Dave looked across the table at Gary, whose face was half-concealed behind the Game master’s screen. To Dave’s left sat Mike, who was busy fiddling around with his twenty-sided dice. They had gathered in Gary’s basement for their traditional gaming night, but Gary had something new planned. Dave began to speak up.
“So, what are we doing again?”
Gary didn’t even look up from behind his screen. “You two are helping me play test my new idea for a role-playing game.”
“Which is what again, exactly?”
“A role-playing reality simulation.”
“Which means…?”
“You’re playing characters that are playing a role-playing game.”
Dave stared at the obscuring screen flatly. “Uh-huh.”
Mike rolled his die on the table and joined in. “Sounds like fun!”
The top of Gary’s head bobbed around behind his screen, indicating he was nodding, most likely. “Alright, let’s get started. Okay, Dave and Mike, your characters are sitting at the table, looking at the GM. You’ve made your characters and are getting ready to play….”
Dave put a finger to his left temple. “Let me get this right: We’re playing a role-playing game where we’re playing as…”
“People playing a role-playing game. And your characters are playing-”
Dave rolled his eyes. “Are they playing as people playing a role-playing game?”
Gary’s eyes peeked up from behind the screen, his brow furrowed. “Now that wouldn’t make sense. Why would your characters play a role-playing simulation? No, they’re playing a sword & sorcery epic.”
“So when Mike or I roll the dice….”
“It’s to see how well your characters roll their dice.”
Dave rolled his eyes. “So, I have this character who is essentially exactly the same as I am who’s sitting at a table with Mike’s character who’s playing a fantasy role-playing game.”
Mike was rolling two dice in his left hand. “Yep.”
“Gary, why not just cut out the middle-man and have Mike and I play a fantasy game. I could be a barbarian, and Mike could be an Elven ranger.”
Mike clicked his tongue. “Half-Elven ranger, thank you.”
Dave ignored Mike and continued. “How about it, Gary?”
“That is what you guys are doing.”
“No, that’s what our characters are doing. Instead of pretending to be guys pretending to be elves-
“Half-elves…”
“Shut it, Mike. Instead of pretending to be guys who are pretending to be fantasy characters, why don’t we just pretend to be fantasy characters, like any respectable dork?”
Dave, still hidden behind his screen, offered his rebuttal. “Because that’s ninety-five percent of the gaming market. What we’re trying to do here is shift a paradigm, so to speak. So, can we get started?”
Mike looked at his character sheet while Dave sighed. “Yes, I can’t wait! How about you, Dave?”
Dave grunted noncommittally. Gary shuffled something from behind his screen.
“Okay, then, you’re all sitting around the table. Dave, what do you do?”
“How about we order something to eat?”
“That’s a great idea! Mike, how does that sound?”
“I like it!”
Dave began to fish his cell phone out of his pocket. This ridiculous exercise would go a lot faster for him with some food in his stomach. “So, what do we want?”
The sound of Gary picking up dice emanated from behind the screen. “Well, we roll on the snack and dinner table to see if everyone can agree on something….”
“Wait, what?”
Gary’s eyes peeked up, blinking once. “Oh! You actually want to order food. I thought you were speaking in character.”
“No, I actually want to eat something.”
“Oh, well, Mike and I already had something to eat before you got here.”
Dave felt a vein on his forehead begin to throb. “Okay, I’ve had enough of this.”
Mike looked forlorn. “What, doesn’t Gary’s game sound fun? I’m having fun.”
“Good for you! Unfortunately, I’m not having fun. I’ll bet my character will have fun, because he gets to play as a guy with a battle-axe who slays orcs. I, on the other hand, have to play as a guy with nothing better to do on a Friday night than sit around a table, HUNGRY, pretending to be a guy who’s having fun.”
Gary’s head rose up a little further. “Dave, maybe you don’t quite get my vision for this game….”
“I get it; it’s just so trifling and dull an idea it makes my vision swim. I mean, it’s Friday night; we could be out at a bar, flirting with girls.”
“That’s beyond the scope of the rules I’ve written up….”
“I mean in real life, you jackass! I could’ve hung out with that cute girl from work tonight, and yet I turned her down for this.”
Gary stood up a little. “So, if you were playing as a barbarian tonight, that would be okay?”
“Well, it’d be a start….”
“But your character’s playing as a barbarian….”
“Oh, for God’s sake. I can't take anymore. I’m gonna call Annie from work; see if I can still hang with her. Later, guys.”
With that, Dave left the room and exited up the basement stairs. Mike looked at Gary.
“He didn’t roll to see if he could leave.”
Gary sighed. “I know.”
“How come I don’t have cute female friends I can hang out with?”
