December, 1983:

I sat on the floor in my Aunt Val's house, and opened up her Christmas present to me. It was a red box with a really cool looking dragon on the front of it. Inside, there were a few books, some dice, a map, and a crayon to color in the dice.

"That's a game that I hear lots of kids like to play, Willow," she said, "It's dragons and wizards and those things you liked from The Hobbit. The back says you use your imagination, and I know what a great imagination you have." My brother played with Legos and my cousins played with handheld electronic games. I felt a little gypped.

"Wow," I said, masking my disappointment. "Thanks, Aunt Val!"

Later, while the other kids played with Mattel football and Simon, I sat near the fireplace and examined my gift. It said that I could be a wizard or a fighter, but there weren't any pieces that looked like that. There were a lot of weird looking dice, but I had to color in the numbers. That seemed silly, but at least it was something to do, so I grabbed the black crayon, and rubbed it over the pale blue dice, just like the instructions said.

Aunt Val (who was my favorite relative in the world throughout my entire childhood and right up until she died a few years ago) walked into the living room. "What do you think, Willow?"

"I colored the dice," I said, and showed her the result. "But I haven't read the book, yet."

She patted my leg. "Well, I hope you like it." She moved to the other side of the room, where cousin Jack played with a Nintendo Game and Watch.

I opened the Players Guide, and began to read.

February, 1984:

It was afternoon PE in fifth grade, and I was terrified. I ran and jumped and ducked, surrounded by a cheering crowd of my classmates. The PE teacher did nothing to stop the attack, and in fact encouraged it.

"Get him!" Someone yelled, as I fell to the asphalt, small rocks digging into my palms. I breathed hard, and through my adrenaline-fueled flight-or-fight response, the world slowed, the cheering faded, and I wondered to myself why our playground was just a parking lot, and why we had to wear corduroy pants in the middle of a Southern California heatwave. Before I could offer any answers, a clear and loud voice spoke from within my head. "Hey," it said. "You'd better get up and move, or you're dead."

I nodded my head, and looked up in time to see the red playground ball, spinning in slow motion, as the word "Voit" rotated into view. Pain exploded across my face and a mighty cheer erupted from the crowd. The PE teacher blew her whistle.

I don't know how I managed to be the last kid standing on our team. I usually ran right to the front of the court, so I could get knocked out quickly and (hopefully) painlessly before the good players got worked up by the furor of battle and started taking head shots, but I'd been stricken by a bout of temporary insanity—possibly created by the heat—on this February day, and I'd actually played to win the game, using a very simple strategy: run like hell and hope to get lucky.

I blinked back tears as I looked up at Jimmie Just, who had delivered the fatal blow. Jimmie was the playground bully who spent as much time in the principal's office as he did in our classroom, and was the most feared dodgeball player at the Lutheran School of the Foothills.

He laughed at me, his long hair stuck to his face in sweaty mats, and sneered, "Nice try, Wil the Pill."

I picked myself up off the ground, determined not to cry. I sucked in deep breaths of air through my nose.

Mrs. Cooper, the PE teacher, walked over to me. "Are you okay, Wil?" She asked.

"Uh-huh," I lied. Anything more than that and I risked breaking down into humiliating sobs that would follow me around the rest of the school year, and possibly into sixth grade.

"Why don't you go wash off your face," she said, not unkindly. "And sit down for a minute."

"Okay," I said. I walked slowly across the blacktop to the drinking fountains. Maybe if I really took my time, I could run out the clock and I wouldn't have to play another stupid dodgeball game.

January, 1984:

Papers scattered across my bed appeared to be homework to the casual observer, but to me they were people. A thief, a couple of wizards, some fighters; a party of adventurers who desperately wanted to storm The Keep on the Borderlands. But without anyone to guide them, they sat alone, trapped in the purgatory of my bedroom, straining behind college-ruled blue lines to come to life.

I tried to recruit my younger brother to play with me, but he was 7, and more interested in Monchichi. The kids in my neighborhood were more interested in football and riding bikes, so I was left to read through module B2 by myself, wandering the Caves of Chaos and dodging Lizardmen alone.

February, 1984:

I washed my face and drank deeply from the drinking fountain, and by the time I made it back to the benches against the playground's southern edge, I'd lost the urge to cry, but my face radiated enough heat to compete with the blistering La Crescenta sun.

I sat down near this kid Simon Teele, who, thanks to the wonders of alphabetization, ended up with me and Harry Yan (the school's lone Asian kid) on field trips and fire drills, and in chapel. Simon was taller than all of us, wore his hair down into his face, and really kept to himself. He was reading an oversized book that sort of looked like a text book, filled with charts and tables.

