Old Man

Recently, listening to a discussion about how easy it can be in a big city, like the one I live in, to just go out and find a D&D game, I can't say I disagree. I know of a bar where they play on large wooden tables; two game stores where they play on folding tables; and I suppose either the university or the city college must have some kind of club that I could get into, alumni or no. But public D&D isn't what it used to be for me, and hasn't been since I passed 55.

First and foremost, there's food. There's something immensely comforting not just in being able to go to one's own fridge, pantry or coffee maker for sustenance during a game, there's the pleasure of eating it on plates or in one's own bowls or from one's own cup. Invariably, out of the house, there's a limitation on what can be had; on how much it costs; on how it's served, or for that matter policed by the space. I've done the thing where chips aren't allowed or where the pop has to be in-house or there's no coffee or tea at all allowed, because we can't bring it in from somewhere else. Not everywhere has all these rules, but surely something is disallowed... which is understandable, because it's not my home. Their place, their rules. Which only makes it clear that I want to play in my place, by my rules.

Next, it's seating. Thirty years ago I could comfortably sit on a wooden bench with no back, or a cheap grungy school chair, without discomfort. Now, not so much. At home I have a nice comfy chair with an extra cushion, with arm rests, that I can ignore for five or six hours... but there's nothing more distracting that having the points of one's hip bone being aggravated by a bench that consists of a log that's been split, planed and lacquered to give that "je ne sais quoi" that makes one wish for a sofa. The solution, of course, is painkillers: two every two hours, tempting the death of one's liver, so that the seating can be ignored and the game run with focus.

The aspirin, however, will not solve the larger problem: heat. As one gets to be an old man, that old self-generated furnace that used to be stoked on its own body-fat just doesn't run like it used to. Add that to rooms specifically designed to be enormous enough to manage the sound, the multiple tables, the need to turn the air over continously and the need for younger people to rate the ambience at 68-degrees (19 celsius). I appreciate that need. I had it once myself. In younger days, yes, I could play in a school cafeteria large enough to fit two tennis courts, with a 12-foot room, sitting in a plastic-and-green steel chair, while perfectly comfortable. Now, I'm pulling a jacket overtop my sweater overtop my t-shirt and still rubbing my hands together so I can nimbly handle the dice. My place might be a little warm for the players, but they can always open the patio door, even in the winter time, and even go outside if it gets to be too much. I have no option in a public space to do the same, since the door is 60 feet away; half the time the door only leads to a hall that costs another hundred feet to get outside, where one might warm himself in the sun like a lizard... if it isn't raining.

Then there's the noise. My space has carpets, large wooden furniture, paintings that soak reverberation and a stucco ceiling. The lighting is soft, pleasant and adjustable... as opposed to the cafeteria like space that is hard tile, hard laminate tables, acoustic ceiling tiles that largely fail and a constant thrum that can always be heard despite the echoes of ten groups of players shouting at DMs. I hear just fine; I don't have a problem there. But while once I could sit and play in a room with sixty or eighty like players, nowadays it's the headache that follows, that again acetaminophen just can't quite cut.

All this comes well before the strangers themselves must be considered. But the point of this is not to talk about the strangers I might play with... because long before that, long before I meet them, I'm already uncomfortable. In a way that I can do nothing about.

Contrariwise, as one accumulates nice things, as the world around one's space becomes that much more aesthetic, one begins to wonder just who should be invited home. Once upon a time, when I owned a formica table with a broken leg that could easily be kicked out, when people sat on benches found in dumpsters, when the cups were plastic, and the carpet a shag-variety that had been tramped down for ten years by former residents, a food-fight could have broken out and we'd have laughed about it. But now I get antsy about people who won't use a coaster rather than set their dripping coffee on my hardwood game table. It's silly, I know. But you work to own these things, you care about them, you hope to keep them in good condition for the short time you have left on this planet... you sort of want the kind of players who have their own nice things and know how to care for them. The last thing needed is some rube who, at forty, is still living in assisted housing.

This is the part where the gentle reader nods their head and thinks, "Yeah, old man, can't deal with a little noise or a less-than-plush chair. Poor guy. Might just as well shoot himself now."

To which I reply with the old man's taunt. "If you're lucky, and you don't die, one day you will walk in my shoes."