#005 - Bill Striker laughs in the face of condoms
A fact about me: I have DMed exactly one pen-and-paper RPG session in my life, and I was I think a junior in high school at the time, and I was not very good at it at all, but I had drawn up a bunch of random encounter tables for it, and also there was this spooky mansion and in the basement of the mansion was some weird complicated glowing magical trap thing that reacted to character alignment in a way that I thought was super clever but the players mostly thought was kind of confusing and annoying, and I stayed up till four a.m. running it for a bunch of gamer/theater friends and two of them ended up sort of making out under a blanket instead of paying any attention, which was kind of rough because I totally had a crush on one of them.
I haven’t really comported myself that much better as a player over the years, either. One time, I stabbed a horse in the neck with an arrow? To try and slow down some dwarves? Basically it was like pushing over a bunch of Hell’s Angels bikes outside a bar, except in the Forbidden Realms. So that was a thing.
Basically what I’m saying is I have a lot of respect for anyone who can manage to run a game. I’m not sure Geordi knows what he’s getting himself into.
Geordi: Alright! I’ve spent all night writing up the setting for our first role-playing campaign. You’ll be a motley crew of–
Picard: We should do a detective tale, a real rip-roaring, hardboiled story of a good private dick in a world that can scarcely help but treat him bad–
Bev: Jean Luc, we always do Dixon Hill, I’m tired of Dixon Hill–
Data: Perhaps a more cerebral sort of mystery, starring a keen-eyed, pipe-smoking deductionist whose logic saves the–
Riker: Something set on the pleasure planet Risa–
Geordi: guys, I–
Worf: I demand an Ancient Western program–
Wes: It could be, like, a story about a young man with amazing powers for manipulating space and time and he has a hot girlfriend and his dad isn’t dead and–
Geordi: Guys, I already–
Riker: “Encounter at Pon Farr-point: a trio of sexy lady Vulcans must mate…or die! Can Captain Bill Striker ‘Risa’ to the occasion?”
Troi: “Bill Striker”? For god’s sake–
Geordi: Guys?
Another motivating factor in this strip was, as it is in almost every other part of my life as well, the chance to make terrible puns. I'm still very pleased with "Encounter at Pon Farr-point."
I was really married to Picard's obsession with Dixon Hill holoprograms when this started. A decade on, not having reread the whole archive before getting underway on this commentary as I restore the comic strip-by-strip, I don't know remember if I ever did anything much with that gimmick, though the old-married-couple dynamic here with Beverly is at least getting at something of the character interplay I enjoyed most when writing these.