Chapter 61: The Art of War

Wednesday, February 6, 1985

Instead of having a real study group tonight, we instead had a gaming study group. Mel invited Larry Beck, Brad Henderson, and Paul Fitzgerald (all of whom were Mech E friends of hers) to teach us a few things about gaming. Mel told us in advance that we didn’t have to hide anything — she’d made sure they were fine with her being gay (which hopefully meant they were fine with Cammie, Angie, and Paige, too!)

The three turned out to be pretty nice and not terribly ‘nerdy.’ Somewhat nerdy, but not as bad as first-life Steve (or Dave Mayrink, either), nor Carl Washington for that matter. Brad was in the Corps, while Larry and Paul were ‘non-regs’ like the rest of us. It still amused me that most people referred to the vast majority of students by referring to something that they weren’t, but that’s what happens when a school is all-military for ninety years and then starts admitting ‘civilians.’

Larry brought his AD&D rulebooks (we hadn’t bought them yet). Paul brought ‘Traveller’ and ‘Car Wars’, neither of which we were all that interested in playing (both were fairly complex role-playing games, and AD&D was enough of that for one weekend!). Brad brought ‘Ogre’, which we definitely were interested in playing!

Ogre was a small, quick-to-learn, quick-to-play asymmetrical wargame in which a giant, automated war machine (the titular Ogre) menaces a command post for the human army, which is defended by a number of war machines and infantry. The humans must destroy the Ogre before it blows up their command post or they lose. Defending the base is the only goal. Defenders are expendable, the base is not. One player pushes around lots of counters, the other moves only one.

Ogre was still commonly played into the 2010s, at least. Quite a feat of longevity!

Both Ogre and Car Wars were games from the legendary Steve Jackson. He (and his business) were over in Austin. He was someone I wouldn’t mind meeting this time around, perhaps. That was something for the future, though, if ever.

Brad (perhaps fittingly, since he was in the Army branch of the Corps) had a head for tactics, and not only taught (or retaught, in my case) us Ogre, but also gave us quite a few tips on how to best arrange defenders or (if playing the Ogre) how to eliminate them without being destroyed in a crossfire. That was the nature of the game: the Ogre could damage or destroy any defending unit with relative ease (subject to random chance, of course), but the defenders had to combine their strength to get a big enough hit to knock the Ogre out of commission.

As it turned out, Angie was also being re-taught Ogre. She had gone with me to my old D&D group and some of the gang had taught her Ogre then. She’d picked it up quickly, and picked it up even more quickly now. I barely remembered it thanks to the still (and forever, it appeared) hazy memories I had of the time between Angie’s move to Houston and my arrival in this universe.

Larry was pretty good at teaching, too. He got everyone through the AD&D character classes, races, basic statistics, and enough of the magic and weapons systems that we wouldn’t be completely clueless. Quite a lot of it came back to me quickly. The girls picked it up nearly as fast, which hardly surprised me, since we were all quick learners. Not only that, but four of us were accomplished actors, and Cammie and Mel had a background in pretending to be people they really weren’t. The ‘role-playing’ aspect of the game fit all of us well. We could ‘become’ our characters for a while without much effort.

All of this reminded me that we were in the era where D&D was still mostly ‘fun.’ Some later editions made players spend a lot of effort figuring out all sorts of details, which was great for realism but slowed the game down and reduced ‘fun.’ Many people just want to be ‘heroes,’ and ‘heroes’ usually aren’t written as worrying about whether they can carry food, water, weapons, armor, and loot without passing out from the weight of it all, for instance.

After a while, they’d backed off on that, or made it more clear that many rules were optional, and the ‘fun’ angle had been played up again. Such was a never-ending battle in gaming. On the one hand, D&D as entertainment; on the other, D&D as simulation. On the one hand: fast, easy games like Ogre, which benefited from tactical thinking but didn’t try to simulate anything realistic. On the other: things like Avalon Hill’s World War II games, which tried to simulate the war down to small-unit scale, with a dizzying array of units, counters, and rules. If you put all of their games together, the map would take a gymnasium to lay out. At least one person had done that, I was pretty sure, though maybe not yet.

