Playing with You is a Full Contact Sport

When I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in my mid-twenties the people I played with fell into two categories: people who had played since they were eight and me. So my first games were filled with the sort of devilish intrigues that many long term games tend to suffer from as players attempted to out smart one another and the Dungeon Master at the same time. They moved quickly from one plot to the next while I sluggishly made my way through the game feeling like my feet were in quicksand.

I was robbed, murdered, and on one occasion sold as a slave to a rather large and rapey hobgoblin. I lost a half dozen characters to their plots as I learned the game and drank my weight in wine while they told me the wonders of the world they were opening up to me. I listened as they spoke and made notes on how they played. After a while I was even able to predict where they were going and how they were going to try and screw me over. Some called that time "paying my dues" but I prefer to think of it as the time when I played with a bunch of assholes.

I killed the first of their characters in the fall by lining my coin pouch with poison and not telling them. The second died when he tried to bump me into a corridor to check for traps and I moved out of the way. Sessions came and went and I dropped their characters with an ever increasing frequency - often without them knowing I had engineered their deaths.

At some point during all of this I started playing with Kid Icarus, Step-up, and Biggboy. They were fun and I didn't have to be so quick on the trigger. Hell, they never tried to steal from me nor kill my characters (unless it was really funny). So I stopped killing my fellow players for several years, and then I met the tres amigos . . .