Society for Aesthetic Deletions

Sometimes I wonder at the world that roleplayers live in, and how it's viewed by the outsiders, the "mundanes."

I have a game on Monday nights. Lou is not in this game, he decided not to play for a number of reasons. But prior to this game starting, Lou was in the same GM's Monday night game, which I was not in.

This previous game had a lot of character deaths. So each night when Lou came home, I'd ask him the same question -- "Did you die? Did anyone die?" Alas, his character never died, but a number of the other ones died, sometimes multiple times.

[digression here -- the best one was the guy who decided he wanted to play a new character, so the GM killed off his old character. His new character was part of a group of captives the other PCs were going to save. In the process, the new character died. So the player spent the rest of the session creating YET ANOTHER new PC for the game. He should have just stuck with his original character!]

So, since I'm now playing in this GMs game, on Monday nights, Lou constantly asks me when I get home if I died. In this game, death is significant -- the PCs are linked via magical rings to one other person in the Realms (it's a Forgotten Realms game, we're going through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil). If we die, the other person we're linked to dies, and vice versa. It's how the GM decided to allow evil PCs in the game, yet still make them want to work together.

We've had one death (well, two), but that was because one player never showed up past the first session, and another player didn't like his own character, so they both got offed. No one since then has died, but a few have come close.

So last night, Lou and I headed out of the house together. He was going grocery shopping (which we hadn't done since coming back from Las Vegas -- too much Final Fantasy X), I was going to the game. We said our goodbyes, and then he called out, "Hope you don't die!"

I pondered to myself if my neighbors had heard that, and what they would think. Usually, a husband and wife might say to each other, "Drive safely," or "Have fun," or "I love you," and so on. But it's not often you hear "Hope you don't die," from one's beloved spouse.

But hey, it made perfect sense to me.