Charles Goodhorn Is On Your Team, Idiots

Are you looking for adventure? Are you looking for magic? Are you looking for a magical adventure with dragon-slaying and princess-rescuing? Well, put away the Kindle and its charging cord, because you won’t get that from Charles Goodhorn’s brief encounter with gun-wielding bugbears. Who is Charles Goodhorn, you ask? He’s a noble paladin. A righteous warrior. A slayer of everything evil. With every D&D campaign he was a part of, he made it to the eighth level of his profession. He was so close to getting his own warhorse and followers. He could have been the stuff of legends…but not this time. Not even close to this time.

Somewhere in the mid to late-90’s, my brother James hosted an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with his friends Adam and his own brother whose name I can’t remember, both of whom played bugbears. What the fuck was a bugbear? Well, I didn’t start using the internet on a frequent basis until 2000, so it wasn’t like I could Google it right away. I always thought they were just humanoid bears. Damn, did I turn out to be wrong. James, Adam, and Adam’s nameless brother were in the middle of a session when from out of nowhere, James asked if I wanted to play to. Hell yes, I wanted to play! I got my eighth-level paladin ready for some action, complete with a magical bastard sword and the swagger of a true warrior.

Charles Goodhorn, the paladin in question, entered the game…and the first thing the two bugbears do is point their guns at me. Whatever swagger Charles had going into this campaign was completely gone when I, the player, couldn’t figure out how to deal with this situation. I froze up. I scrambled for answers and couldn’t find any. I couldn’t understand why two player characters would want to point guns at me for seemingly no reason. And so, Charles Goodhorn disappeared in a puff of smoke. Adam’s brother wanted to take Charles’s magical bastard sword, but that disappeared too. And then I retreated to my room not knowing why the hell everything happened the way it did.

Even though this session lasted about as long as virgin sex (which I would know nothing about), there is a lot to unpack now that I’m an adult storyteller with a somewhat developed frontal cortex. First of all, let’s ask why. Why would two player characters want to point weapons at another player character, especially when Charles did nothing to provoke them? Aren’t all player characters supposed to be on the same side? Even with differing alignments, surely they could find a way to work together. Maybe that’s what I should have had Charles say: “I’m on your team, idiots!”

Was he, though? Would a Detect Evil check inform him of the bugbears’ intentions? Should characters just willingly trust each other due to their circumstances? Do they have to get along all the time? If not, then why would they not get along? Did these bugbears come with their own emotional baggage? Were they screwed over so many times that pointing guns at strangers is reasonable? 

Or maybe…just maybe, a Google search many decades later would reveal to me that bugbears generally conform to the Chaotic Evil alignment, which meant there was no structure or recourse to what they were doing as long as it meant killing all the good guys. If I had used the Detect Evil skill that all paladins are entitled to, then I probably would have figured this out. But I froze up not knowing what to do, because I thought all player characters had to get along all the time.

But let’s say that Charles knew ahead of time that the bugbears were evil. Surely, he could just cut them down with his bastard sword the minute they got too close. But maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea to say, “I’m on your team, idiots!” Could declaring allegiance to Chaotic Evil bugbears turn Charles into an Oath Breaker, or a warrior who lost all of his paladin powers by virtue of deviating from Lawful Goodness?

But let’s say my Google search turned out to be a bunch of horseshit. Let’s say the bugbears weren’t Chaotic Evil, but they were just distrusting of strangers who suddenly waltzed in on their action. Well…Charles is hardly the only stranger to cross their paths, I’m sure. The streets of every city the bugbears were a part of were most likely packed with strangers. Do the bugbears point their guns at pedestrians crossing the street? How about the bartenders who serve them beer? Or the blacksmiths who forge their weapons? Maybe they should solve their own trust issues before they get thrown in prison for randomly pointing guns at people they don’t know.

If the bugbears weren’t actually Chaotic Evil, why would they want to distrust a paladin, who is notorious for conforming to Lawful Good behavior? If you can’t trust a zealot paladin, who can you trust? A True Neutral thief? A Chaotic Neutral barbarian? How about a Lawful Evil politician? You know, someone who hides behind red tape and charisma while committing the most devious acts imaginable, such as slashing funding for poor people and giving tax breaks to kajillionaires.

