Departure from the Return to the NIGHT OF ADVENTURE!

Every week my buddies and I play Dungeons & Dragons.

Correction: Every week we try to play Dungeons & Dragons. Some weeks are not so successful.

This is the story of one of those weeks.

• Tonight's pre-game D&D debate: Top male rock vocalist of all-time.
• Pretty quick consensus:
  1. Freddie Mercury
  2. Steve Perry
• Fred Durst rates a distant third.
• Bill Murray gets an honorable mention for his performance in Stripes.
• Yeah, it's not rock, but it is ROCKIN'.
• Our obligatory hour of small talk over, it's game time.
• The ship we have commandeered has a zombie crew -- that's what happens when you steal a ship from a necromancer.
• The zombies, it turns out, are not just fine sailors, but excellent cooks as well.
• Surprising, given their rather monotonous diet of brains.
• Note: If you can't play that week because you're out of town, don't be surprised if your character develops a sudden food allergy and has to go lie down for... however many days this session will encompass.
• The party sets sail through slaver waters. The PC we've appointed captain of the ship explains that it's EXTREMELY unlikely that we'll actually get attacked by slavers. "The odds of that are INFINITESIMAL!" he keeps assuring us.
• This character's name is Neeko the Jinx.
• Half an hour into gaming, we discover that the disadvantage to using the Online Character Generator is that if you're not the one who went online, you don't have a character.
• We decide to fake it.
• A ship is spotted on the horizon. What do you suppose the odds are that it's slavers?
• Did you say INFINITESIMAL?
• Good job, 10xp for you.
• Captain Jinx assures us it's probably just harmless traders.
• We debate what WE would do if we ran into a ship of heavily-armed men commanding a crew of zombies. I say: FIREBALL.
• The paladin says, "You're not going to be able to destroy all the undead in the world, so if it's not germane to our mission, I'd just go around them."
• Clearly our paladin has no ambition.
• 4th Edition: Where heroic paladins bravely battle evil! ...if they feel like it.
• Of course, our paladin is not a servant of Tyr, or Moradin, or Donblas the Justice Maker. Our paladin worships a piece of metal.
• I'm surprised we're not on a quest to rid the world of rust monsters.
• Just about the time we're considering ignoring the approaching slaver ship and taking up a quest for Global Rust Monster Genocide, the game gets derailed into a long, contentious debate about the legality of Apple's exclusive contract with AT&T for the iPhone.
• I will spare you the details. But at one point the term "fascism" comes up.
• I told you it was contentious.
• Next week, we're going to define torture!
• I can define it for you right now: listening to this debate is torture.
• Halfway through the debate, the feds show up and tell us we have to move our game to a black site in Estonia because this discussion can't legally take place on US soil. Also: three random people on Santa Monica Blvd confess to being the 20th hijacker.
• At various points in the enhanced interrogation discussion, the iPhone is compared to: a Smart car, a magic trick, LOST, and a UFC fight.
• I think a great magic trick would be concisely explaining all five seasons of LOST while driving a Smart car as the UFC's Brock Lesnar takes on Randy Couture in the back seat. It would also be more entertaining (and shorter) than explaining this argument. Which has dragged on for an hour.
• The bottom line of the argument: If you think AT&T's exclusive contract with Apple is an unfair business practice, you're a fascist. Also: Always print a hardcopy of your character sheet.
• The next thing we discover: There are Dungeons & Dragons shoes.
• SHOES!
• The discussion of Dungeons & Dragons shoes goes on for a total of three minutes.
• Bottom line: If you're not wearing Dungeons & Dragons shoes, you're a fascist.
• About this time, the Dread Pirate Unlikely and the crew of the USS Infinitesimal announce that we have 30 SECONDS TO SURRENDER!
• I don't know if you remember, but there was a ship full of slavers bearing down on us.
• They're pretty far away, it's hard to tell what kind of shoes they're wearing. But they all use T-Mobile and got a great deal on unlimited minutes.
• A brilliant plan: Turn yourself over to the slavers after you give all your magic items and valuables to the thief and have him hide in the hold.
• The thief thinks this is a brilliant plan -- he's going to live high on the hog after he turns traitor, joins the slavers, and spends the rest of his life sailing the high seas marauding every dupe who drops their entire stash of magic items the first time a bunch of wuss pirates show up.
• The wuss pirates' response: "We're not wusses, we have A CANNON!"
• Point taken. Even WE don't have a cannon.
• We spent all of our cannon money on magical sleeping bags.
• I wish I was kidding about that. I really do.
• The day they make a cannon that gives you 1d8 temporary hit points when you sleep inside it is the day I stop at the magical cannon shop.
• That night is the night I decide it's okay to wake up smelling of gunpowder.
• That next morning is the morning I decide it's NOT okay to wake up with a thud, slightly singed and half a mile away.
• Maybe we need to re-think this whole magical sleeping cannon idea.
• Half the party hides in the extra-dimensional smuggling hold. Then we have all our zombie crew members pretend to just be plain old dead corpses. Which means the entire ship is crewed by... three people.
• Dread Pirate Unlikely may be a wuss and a pompous ass, but even HE finds this suspicious.
• The three hapless PCs try to play themselves off as REALLY skilled sailors.
• That, and "some of the crew jumped overboard because they were SO SCARED!"
• Dread Pirate Unlikely is so pompous, he falls for it.
• The pompous wuss captain's victory speech: "Look dwarf, I hope you don't take this personally, but in the business I'm in, we take people and force them to work against their will."
• It looks like our party is going to China to make Dungeons & Dragons shoes!
• I suppose it beats farming for gold in World of Warcraft.

Next week: ASSAULT ON THE AERIE OF THE SLAVE LORDS!

...And we demilitarize the Korean peninsula.

-Tom, who has to go advise Congress about detaining enemy combatants. Bottom line: Habeas corpus doesn't apply to rust monsters.