Gary leaned over and pointed at Mike’s character sheet. “Because you took the three point Socially Inept drawback.”
“Oh, right. On the plus side, that gave me extra points to put into my comic trivia skill.”
“That’s right. So, you still up for some gaming?”
Mike eagerly picked up another dice. “Hell yes. Okay, my character’s going to reference a sourcebook and then have his character make a skill roll.”
“Okay, grab your sourcebook and then make your skill roll….”
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Clever idea. However, Mike goes along too willingly with this idea at the beginning.
Akward phrashing. Either use quotations or switch it around somehow.
“Mike clicked his tongue. “Half-Elven ranger, thank you.” Great line. However, would he really click his tongue?
Cute piece. As an avid gamer and someone who once participated in these role-playing games, I appreciated this. It has a very tongue-in-cheek, breezy tone, which fits with the characters and situation you described.
The dialogue is well-placed and has a good amount of humor. However, you might want to tighten up some of the language. The word choice is odd at times.
Also, at 4 pages, it feels a bit too short. Dave seems frustrated and yearning to break out. Why so? Maybe look into his backstory a bit more and develop the exposition.
The ending was awesome. The idea was clever but it seems these characters (who I’m guessing are teenagers) seem to readily take to it and communicate in a somewhat unrealistic complex understanding of it. This leads to their diction getting tangled up and could confuse the reader.
Fresh writing from a unique perspective.
Great delivery, funny story.
Starting out with a bit more scenery description and setup might help. Help the reader to get their bearings a bit before launching into the dialog. As is you’ve plopped us right down in the middle of the scene, which is a kind of sketch comedy approach.
I think you should add in at least one more player. Dave’s understandable reaction and his “straight-man” (in the comedy sense) status hinge on everyone else being crazy. One more person to like the obviously stupid idea would add to the laughs.
Mike’s persistent dice fiddling grew a little repetitive, but it was funny all the same.
I’m glad you stayed away from physical descriptions, as making them pimple-faced awkward Revenge of the Nerds style geeks would have made this less effective, and would have been aiming for cheap laughs.
I’m not trying to sound mean, but the fact that a piece that is built around a unique concept doesn’t automatically make it good. While reading through this story, I kept waiting for something to happen, and when it did it just didn’t seem satisfying. I caught onto the humor at the end, but I really wanted something more, especially to contrast with the relatively uneventful first half of the story. Dave’s character doesn’t seem believable because conventional stereotype tells us that a guy who is into role-playing games can’t easily snag chicks. You would need to present more information on his character in order to challenge this stereotype. Also, from the start, I was under the impression that Mike was being sarcastic towards Gary, but when I found out in the end that he was being serious all along, it seemed like a huge let down. In order for this piece to stand well alone (i.e. not part of a longer story), it would need to have a more dramatic ending or some type of very unexpected twist. Or, conversely, you can work on developing the chracters, which, in my opinion, would be more difficult to do in such a short piece. Hope this helped.
The actions that you have going on are not uninteresting, and there is a good direction this is taking, however what will help you at this point is a focus on defining characters. I’d like to see this story as it develops.
Here are some critical notes I took while reading:
(Dave looked across the table at Gary, whose face was half-concealed behind the Game master’s screen. To Dave’s left sat Mike,)
The names of everyone shouldn’t be the center focus above the plot of actions. Have actions happening first and then define the characters by those actions.
(They had gathered in Gary’s….night, but Gary)
Don’t repeat his name twice in one sentence.
There is always an issue if you have to continually call out everyone by name in a short section. By clarifying and contextualizing the actions that pertain to the individual characters you give yourself more ways of classifying rather than the desensitizing repetition.
Reading on I see that this continues. You identify characters by name rather than by traits. If a character has a nervous tick, a physical characteristic or specific mannerisms then mention them. It often takes at least three qualities before a character is memorable to the reader.
(rose up a little further)
Farther. You’re talking about a distance.
Okay, suffice to say, I don’t really understand the story. But it was hilarious all the same. It has this bizarre twist on the reality of it all.
I have only minor suggestions. First, “Dave grunted noncommittally.” I’m pretty sure that’s not a word. And I’m also pretty sure you weren’t trying to suggest that he wasn’t committed to his grunt. I don’t think you need to have a qualifier for this statement. Dave grunting alone is indication enough of his not wanting to play the game.
Second, there’s an abundance use of ellipses throughout the text which I find a little excessive. You can add in pauses and trailing off in other ways than that. A few times is okay, but at some points, it’s almost every other line.
Good luck on the contest.
Overall, I liked it. It’s an intriguing idea, but I did think there was room for more exploration of the idea.
