LARP: 1

Note that this is fairly similar to the version that was released as a preview at the start of this month.

*

"Oh, you shaved?"

Patty was one of my oldest friends from college. An accountant. We'd hung out playing video games for about half a year before I finally got up the nerve to ask her out, but she'd turned me down. After that, we took a brief break from hanging out, until about a year later when it just so happened that we both ended up in the same mutual friend's game of Damsels and Devils. (Liam was our friend, we'd both met in college, so it wasn't that surprising in retrospect.)

It'd been about four years since college, and since Patty had gotten a relatively nice house to herself--red roof, simple green lawn outside--she had ended up becoming the anchor to our Damsels and Devils group.

I still was living in a pretty cheap apartment in town; I'd had a grinding marketing job for about a year, then changed jobs for a bit less commute, but then that company had gotten bought out by venture capital and fired everyone. So now I was just living alone, taking some time off... although my unemployment benefits were probably going to run out next month. I really needed something soon.

So, I was finally going back on the job market, and yeah, I'd cleaned myself up.

"Yep, decided to see my chin again," I said. "What do you think?"

"It's weird, usually when people shave they look younger, but somehow I feel like it makes you look older. You look like a thirty year old."

Was that bad? "Uhh..." I said.

"Anyway," she changed topics. "You decide on a character? Zoe should be here soon."

"I mean, she said she wanted us to build them together today, right?" I said.

Zoe was our new DM. Patricia apparently met her through a gaming club; I'd never seen her before. Our last DM, Liam, had bought a house in the midwest and moved there with his wife. It definitely felt like everyone was 'settling down' with their lives faster than me. The result was that we'd been trying to figure out how to keep the group going.

"Yeah, but you have an idea, right?" Patty asked. "As for me, I'm thinking of playing an Orc Barbarian. BIG GUY. RAGE. I've been looking at this build that I think will make him pretty tanky."

"Oh, you're going to play a guy?" I asked. She definitely played a range; one of her last long characters was a gnome mecha pilot in a JOUSTER game; that had been female.

"Yeah, I thought it'd be fun to mix it up," she said. "How about you?"

"Hmm, I don't know," I said. "I guess I had been thinking about playing a bard, but I was going to ask Zoe some stuff about songs in game. I don't want to sing myself."

"Oooh, you could be my girlfriend," Patty said. "Big strong orc with a little bard girl."

"I mean, we don't even know what the campaign will be like yet," I said. "She said there'd be pirates in the setting but not much else." I wondered whether she was taunting me some way with the idea of being her 'girlfriend' in the game, but I actually had  been considering playing a female character, for reasons I had planned to discuss with Zoe.

Hmm. Would it be weird to play cross-gender with a new DM? I mean, Patty was doing it... seemed like she didn't think Zoe would mind...