::A Geek in Korea::

My D&D group has found a neutral place for gaming that won’t force any of our wives, or significant others to evacuate their houses if we want to play. While we have no problem with our inherent nerdiness, our spouses and significant others flee at the sight of a 20 sided dice being rolled on a table. No female has ever witnessed me playing D&D…until now.

It’s in a restaurant with private booths, and waitresses dressed up like Little Red Riding Hood. I have no idea what the theme of this place is supposed to be besides innocent, rustic charm. Here we are ruining it by creating epic battles in one of their back rooms with dice. The booths in the restaurant have white boards. These are meant for students studying, businessmen in a meeting, or bored children. It works out really well for us to play. We take them off the wall and draw the maps directly on the board.

We can rent the rooms for several hours, and all we need to do is buy a cup that allows for unlimited refills of drinks. We also get a cup of free ramyeon, or cookies if we want included in the price of the room. It’s more convenient that any place that should be legally allowed to be. Not only do we get a place to play, but cheap food and all the drinks we want? Awesome. If we go over three hours on our reserved room, we pay a pitance per 30 minutes to keep the room. The manager always approaches our table carefully, as if we’d fly off in a rage when we learn we need to pay 1000 won an hour. Please.We need four people to hold a room, which is perfect too, because we can squeeze everyone inside and just play.

We’ve played in this restaurant’s booths for the past two games and they’ve gone swimmingly well. Everyone ignores the people around us and we cheer for high rolls, groan after low rolls, and sound out gruesome deaths and murders. I get into character whenever anyone does anything particularly amusing.  Some of the players were talking about moving into the actual room surrounded by people instead of getting a booth if it meant better air conditioning. I’m as used to being stared at as the next foreigner, but I’d still prefer a booth to be truthful if I have to pretend to be a dying orge.

I’ve been the Dungeon Master for both games, as we’ve switched to the most recent D&D 4.0 edition. Everyone else was trying to make their new characters before learning the DM rules. I’ve approached the situation backwards, learning the DM rules via Podcast and also via the free materials at the offical site.If no one is going to learn to DM, all the players in the world won’t matter. While I took on the DM last time as a chore and something of a challenge, I’m willfully volunteering my service for DM using the 4.0 rules.

I have as much fun running the encounter as I do playing the game from the other side of the table now. It’s so much easier now that their is prepared material I don’t have to write. There were adventures for the past rule sets too, but the new material is really nice and easy to use. We could potentially use our crop of free materials for the next few levels and never have to do the hard stuff ourselves. If I wanted to go back to writing custom adventures, I could still do that more easily than before, but right now the situation doesn’t demand it, as there is a plethora of materials to draw from, and more arriving all the time.

We scrapped a plan that was going to have us end the story line of our last set of characters dramatically and thematically and made a clean break for the new rules. I get to keep my epic storyline for a later date, and I can use the much easier 4.0 rules to host adventures that have been pre-written for me. I’ll be much more experienced as a DM by the time we’re ready to tackle that story line again.

I’ve been relishing my role as the arbiter of rules and the killer of characters. I’ve murdered one ranger, which happens to be the first time any DM had brought down a character from the party. In the last encounter we had, I had two characters on the ropes, and it was only because of some lucky dice roles in the clutch that they were able to save the day. I had wicked rolls the entire day, while my players rolled for nearly nothing.

Karma will probably balance that our shortly enough. I ordered an entire pound of dice from the Internet so that I can DM without borrowing dice from others, as well as provide other people with dice if we can find another player. We’re also trying to get officially recognized as a play group by the organizers of Living Forgotten Realms, which would set us up with free play material forever. We’d even impact the world we adventured in, like a twisted sort of massively multiplayer role playing game played in small groups around the real world. Considering the last officially recognized team of any kind I ever participated in was a bowling team in 5th grade, that’s pretty awesome.