We weren't officially friends, but I knew him well enough to make polite conversation.

"Hey," I said. "Why don't you have to play dodgeball?"

"Asthma," He said.

"Lucky," I said. "I hate dodgeball."

"Everyone hates dodgeball," he said. "Except Jimmie Just."

"Yeah," I said, relieved to hear someone else say out loud what I'd been thinking since fourth grade.

"Hey," I said. "What are you reading?"

He held up the book, and I saw its cover: a giant statue, illuminated by torches, sat behind an archway. Two guys were on its head, prying loose one of its jeweled eyes, as a group of people stood at the base. One was clearly a wizard, another was obviously a knight.

"Player's Handbook," he said. "Do you play D&D?"

I gasped. According to our ultra-religious school, D&D was Satanic. I looked up for teachers, but none were close to us. 100 feet away on the playground, another game of dodgeball was underway. I involuntarily flinched when I heard the hollow pang! of the ball as it skipped off the ground.

"You're going to get in trouble if you get caught with that," I said.

"No, I won't," he said. "If I just keep it turned upside down, they'll never see it. So do you play or not?"

"I have the red box set," I said, "and a bunch of characters, but I don't have anyone to play with."

"That's basic," he said. "This is advanced."

"Oh."

"But if you want, you could come over to my house this weekend and we could play."

I couldn't believe my good luck. With a dodgeball to the face, Fate put me on the bench next to the kid who, over the next few months, helped me take my first tentative steps down the path to geekdom. He had a ton of AD&D books: the Dungeon Master's Guide, which had a truly terrifying demon on the cover, and would result in certain expulsion if seen at school, the Monster Manual which was filled with dragons, and the Fiend Folio, which not only had demons and devils, but a harpy and a nymph, accompanied by a drawing of a naked woman with boobs!

Simon's parents were divorced, and he lived with his mom in a huge house in La Canada. His room was filled with evidence of a custody battle: too many toys to count littered the floor and spilled out of the closet, but even though we were surrounded by Atari and Intellivision, GI Joe and Transformers, we had D&D fever, and the only prescription was more polyhedral dice.

Though it was just the two of us playing, we stormed the Keep on the Borderlands and explored the Isle of Dread. We spent all our free time at school making new characters, designing dungeons, and unsuccessfully attempting to recruit other kids to play with us.

March, 1984:

My babysitter Gina's older brother was an experienced dungeon master, and he let us play in one of his custom-made dungeons. My fighter walked into a room, got trapped behind a portcullis, and died when I sprung a trap trying to escape. Simon and I decided later that it would be okay to resurrect him for our own adventures without penalty, because Gina's brother's dungeon was really too hard, and it wasn't part of our world, anyway.

June, 1984:

Simon and I finally got two other kids to join our group: Robert and his friend David. The four of us were officially declared "the nerds" by the cool kids at school, and the four of us played almost every weekend. I started carrying my dice, a couple of pencils, and folded-up character sheets with me everywhere I went, stored in a pleather Casio calculator case that my dad gave me.

The Satanic Panic, fueled by Jack Chick's Dark Dungeons and some "investigative" reporting on television news magazines reached our suburban school, and a letter was sent home warning our parents about the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons. My parents laughed it off, but Robert's did not; he was prohibited from playing with us any more, and since he brought David into our little group, he left too. Then, right when school was about to get out for Summer, we were dealt a total party kill: Simon's mom was moving the two of them to Indiana.

July, 1984:

With Simon gone and the Satanic Panic at its peak, I didn't have anyone to play with. My books and character sheets slowly made their way into my closet, as Atari began to creep further and further into my life. Then, for my birthday, Aunt Val gave me a book called Lone Wolf. It was like Choose Your Own Adventure, but you had a character sheet, and rolled dice for combat! It wasn't D&D, but it was close enough. That series of books carried me all the way through middle school, and guided me farther and farther down the path to geekdom.

1987:

I was a freshman in high school, and gained admittance to a group of geeks via my friend Darin. We played tons of geeky games together, watched Holy Grail at least once a month, and argued the finer points of Sci-Fi. I was finally surrounded by geeks again, only this time I was proud to be counted among their number.

One day, sitting in Darin's house and playing Illuminati, I said, "Hey, do any of you guys ever play D&D?"

There was a collective snort of derision.

"What?" I said.

"We play GURPS," one of the guys said.

On the path to geekdom, I crossed another Rubicon.

Wil Wheaton has a +20 shirt of Smiting. He would gladly trade it for +5 vs. Dodgeball.