We’ve decided that July is Dungeon Master Appreciation Month. Do something nice for your DM during the month of July. After all, your D&D game just isn’t the same without your DM. He or she delights and confounds in slaughtering your player characters on a regular basis, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Of course, despite his biterness, he kept his perspective.  As Monty Python famously sang, “Always look on the bright side of life.”  Cleese does. “I got off lightly,” he said.  ”Think what I’d have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship.”

Oooooh,  burn.

He claimed he’d be “working until he was 80″ to afford it . . . and so guess who wins?  We do!

Never has one woman’s greed and antagonism done so much for so many. I’m dancing in my seat! Now nerds will have *brand new* catchphrases to use when playing D&D.

Of course, back when I used to watch Monty Python, life was harder than it is now.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

Ten! Ten points of damage resistance! Ah ah ah ah aaah!

My brother-in-law (a very smart cat who reads Iron Man) tells me that it’s extremely faithtful to the comic, and I understand that it’s the first of a new series of comic films that Marvel bet the bank on — rather than license the characters, they ponied up the money themselves. So good on ‘em, it’s a fantastic movie.

But Favreau? From the LA Times:

Some filmmakers get their start making shaky home movies, others catch the bug in a high school drama class or maybe through an art institute where they put paint to canvas. Favreau has more of an eight-sided education.

“It was Dungeons & Dragons, but I wouldn’t have owned up so quickly a few years ago,” Favreau said sheepishly.

“It’s rough. It’s one of the few groups that even comic-book fans look down on. But it gave me a really strong background in imagination, storytelling, understanding how to create tone and a sense of balance. You’re creating this modular, mythic environment where people can play in it.”

He goes on about his gamer shame, and how he had to put D&D aside because it was holding him back socially (read: nobody gets laid playing D&D).

“When I was young, it was exciting, but as I got older it felt like it was keeping me from progressing. You’re social in your small circle, but it’s asocial to the wider world.”

Before we all spit on him, let’s remember that there were a lot of gamers of our generation that couldn’t handle being nerds. We just didn’t care about what the dominant paradigm was doing because we were ant1s0c1aL.

The entertainment industry in LA is populated mostly by (white) people from anywhere other than California who desperately, painfully, truly need to be popular. After all, what is fame, but a big, fat ‘hey guy’ from all the people who . . . like you . . . right now, they like you.”

Okay . . . now we can spit on him.

Great movie though, I hope he gets Iron Man II.

This week, I’ve been at a game manufacturers convention supporting Shifting Skies Games, a gaming start-up that has their first game in production. I’m just the graphic designer on the project– not even the illustrator (read: no gamer cachet whatsoever), but the other person who was supposed to attend couldn’t make it, and in exchange for a trip to Las Vegas, I agreed to play convention-booth wingman.

Conventions kind of suck, huh? For the game company, it was actually a great trip– Boyan (the designer) got to refine his “elevator pitch” by giving it a hundred times to other manufacturers and retailers. We got to see how the guys who put games on shelves reacted to the premise and target market of the game, and it was very positive. But from a standing-around-talking-to-strangers point of view, it was pretty painful. By the end of the second day, Boyan and I were just mocking ourselves, going around making gunfingers and trying to be as cheesy as possible. We cracked ourselves up.

But I didn’t just put finger to keyboard to share a slice of my working life with you. I am here to offer you an accounting of my encounters with the most obnoxious slice of white America; Las Vegas is like a Douchebag Petting Zoo.

Monday:
When I first arrived in Las Vegas, my impression was that the strip was an overrated obnoxious tourist trap populated by chain-smoking degenerate gamblers where you have to pay $11.95 for a $5.00 sandwich. That evening, we hung at the Excalibur and spent $20.00 a round on drinks and second-hand smoked about a pack of everyone else’s cigarettes.

And in case you cannot quite visualize my situation, I’ve created a handy diagram for you:

And here was the highlight of the decoration: a ten-foot tall plastic Merlin that . . . wait for it[/ . . . actually rotated!