But let’s say the bugbears don’t have deep-seated trust issues nor are they Chaotic Evil. Why then would they point guns at a random paladin? Perhaps it had more to do with the setting than anything else. I never did ask James where this campaign took place. If the bugbears were in a monster-infested dungeon, maybe they thought the paladin was yet another monster. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, at that point, it sounds more like a prophecy for Dick Cheney shooting hunters in the face. Apparently, Dick Cheney wasn’t an outlier. There really were hunters in the news who shot distant people because they thought the person was a deer. Charles Goodhorn didn’t have antlers…or tentacles…or vampire fangs…or bat wings…he was just a human knight with good intentions. And yet, he could have been shot in the face because of hair-trigger paranoia.

Hair-trigger paranoia is actually a common theme in movies and books. In the beginning of The Hateful Eight, Marquis Warren asks for a ride from John Ruth’s horse carriage. Because John Ruth is a bounty hunter with a pricy criminal in tow, he points his guns at Marquis and demands to see his hands. John has no idea if Marquis is a criminal, but he won’t take any chances due to the gravity of his situation. Maybe the bugbears had similar gravity in their situations and would rather vet people than let them have access to whatever riches or artifacts they have. That would have been a fair justification for paranoia, but I didn’t know that at the time, because I always assumed player characters were part of a team.

There’s a lesson to be learned in the campaign that lasted about as long as Daniel Bryan vs. Sheamus at WWE Wrestlemania in 2012. Read the room. Make sure you see all the nuances of the situation before making wild assumptions. Charles had no idea why bugbears would want to point rifles at him, but it wouldn’t have hurt to find out. It wasn’t like he could just run up to them and cut them down, which may or may not have made him an Oath Breaker. They had guns, which meant they were in control. The one who has the bullets has all the power, in case you learned nothing from every bank robbery movie ever. Instead of calling them idiots for not seeing his side, Charles could interrogate them a little bit. Why are they pointing guns at him? Who are they? What are their intentions with him? What will it take to convince them to put their weapons down?

While illnesses like cancer and schizophrenia seem to happen randomly, human behavior happens for a reason. Is anybody really acting randomly? Do bugbears just shoot their guns off for no reason? Or do they have psychological issues which force them to do so? Do they have prejudices? Do they have untreated illnesses? Do they have past experiences with people who screwed them over? Do they value protection a little too much in dungeon-crawling scenarios? Would they shoot an innocent prisoner if they thought he was a monster? If so, what would prompt them to act hastily? Psychology can’t be boiled down to one or two actions or thoughts. There’s a whole universe going on in people’s heads. What kind of universe goes on in the bugbears’ heads?

I’ll tell you what kind of universe goes on in Charles Goodhorn’s head: the same as mine: confusion, anxiety, awkwardness, and shyness. I exhibit these traits in Charles because those were the only behaviors I knew as a pre-teen growing up in Chehalis, Washington. Getting inside other people’s heads and expanding character psychologies was an alien concept to me back then. I just wanted to slash some shit up. I wanted to kill the evil sorcerers and collect enough loot to support my Lawful Good churches. I wanted to slay dragons and rescue princesses. I wanted to leave behind a legacy of epic proportions. But if I did any of things as a Gary-Stu, then the legendary status loses all of its specialty.

If I prided myself so heavily on my creativity back then, why wouldn’t I want to expand my storytelling skills and see beyond the black and white? Because in order to do that, I’d have to actually take an interest in the literature middle school and high school gave me to analyze. School books are notorious for being boring, with the exceptions coming few and far between. Even in college, the reading material bored me to tears. I jokingly called Tom King’s book “Green Grass, Running Diarrhea”. I might as well have brought a blanket and pillow with me very time I stepped into Medieval Literature class. Going to school killed any love for reading I had, because the books sucked. It wasn’t until after I left school in 2009 that I started to find books that I liked and became a born-again bookworm.

