One of the best things about Dungeons and Dragons is that, in order to play the game, you have to play “let’s pretend” a lot. You start with the notion that you have to pretend to be somebody else besides who you really are. Possibly you can pretend to be someone who is impossible and could never be real. You can be an elf, or an orc, or a dwarf… but if you decide to be a hobbit, you can’t call yourself a hobbit because that name is the intellectual property of the Tolkein family… but you can be a halfling… and somehow that gets you by. And if you are, like me, the “Dungeon Master”, it becomes your responsibility to become the voices for all the NPC’s or non-player characters. You get to be a multitude of people who are really not you. And you get to do things that the real-life you would never do… either because it is simply not possible, or you haven’t finished studying magic in the real world, or because you are really not such a terrible person in real life… or not such a good and wonderful person in real life as the elf paladin you play in D&D.
My eldest son’s character, the leader of the adventuring party.
Ditty Bytcha was my son’s first D&D character, rolled up with dice to be a human fighter and an artificer (a maker of useful mechanical and magical devices). His name was a bit of a joke. His back story included a father named Willy Bytcha and a mother who was a paladin of the god Aureon (the blue dragon god of wisdom and knowledge) named Gunna Bytcha. His grandpa was named Gummy Bytcha. But as time went on, he acquired a sword named Stormgaar. It was a magic sword, imbued with the intelligence and memories of the secret agent from Breland that gave the sword to him. It served as his conscience. It kept him from stealing from the poor and murdering women and children. It guided him through moral dilemmas like what to do with a captured enemy. And it gave him a way to add to his power to defeat evil. By playing this game of goblins and dire wolves, dragons and surly dwarves, my son learned to negotiate his problems. He learned that every problem does not lend itself to being solved by hitting it with something heavy or something sharp. It gave him leadership skills that I truly believe have influenced him as a present day U.S. Marine, and may have led to the leadership responsibilities he has taken on there.
My number two son’s character is Gandy Rumspot, the halfling rogue and builder of sailing ships.
My number two son decided to take over an existing character, the halfling rogue Gandy Rumspot. This character was a hard-drinking, charismatic, and thoroughly outgoing little hobbit… er, I mean halfling. He was really the opposite of my son in almost every way. My son is shy and over-cautious to a fault. Gandy, however, took to the sea and took to the air. He turned himself into a designer and builder of ocean-going ships. And when they encountered other halflings who rode on trained pterodactyls, he had to have one. They captured and tamed one, and he learned to glide through the air on the saddled back of a pterosaur. He has learned to take risks and try the things that might seem scary. When he wanted to get a job, without prompting, he went up to the manager of a tea-seller’s booth in the H-Mart Asian market and asked for an application. They immediately gave him an interview and hired him. He has already earned enough money to buy himself an electric guitar which he has taught himself to play very, very well.
My daughter the Princess chose as her character Mira Mirkestasia, a soul-gem wearing Kalashtar (a form of mind-reading sorceress).
Mira is my daughter’s character. It took a while to convince the other two that their icky little sister should be allowed to play the game too. They were worried that she wouldn’t be smart enough to keep up with what they wanted to do, wouldn’t be resourceful enough to help them overcome evil, and would be too squeamish to kill stuff and kill guys when it needed to happen. So, she became a cerebral Kalashtar, one of those ESP brainiac characters who can do mind-reading and telekinesis because they share their body and soul with a bizarre creature who fled oppression in another dimension entirely. In one adventure, she took possession of a mystically powered intelligent throwing knife named Xulo-Mira that would always hit the target (assuming she could make the dice roll) and would always return to her hand. She became a reader of magic scrolls, a lover of magic books, and, in real life, she fell in love with reading, particularly the Percy Jackson novels of Rick Riordan. Her grades in school improved. She has become inventive, creative, and artistic… enough so that she was accepted into the special METSA program for high school next year where she will be able to get college engineering credits and do the things she loves to do while getting her high school diploma.
