nce in junior high I decided to enter a Dungeons and Dragons contest sponsored by my dad's place of work, McDonnell Douglas. It was mainly for the adult employees of the company, many of whom were still playing in the early 80s, but technically any family member of an employee could also enter. Dad knew how much I loved D&D, so he signed me up and drove me to the main campus' cafeteria one Friday night.
It was a really fascinating experience. I, like most junior-high-schoolers, had been playing D&D mostly as an excuse to amass power. My friends and I would bump our characters up to 20th and 30th level status when no one was around, claiming that it had happened during campaigns in other subdivisions with guys from school the other people didn't know. It had reached such ridiculous proportions that our "games" had instead become exercises in building impossibly-dangerous dungeons which existed only to kill off each others' all-powerful characters.
The adults at the tournament that night were the gaming equivalent of policy wonks. These guys were interested in D&D only for the game itself and how to best play it, not for the fake accumulation of treasures and hit points and spells. The men (they were all men) playing that night knew the 300-page rulebook like the back of their hand, and they were constantly quoting some obscure tidbit buried away in a back chapter in order to save their ass from impending doom. And it worked!
The tournament worked like this: there was a dungeon that had been especially designed for that evening, to ensure that no one had seen or played it before. Competitors were split into teams of eight, and each team would then be forced to work as a group for the greater good. Competitors were assigned one of eight low-level stock characters, the same eight for each team, which were specifically designed to challenge the player's wits and survival skills. All the eight-player teams played the same dungeon at the same time throughout the room, accumulating a complicated series of points based on what monsters they killed, what treasures they grabbed, what secrets they found and how many players stayed alive. At the end of a prescribed period of time, play would be called off and whichever team had accumulated the most points would be declared the winners, each of those eight taking home a prize.
It was really hard! This was D&D like I had never played it before, surviving not through a series of spells and powerful weapons but through my instinct and intelligence alone. I was one of the only kids at the tournament that night, and the other seven guys on my team collectively groaned when they saw that I had been paired with them. But I held my own-dare I say it, even added a bit to the collective good of the group-and when time was called I was still alive, albeit with only one hit point left and currently in the middle of a battle that surely would've killed me if it had lasted even another five minutes.
We won. Another team across the room had almost the exact number of points as ours, but it was determined that having all eight members of our team still alive was the tiny edge that pushed us over the top. I won a $20 gift certificate to a local hobby store. I bought a box full of miniature pewter Dungeons & Dragons characters, which I then painstakingly hand-painted with tiny brushes and showed off at school the next month. It was the coolest!
