Fantasists

During its heyday in the late-70s to the mid-80s we toyed with playing Dungeons and Dragons -- the seminal role playing game with the crazy set of 6, 8, and 20 sided dice -- but honestly could not get into it. It was too much work, too cerebral and way too steeped in competitive seriousness with levels of skill etc. If you came late to the game you couldn't just play with your buddies who "knew" how. The owners and their "Characters" had too much "experience" to willingly play with a novice who would undoubtedly slow down game play and make the game un-fun.

So, now, rather than drawing mazes, and building characters via dice rolls, and some predetermined allotment of gold coins, men -- many of whom no doubt played D&D as boys -- now "draft" "teams" of professional athletes and play fantasy (fill in the blank). We know that there are many massively-multiplayer-games on the web that more closely mirror the old paper/pencil/dice-D&D experience but we don't play those for the same basic reasons that we never got into D&D. That said, fantasy (fill in the blank) players (aka: "team owners") are as geeky, dorky and obsessive as any of the most hardcore, 15th level warrior-owning D&D dice-rollers ever were. In our second year of Fantasy Football (FF), we feel much as we did as a 13 year old D&D aspirant -- frustrated, uninterested and basically fed up with the whole inane process.

By nature, we are competitive, and losing is not a fun experience even in relation to something as irrelevant as FF. FF is aggravating and there is enough aggravation in life without willingly submitting to an aggravating "game." Games, by their nature, are supposed to be fun. However, given the unpredictability of "any given Sunday" in the NFL, FF becomes a game of chance and we hate games of chance. So, just as we did 20-odd-years ago with the D&D craze, we'll remove ourselves from the Fantasy universe and leave it to the true fantasists and obsessives. Anybody for Monopoly?