The clay dragon the Princess made in art class and wowed the art teacher into blubbering incoherence with.
I cannot claim with a straight face that playing the D&D role-playing game allowed me to train my three kids into wonderful people. That is just an opinion from a doting father who gets off on playing god in an imaginary universe. But I have found role-playing to be a useful way to teach things. Over the years I played a lot of RPG’s in the classroom and at home. I used role-playing exercises on kids whose behavior needed a lot of molding and modeling. It can be done in real life, and I am not merely a D&D nerd who only lives in a fantasy world of his own making. I am a D&D nerd teacher who teaches through a fantasy world of my own making.
Catch a Falling Star 
Aunty Entropy Moves In
Mother Nature’s sister is one of those rich relatives you don’t really like, but have to endure. She tends to take charge of everything and ruin all your plans. Yes, we do not throw a party when Aunt Entropy comes to visit. Well, at least not the happy kind of party where everybody has fun. Aunt Entropy has come to stay for a while and take things apart.
One thing Aunt Entropy likes about Texas is its utter dedication to fracking and oil money. High profit motives have continued to force oil companies to pump toxic liquids into the underground to break apart shale and push out the oil. We have fracking to thank for lower gas prices and Fox News talking points about no longer being dependent on evil ookie-icky foreign oil. We also have it to thank for the current condition of the foundation of my little house. Alternating years of flooding and drought have expanded and contracted the small hill the house sits on so much that the front end of the house has all but cracked off. The frequent Dallas area earthquakes have no doubt helped this process. Auntie Entropy clucks her tongue at it. “Insurance doesn’t have to pay for this because you should have invested in foundation repair long ago. It isn’t earthquake damage, it is neglect!” Of course, my healthcare costs over the last decade have completely prevented any notion of paying out for foundation repair. No one would loan a deadbeat former teacher money for household repairs just because he is old and broke and decrepit. Lovely caring woman, that Aunt Entropy.
The fracking related sinkhole under Wink, Texas… those lines around it are roads and highways.
The Grandbury, Texas parking lot sinkhole which formed after heavy rain and a long history of fracking.
Aunt Entropy is, after all the personification of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in the science of physics. To put it simply, Entropy is a process by which matter and energy progress from a beginning state all the way to a final state. In the case of our universe, the process goes from the Big Bang of creation to the final star winking out at the end of the universe as we now know it. Entropy means the progress we are making towards the ultimate ends of death and decay. Every action we take leads to a consequence and a further action until we are dead. Not just me. Not even just you and me. But all of us, everywhere in the universe. This is why the little things where our lives break down make Auntie Entropy smile when nothing else will.
Here are some things that make Auntie Entropy smile;
The Orange King with golden crown and tiny hands may be our next president.
The hatred and self-aggrandizement that he campaigns on have taken root in the fertile soil of fear and hatred that Fox News and conservative leaders have tilled and toiled over for so long. They are beginning to bud with flowers… if you can call weeds flowers. And they are bound to produce poisonous fruits.
Mickey’s car is breaking down again because of heat. After paying over a thousand dollars to get pot-hole damage to the front tire and rim repaired, the coolant pump gave out and had to be replaced. Now the overheating warning light comes on daily and we are forecast to have dangerous levels of heat in Texas weather for the next few days. I am going to have to decide whether to spring for more car repair, or go see the doctor about the pain in my extremities. I won’t be able to afford both. Oh, my aching bank account!
My wife is overseas in the Philippines spending a month with her family after the death of her father. But she left her green card here. I had to express mail it to her for a large amount of postage cost and risk losing it along the way in the mail. She might never be able to return to this country. Well, I do see that as a bad thing, after all.
So while Aunt Entropy is visiting… or rather living here permanently, and feeding us her bad-luck salad made with equal parts misery, misfortune, and mayonnaise, we must learn to endure her wicked sense of humor and micro-managing ways.
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