Knights of the Dinner Table Volume 2 Issue 6

Issue 6: Plays Well with Others

Luck of the Macaw – the Knights play HackBeard, the RPG about piracy on the high seas. B.A. Felton’s failure to railroad his players into his prepared adventure leads him to trick the Knights. Bob’s macaw Half-Pint gets lots of words in edge-wise.

Can We Talk? – the Knights kill the only person who knows where the end of the quest lies, but Sara beats the odds (or so she thinks).

Wherever You Go, There You Are – The Knights’ greatest enemy is Dave’s mapping skills.

Silver Things Upon His Chest – Brian’s medals provide the Knights with a way to boost their gaming status (and egos).

The Safety Lecture – B.A.’s lecture about player absenteeism leads to a story about Bob and his fight with Victor “Nitro” Fergueson.

The Great Intervention – Brian’s girlfriend, Alexis Marie, sounds too good to be true.

Carvin’ Marvin – Here we see the initial members of the Knights. B.A. is GM (after replacing Brian), Bob, Brian and Johnny Kizinski are players, and Dave just recently joined. His wish for a “big-ass sword” leads to the group questing for an intelligent sword with a bad attitude.

When reading The Great Intervention I actually felt for Brian. Here he is, a nerd with almost no social skills and no life outside the Knights (we see more of this later on) and so lonely he made up a girlfriend just to ease his loneliness. It goes too far when he tries to include the Knights into this reality he built for himself. I’ve come close to doing this myself when I was young and had no friends, so I understand. Otherwise, most of the other stories are members of the Knights again undermining the group’s collective efforts in their adventures. But the Safety Lecture story is an oddity. Here Bob’s high-strung nature and love of his dice combine to form a violent personality. Sure the violence is the funny bit and these are comic book characters, but like I said, I do begin to care about these characters. So I must think harder about the kind of people the Knights are. And Bob is like 2 or 3 steps away from that William Foster character in the movie Falling Down. At least that’s what it seems like to me (and to be fair, the more about his life we learn, the more his actions become understandable).