These Dungeons & Dragons memoirs aren’t just fun to write; they’re learning experiences for my past self, whether it’s something to expand upon or never do again as a writer. Hopefully, young writers won’t make the same mistakes that I did, but if they do, it probably has something to do with the school system failing them. In my case, instead of turning to literary crap, I turned on the TV and watched edge lord shows like The Shield, WWE Raw, Mind of Mencia, and anything else that had offensive stereotypes that I never questioned. I took a lot of work to undo those edge lord tendencies. But if I hadn’t undone them, I wouldn’t be here to teach you these D&D-inspired lessons to begin with. Forget Cancel Culture, because my career wouldn’t have started anyways. Can’t take away a career that never was. Learn and continue to learn, my friends. That’s all I can teach you.

Soccer Sucks

The summer sun shone down upon the gym students of Santa Consuela High School like an oven baking a pizza. As they played soccer on the school’s grass field, sweat rained down from their bodies to where their gym clothes looked like they had just gone swimming in a river. The kids and their teacher Miss Lopez were in tiptop athletic shape, so slowing down wasn’t a problem. For mildly overweight student Ben Troy, huffing, puffing, and sluggishly dragging himself across the field was as natural as the sweat pouring from his body.

Ben hated gym class so much that his muscles tightened at the though of it, only to ask himself, what muscles? He gritted his teeth together every time Miss Lopez told him to “pick it up”. No gym teacher could begin to fathom what it’s like to be overweight and constantly tired. Ben could sleep for days after a shitty soccer game like this. He was already in such a foul mood that he could blow off a firestorm of swear words at the smallest annoyance.

But instead all it took was a flying soccer ball to Ben’s ribcage. The impact stung him so badly that he dropped to his knees and screamed like a wounded lion. The other students, who paid more attention to the game than to Ben, accidentally knocked him down as they passed him by, leaving the big guy rolling around in the grass and crying in agony.

Rather than relishing in his agony, Ben nipped up and stopped the game with cacophonic vitriol. “That’s it! I fucking quit! I hate this goddamn game and I hate you stupid ass motherfuckers! Why don’t you look where the fuck you’re going next time, you goddamn faggots!”

Every student on the field had their wide eyes on him and one kid mocked him with an, “Ooo, I’m so scared!”

“Shut up, pencil dick!” shouted Ben before stomping off of the field and sitting on a metal bench with his spine and shoulders hunched over. He looked down at his black sneakers and gray athletic shorts and breathed deeply in anger. Contrary to popular belief, heavy breathing didn’t calm him down in the least. He still felt like punching the heads off of everybody on that field. Maybe he could grab them by the legs and split them in half like a banana. Those seemed like reasonable options to a pissed off kid with weight issues and a teacher who constantly told him to “pick it up”. In Ben’s mind, the only thing they would be picking up his pieces of skull off of the grassy field.

“We need to talk,” said Miss Kira Lopez.

Deep down inside, Ben always thought that his thirty-something gym teacher looked attractive with her brown skin, black ponytail, and red gym shorts. But he was in no mood to think with his penis. He wanted to strangle people. He wanted to head butt that kid who made fun of him. He wanted to rip out the spinal columns of everyone who had ever made fun of him for being bad at sports.

Miss Lopez sat down next to Ben and said, “You know you’re going to get detention for swearing at your fellow students. Sure, I don’t like being hit with a soccer ball either, but those were some pretty harsh things you said. I certainly don’t appreciate you using a homophobic slur against them. You know the one I’m talking about.”

“Faggot isn’t a gay slur. It’s a generic insult. Everybody knows that,” argued Ben, still with his crew cut-wearing head tucked against his chest.

“You can debate the semantics of an insult all day long, but that doesn’t change the fact that you just earned yourself detention. I want to see you here after school for thirty minutes. We’ve got a lot to talk about,” said Miss Lopez.

“How many minutes of detention are those morons getting for knocking my ass over and smacking me with the ball? Huh? Soccer is supposed to be a non-contact sport, which means nobody’s supposed to get hurt. If you really wanted to injure your students so badly, why don’t you teach some MMA or some shit like that? At least then, beating the shit out of students will be legal.”