What you can’t see are all the degenerate gamblers playing the slots ‘neath Merlin’s beguiling gaze. Hark, is that a tinny rendition of Camptown Ladies emerging from yonder brightly lit device! Verily, I think it is! By the Flowing Mullet of Steven, I shall tame this beast if it takes me five hundred dollars in quarters to bring it to heel!

Tuesday:

Wake up feeling like I’d spent the night before licking the Pink Panther’s ass. I searched the casino, and discovered a Krispy Kreme and a McDonalds, but can’t find anywhere that sells asprin.

Drag ass into convention. Our booth is the least-decorated, least flashy, least actual product having booth in the entire con. But we have 24 bottles of water, and a game that’s actually fun to play (yes, I’m talking to you “Caribbean Monopoly,” so fuck what you think. Oh, look, gamers. Repeat as necessary.

Wandering around the con, I see what could quite possibly be the perfect CK game: The Paranoia Mandatory Bonus Fun Card Game: Save the computer, die a lot.

ME (to The Mongoose Guy): Wow, that looks hot. When is that game coming out?

TMG (English accent): Last year, actually.

ME: Oh.

ME: . . .

ME: Well, shows how tuned in I am.

TMG: Sounds like I’m going to have to fire my marketing guy.

By Tuesday evening, we realized that the Excalibur was just kind of ghetto (sorry Galahad, it’s true– you and Percival ought to . . . you know, do the fabulous thing and re-decorate or something) and we figured out that we should move “up-strip.” So up we went to Treasure Island/Madalay Bay. Okay, first impressions good . . . there were definitely less morbidly obese people playing slots with an oxygen tank in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

At Treasure Island, I realized that my initial impression about Las Vegas was wrong. In fact, the strip was actually an overrated obnoxious tourist trap populated by chain-smoking degenerate gamblers where you have to pay $14.95 for your $5.00 sandwich.

Fuck Las Vegas; in bed by 9pm. Wake up feeling pretty damned human.

Wednesday:
Gamers. Repeat. I curl into a corner and work on some other projects and try to pretend that I’m in my happy place.

Overwhelmed by the sheer corniness of pitching the market angles of your labor of love to everyone that comes by, Boyan and I begin to brainstorm a new game: Gunfingers: the Art of the Deal, where all the players play marketing weenies who have to use uber-cheesy phrases to close the deal, and sabotage the competition. You would punctuate your sentences by pointing at everyone. It would be funny because it’s true.

We started adopting fake laughs and calling each other “guy.”

By Wednesday evening, I was all set to just say, “fuck Las Vegas,” and get some good reading done, but instead we went to the Paris casino, which was actually pretty cool. It has a high ceiling, good air circulation, and isn’t a psycho mind-fuck claustrophobic maze designed to lubricate the part of the mind that separates drunks from their money.

The bartender takes a shine to us, and feeling sheepish about charging $17.00 for drinks, pours us triples. The lounge area is comfortable, has the Suns game on, and has the first genuinely attractive women that we’ve seen since arriving in Las Vegas. We sit for a minute, stroll around the casino, and return in time to see the house band start their show– they play covers of 70s funk and soul music. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I loves me some old-school soul, so I’m growing very happy at this point. Our guy left the bar, so our pours didn’t stay as generous, but the service was fast and the band was really good. They could play, and they looked like they were having a good time as well.

For whatever reason, “Jungle Love” was clearly the band’s favorite song. Even the stoic drummer had a big grin on his face. Oweeeeoweeeoh! Girl I wanna know ya (know ya)!

We eventually figured out that all of the attractive women in this area were friends with one of the singers from the band; she was a cutie herself, but at a metaphysical level she was like this spiritual gravity center for hot women. I don’t claim to understand the intricacies of the whole deal, but God As My Witness, I sat there and watched it unfold.

After the band finished, I went and told the band how much fun they were and that if they ever needed a designer, they should contact me. I didn’t give them the gunfingers, but you know I thought about it.

If you haven’t been able to comment on my blog previously (due to it being on a pay-to-play site), now you can.

Just remember– if D&D were real life, you’d be doing everything you could to grab experience points.