Hulk sad.


Gamer Life General Discussion


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Pathfinder Maps Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I don’t expect I need to tell anyone in this crowd that Stan Lee died today. He made it to the grand age of 95, and I’m sure he was an icon to a lot of people here.

For many in my age bracket, he was more than that; Stan provided refuge. He told you “freak” was nothing but a made-up word once you got to know people. I bet most of us here have a short list of refuge names like Lee or Roddenberry, and several novelists besides. They gave us places to go where we weren’t the weird kid anymore, and we could stay there almost as long as we liked.

Then gaming came along, and we added more names of people we’d likely never meet. Gygax, Arneson, Cook and the rest didn’t just make magic. They gave us textbooks full of strange tables that referenced stranger dice, and they told us we could do it ourselves. Ever since I heard Stan the Man was gone, I’ve been thinking about the names I carry with me like talismans, and I’ve been thinking about this playtest.

Somewhere out there, right now, is a kid who doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know it isn’t supposed to hurt that much. She doesn’t know she’s not alone. They don’t know “freak” is one of a million things people call you when they want to pass their own fear on to someone else and get rid of it. None of them know “freak” is a myth we tell ourselves. Not yet.

They do have their own growing list of anonymous names, I’m sure. I’m plowing through middle age at the moment, so I won’t embarrass myself by trying and getting the names wrong. But there are so rarely enough, and these kids, in whom I see my younger self, well, many don’t know yet that they can make the magic themselves.

When I think about this playtest, especially today, I think about holding a Dungeons & Dragons box in 1982. I think about discovering a world a couple friends and I could build ourselves, where we weren’t weird, we weren’t freaks or nerds, we didn’t even need to fit in. We were heroes. And my younger self, who never had the chance to thank those providers of refuge and magic, would like to thank you folks instead.

Thank you, game developers, for the sleep you’ve lost between July and now, and for enduring all the threads complaining that your work didn’t work right. Thank you, forum people, for the dissections of plus-one-per-level, of wild shape armor class and double slice damage-per-round. Somewhere out there, that kid I was exists again. He/she/they don’t know yet that they’ll pick up a strangely heavy book with a captivating fantasy cast on the cover, then be drawn to the glossy tables full of arithmetic and magic. But they will, soon, and slowly they’ll realize they haven’t just opened a book; they’ve opened a new home. On their behalf, thank you.

And thank you, Stan, for pulling the curtain back on “freak.”

Excelsior!

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