Miss Lopez placed a gentle hand on Ben’s shoulder and caused him to glare at her with the viciousness of a wild wolf. She said, “Listen to me. First of all, that look your giving me doesn’t mean anything right now. You can get mad all you want, but you’re in a gym class and you have an assignment to do. Second of all, if we allowed you to beat up whoever you wanted, you’d completely miss the point of soccer. In addition to being a non-contact sport, which you alluded to earlier, soccer is a team sport. In order for a team to be successful, they have to learn how to get along. That’s what school is about: building communities. What kind of community are we going to have if you’re constantly screaming vulgar insults at your classmates and threatening to kill them?”

“If you don’t want me to do those things, then tell those kids to stop hitting me with the goddamn ball. It’s that simple. And if they do hit me with the goddamn ball, give them the same amount of detention that I have,” suggested Ben.

“You know full well that that was an accident. Sure, we should try our best to reduce the number of accidents in sports, but that doesn’t mean everybody’s going to suddenly be perfect. Whether you know it or not, those other kids are depending on you to be their rock. They need your help in achieving victory. If you’re going to deny that to them, then you’re not really part of a community at all, are you?”

Ben swatted Miss Lopez’s arm away and said, “What the fuck do they need me for? I’m just a big fat ass who’s slower than an old lady crossing the street.”

The gym teacher folded her arms and looked at her student incredulously before saying, “Is that what you really believe? Do you really think that using your weight issues as a crutch is going to bring you happiness? I know you’re unhappy with your body, which is another reason gym classes exist. I know you don’t believe this right now, but I actually want you to live a long and healthy life. I want good things for you, Ben. You’re not going to get those good things if you’re just sitting here on the bench while your teammates are losing. Come on, give them another chance. Please?”

Ben breathed heavily in and out as he contemplated this point while trying to sooth his fiery anger. He reluctantly stood back up with his fists clenched at his sides, ready to go at a moment’s notice. But then he looked down at his teacher with the same venomous glare and said, “The next motherfucker who knocks me down is getting the shit kicked out of him. I don’t care how much detention I get. I still think soccer sucks.”

The vengeful student tromped his way back on the field and engaged his classmates in even more athletic warfare. He struggled with his cardio and sucked as much air as he possibly could from this burning and humid weather. Getting the soccer ball away from his opponents while managing to stay on his feet this time was a struggle that only added to his huffing and puffing.

Deep inside he didn’t want any more trouble than he had already gotten himself into. Something about Miss Lopez’s words struck a chord with him, though he wouldn’t openly admit it. Maybe it was teenaged attraction, but this was an even worse time to think with his penis. He had a game to win and goddamn it, he was going to win come hell or high water.

After a long while of sucking in air like a cyclone, Ben finally managed to gain control of the soccer ball. The easy part was over. Now it was time to channel is rage into positivity. All of this fire burning in his belly and lungs was now being used as fuel for his newfound athleticism. He ran with the ball like a freight train bursting down the tracks. He didn’t care about his saggy belly or thunder thighs. He didn’t care about his lightheadedness or quickly beating heart and brain. He didn’t care that his insides felt like he swallowed molten steel. He had this ball and he wasn’t letting go.

After a slight bump of the shoulders with another student, Ben felt like kicking some heads. In one thunderous motion, he threw his biggest, most earth-shattering kick his heavy frame would allow. But instead of concussing another student, his raging energy was directed toward the soccer ball. It flew through the air like cannon volley and sailed past the goalie before touching the net. Prior to that goal kick, the score was ten-to-ten. With only seconds remaining, Ben Troy just scored the final kick and led his team to victory.

In the midst of all of this raspy breathing, Ben’s eyes grew wide with disbelief as his fellow teammates cheered their heads off. He was in an even bigger state of disbelief when they actually had the strength to hoist him on their shoulders in an act of celebration. A small grin formed on his pudgy face as he was lowered to the grass. He finally did it. He made a difference in a way that didn’t involve homophobic slurs or extreme violence. For that small moment, he found his happiness. And then the overweight student collapsed to the ground and blacked out.

“Somebody get some help! Call 9-1-1!” shouted Miss Lopez. That was the last thing Ben heard before taking his happy ass into dreamland, or wherever the dark side was.