I was lucky in that I had that third choice. Not everyone can come back reliably with a snappy reply that hurts like hell. I can think on my feet. But make no mistake - that was due in large part to training. It was my only defense against my similarly armed mother. The truth is, I was (and to a certain extent, still am) wary of becoming like her. Zingers that miss aren’t effective, so I didn’t pull punches, but zingers that hit home made me very uneasy whenever I stopped to think about how it would feel to be on the receiving end. 

And so, despite the potential for creativity and spontaneity that D&D offered, I found I couldn’t afford the price tag. I couldn’t afford the time commitment given how poorly I was doing in school, and I couldn’t afford to take on any unnecessary battles for my own dignity. I had plenty of those without seeking out more. The D&D books got put in a box. The dice bag was snugged in next to them.