Remembrances: Gamer Style
Christy, aka Lia, at Zencon
As you will see following this page, The Zen Bassmasters die in games. A lot. Like, more than would normally be expected lot. Enough so that becoming “at one with the bait” (aka eaten by the worms which you later use for fishing”) became the group motto. We never got upset or worried about it. We never got mad when Sneaky T had one of his Leeeeroy Jenkins moments and brought an entire dungeon on our heads. It was good fun; a laugh and a quip about yet again being murdered by a giant chicken (we’ll get there eventually, be assured). As gamers, we took death as a joke. We laughed in the face of the Grim Reaper (who, if we’re honest here, had the lot of us on speed dial).
It’s not as funny in real life.
Like so many, far too many, we lost one of our group to COVID-19 in 2020. Christy joined us in the middle of the three decade adventure, but quickly became a mainstay of the crew. So when she died, without a funeral (COVID, remember?) it fell to the team to remember her in our own way, through individual conversations. And, with these, merged the sorrow of real loss with our typical humor around pixelated loss.
In other words, almost all of the conversations revolved around particularly stupid deaths, improbable survivals, the consequences of rolling a “1”, and the individual color of her unique personality. I’m sure the other Bassmasters will share their own remembrances either in comments or other posts here. I can only post my own favorite stories.
The first comes from our long-running D&D group (which spanned over five years, enough to see two members achieve godhood). Lia, a rogue, began the tradition that became one of the many catchphrases for the Zen Bassmasters; “I push Tserof.” Despite, nominally, being the group’s rogue, Lia was pretty terrible at disarming traps. Enough so that, noting that most traps had a 10-20 foot radius of effect, we would tie a rope with 20 feet of length to her and all stand beyond the end of it when she went in. Her solution to this dilemma was to push Tserof. Tserof was our arcane archer and overall goof, so Lia’s favorite method of disarming traps became, upon detecting a trap, to push Tserof into said trap, setting it off and disarming it (de-arming Tserof in the process. The healers kept a couple of extra rez spells handy).
The second was our group’s time in Dark Ages of Camelot. As we each chose character names, some from previous gaming monikers, some original, Christy chose as her last name Bustenhalter. It was both a nod to the Britcom Are You Being Served, which some of us had been binge watching (back when that involved swapping out a DVD on occasion), and also the fantasy trope of female characters wearing bras as armor and little else.
The third came in a pen and paper game of Star Wars, where Christy (I have forgotten her game name there) was our wiz with the languages; which in ZB means she was nominally less bad at it than the rest of it. The group was escorting a group of Jawas to safety (why Jawas? Did you forget which group this is?) and ran across a hostile group of Gammoreans who didn’t speak Basic. Pulling upon her knowledge of languages, Christy proceeded to tell the Gammoreans “We’re just taking these Jawas to our ship. We don’t want to hurt you.” Except she rolled a 1… and proceeded to actually tell the Gammoreans “We’d like to hurt you, but the Jawas have to leave now.” Cue one of thousands of running sequences synchronized to “Yakety Sax.”
Those are my memories. Not tender times, not uniquely positive qualities. Not fond moments of real emotion.
We’re gamers. It’s what we do. If it were me, Christy would have been at my wake telling as many “stupid Mekee stories” as she could remember. And if she hadn’t, I’d have haunted her. We all grieve in different ways. Gamers more oddly than most. Some would look down their noses at reducing one’s life to a series of pixels and penciled stats on paper. But any gamer knows that the meat sacks we’re all trapped in are forced upon us, with the frailties and limitations therein.
Our characters are who we are; who we really are; who we choose to be.