First, though, I did feel a bit of a contradiction. At the say this is Dave, Gary and Mike’s ‘traditional gaming night’. That makes it sound like Dave is a regular to the night and that he’s fully happy to be there. It also paints him as a proper nerd/geek.
However, later on he comes across as surly because it’s a Friday night and he could be out picking up girls or specifically with the girl from work. This seems like too much of a contradiction to me.
Whilst I’m not saying you can’t break the cliche and have a nerd who is good at talking to girls, etc, it would seem very odd if such a socially adept nerd was a regular attendee at a gaming session held on a Friday night. It would seem even odder that he specifically said no to a girl to be here.
You either need to bed that in earlier – have him turn up grumbling about missing the date, for example. Or tweak it slightly – perhaps the session is normally on a Tuesday, but Gary rescheduled it to Friday? Or this is a special session and Gary’s such a geek putting it on a Friday didn’t occur to him.
I hope that makes sense – the motivation of why Dave even attends and why he quickly blows the game off seem to conflict.
Anyway, in terms of expanding it up – I think there’s quite a lot more you could do with the idea. For example, when they continue playing, perhaps in order for the game to work, they keep playing Gary’s character and somehow what they do in the game starts to affect real life? You could go in all sorts of interesting directions with that – they mess up the date or the aforementioned orcs start to appear looking for a barbarian to fight, for example.
My only other crit would be that the details could do with some fleshing out – what do Dave, Gary and Mike look like? Is Gary’s basement dank and dark or brightly lit and modern?
I also think you could splice these details into the story better – instead of having an intro para at the top, spread the details throughout the story more. So the first time Mike speaks talk about him fiddling with the dice then and in more detail.
I hope this is of some use.
This is funny stuff. Only because I know guys like this. (I have this, um FRIEND, see….)
Here are just a few places that pulled me out of the moment:
“Dave began to speak up.”—“Dave spoke up” is less awkward.
““Half-Elven ranger, thank you.”—
“Dave, still hidden behind…”—Shouldn’t that be “Gary, still hidden…”?
“Mike looked at his character sheet while Dave sighed. “Yes, I can’t wait! How about you, Dave?”—If there is no “[name] said” tag before the dialogue, the reader will assume that the last person mentioned is the one speaking. In this case, Dave is the last person mentioned, but the dialogue can’t be his. Just rearrange the order here.
Yeah, it’s a niche market piece, but not so exclusive that other people wouldn’t get it. Nice job.
The idea is funny and somewhat clever, but it suffers from the classic hack comedy syndrome of relying on a straightman. Dave is the normal character we can relate to, who apparently lives in our reality. The other two characters, quite inexplicably, inhabit a reality where seemingly smart and sane people do absurd things. There’s a plausibility issue there as long as you’ve got a Dave. If, instead, all the characters were in the same equally bizarre universe of roleplayers roleplaying roleplayers, that would be something. Or, if Dave wasn’t a straightman, but an equally absurd foil -- say, he wants to play some other equally absurd similation -- that would be something. But right now, I see a clever idea that is floundering in the mundane.
“Dave began to speak up.”
Did he begin to, or did he speak up?
The argumentative exchange over elf/half-elf doesn’t come across clearly at all.
“forehead begin to throb”
Did he feel it BEGIN TO THROB, or did he feel it throb? (Rule of thumb: avoid the constructions “start to” and “begin to” except when absolutely necessary.)
I felt his friend frustration when he brought up the idea. I had to read slow just to understand what the hell the rules of the game were. I didnt find anything wrong, it reminded of my days in middle school arguing about whose desk we should play pokemon on or something. Overall it’s was a feel good story for me.
Well, high points on Geekery… :)
“Game master’s” – Capitalize both words, or neither
“Alright” – “All right”
“sword & sorcery” – Spell out “and,” since this is in dialogue
Mike’s insistence on making a distinction between elven and half-elven is amusing.
“Half-Elven” “Half-elves” – Decide how you want to handle capitalization here, and stick with it
“Well, we roll on the snack and dinner table…” This is where the story really starts to get weird.
You use semicolons a lot. The only place where it seemed inappropriate was in the sentence starting with “I’m gonna call Annie” (comma instead), but semicolons can be distracting if used frequently.
“Because you took the three point Socially Inept drawback.” Wow. So the layers really are stacked that deep: gamers pretending to be gamers pretending to be gamers…
You’re right that this is a niche-market story, but it’s interesting and amusing and sometimes a little disturbing – and probably understandable even to people who’ve never played an RPG in their lives. If you want to, you could flesh out the narrative a bit more: description of physical setting, actions, etc. It isn’t necessary, though; the dialogue clearly is the most important part.
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