It might take as long to merely set up one of those detailed games as it would take to play three or four rounds of Ogre. Different strokes for different folks!

We talked and played until eleven forty-five, finally wrapping up because Brad’s unit had a midnight curfew tonight. I offered to drive the three of them back and they gratefully accepted. We talked a bit on the drive, and it was clear they’d had a good time. I was glad about that!

Thursday, February 7, 1985

I picked up the basic AD&D rulebooks from a bookstore near campus. By 1985, regular bookstores fairly reliably carried AD&D rulebooks. There was just enough demand that it made sense for them. A few years earlier I’d have needed to go to a gaming store.

There would, of course, be plenty of people selling AD&D rulebooks at WarCon tomorrow, but everyone wanted at least a bit of time flipping through them tonight and getting familiar with the contents and layout. If we liked it, we’d have them to refer to later. If we didn’t, it was no great loss. I wouldn’t try to return them. At worst, they’d be souvenirs of the one time we’d gone to a gaming convention together.

If we did like it, though, I could get my set from Houston, which would give us a current set and a set that was a few years out of date. The changes would likely be minor enough that we would be fine.

Friday, February 8, 1985

We headed over to the MSC after our last class, paid our admission fee ($10 each), and got our WarCon badges. Angie immediately quipped that ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!’ which (unsurprisingly, in retrospect) slightly confused everyone but Jas and me. Oh, everyone had heard it, but none of the others knew where it was from. That put two movies on the watch list: ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, which none of us had seen (but was the true origin of the phrase), and ‘Blazing Saddles’, which had popularized it for a new generation.

Weird Al would later rephrase it as ‘We don’t need no stinking badgers!’, and his version would be inexplicable without knowing the other versions.

We walked around the dealers’ room, with everyone oohing and ahhing over the miniature figures, fancy dice, and other typical gaming paraphernalia. The only one besides me who’d seen most of this ‘stuff’ was Angie, and she’d only gone to my D&D group with me twice in this life, plus once in her other life. The one where she’d tried Ogre was, at best, vague, while the other was fully dream-like. It had been decades since I’d been to a ‘con’ and over forty years since I’d been to a con this narrowly focused on wargaming (as opposed to ones covering the wider range of science fiction, fantasy, anime, manga, comics, movies, and other fandoms), so this was nearly as much ‘new ground’ for me as for the others.

All of the girls had miniatures they liked, and I could see some of them becoming decorations around the house. That’s not what they were made for, of course, but the vendors wouldn’t care that we weren’t going to use them for gaming. A sale was a sale, and it might be flattering that we considered them worthy of being displayed as art.

There was plenty of actual art, too. Boris Vallejo posters dominated one section, which got the girls giggling. He had a knack for depicting fantasy women in ridiculously impractical, but very hot, outfits. There were plenty of H. R. Giger posters, too. He’d been in vogue since Alien gave a wide audience exposure to his work. Other artists, both ‘name’ and unknown (at least to us), had their work displayed, along with a wide selection of movie posters from any films wargamer nerds might appreciate. That meant plenty of fantasy and science fiction movies, of course, but also war movies and comedies from artists as diverse as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Ralph Bakshi, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen.

The good news for me was that I wasn’t going to get an elbow in the ribs for appreciating a Boris painting. Not when my girlfriend and my other female friends appreciated it as much, and for the same reason!

I doubted we’d take home any of his, but I figured we would wind up with a few things to add to the house. We had plenty of room to display artwork, and it’d be easy to (for instance) make a theme room out of the basement living room.

Personally, I felt as ‘nerdy’ right now as I’d felt in years. Not that I hadn’t felt at least somewhat like a ‘nerd’ at Memorial. After all, both ‘Debater’ and ‘Student Council President’ are almost universally viewed as ‘nerdy.’ Still, I’d also dated the head cheerleader (and looked like I belonged in that role) and had been the Homecoming King. Neither of those is traditionally ‘nerdy,’ even at Memorial.