Magic And… D&D

After last weekend’s Order of the Stick gaming, I didn’t think it could get any better, but this weekend Miranda wanted to try playing Magic: The Gathering, and then we tried our hand at playing a simple D&D-style roleplaying game as a family today. If this is a phase she’s going through, I’m glad it came and I hope it stays a while.

The last time I got to play Magic was in 2002. I’ve had the cards since then, and a couple of years ago Miranda got them out and was interested in looking at the artwork and sharing and trading with some boys at TMC, but didn’t want to play. Out of the blue, she asked to play on Saturday morning. She made a green deck and a blue deck, and I made a red deck and a white deck. We had fun and each of us won some and lost some. Her green deck fared pretty well, while my white deck went undefeated.

Today was another miserable day, just above freezing and wet. I had had a bit of a worry about my left calf since Friday evening: it had been feeling tight like when I had the thrombosis back in 2014. I was cramped in a middle seat on my way home from Winnipeg, and was worried that I was facing another clot. Today it was fine, but I was wary of taking a risk. With time on our hands and Ian suffering with a cold, I decided to act on something that Jeff had talked about when we visited this summer.

Jeff had mentioned that he had tried a bit of Dungeons and Dragons with Katya and Alyosha. My antennae twitched at that: D&D was a game I’d tried to interest Miranda and Tammy in a few years ago. I’d even bought the red box starter game, but it hadn’t gone anywhere. He explained that he hadn’t tried to play by the rules. He just started telling them a story with a cave and some treasure and the kids had been encouraged to role play. He rolled a die every once in a while to see if something random would happen, but not doing “hit dice” or anything like that.

I’d thought about that and mentioned it at the dinner table last weekend. And today I put it into motion. I had a bit of a story to start with, and we spent quite a bit of time helping everybody develop some characters for the game. Maybe I tried too hard with Ian to come up with a compelling back story, because he cried a bit as he was imagining it. But in the end, Kaz, Astrid and Steve started their adventure in the port city on the Inner Sea.

It went pretty well, but it was clear when it was time to put it aside for next time. Ian started being a bit goofy. Too bad, because they were just about to find the treasure after defeating the bandits.

It was enough to make me not feel too bad about not riding for the second weekend in a row.