Roll D20 For Saving Throw: Geeky Coolness...SUCCESS!

Last Saturday's D&D event on Market St. in SF orchestrated by my former coworker and assisted by yours truly was a smashing success by our meager standards. Heck, we got a nod from Laughing Squid. That's something. Considering that we were, in our minds, sure the cops would put the kabosh on our little stunt before the dungeon crawling got started, yeah, going four hours straight sans any fuzz-related interference, hobo fights, ex-con chess jockey brawls or being hit by the frequent MUNI buses that whizzed by inches from Jason's DM stand was damn impressive.

Since the dawn of time man has wondered whether or not one can actually get away with anything on Market Street in broad daylight. The answer: A resounding YES!

We started about an hour later than planned, owing to problems getting tables, chairs and Jason's vast--VAST--array of D&D paraphernalia from Hayes Valley to the Powell-Market intersection. Our rescuer was City CarShare and their no-fuss, affordable brand of short-term auto rentals, from whom we snagged a pickup truck for thirty-minutes. After dropping Jason and the stuff off then returning the truck I walked back to the scene of the crime and found our three invited players had come--plants who pretended not to know Jason and made it look like we'd genuinely snagged some members of the public to sit and roll the dice. That little gambit worked, actually, and before long we had two homeless guys come sit down to play...with mixed results.

This was pretty much the player group, minus the unhinged homeless dude who came by to backstab the others.

The first man, a middle-aged Chinese dude, had been involved in a fistfight with a clearly mentally unstable gentleman not thirty minutes before taking a seat. Although he'd never played the game before, the man was a natural role player and ended up being more effective a participant than even the three plants. His friend who came about an hour later was another matter altogether. This guy sat down and started to play, but from the outset made it very clear he would be working for the enemy, promptly attacking the four other players in the middle of an encounter. I suppose he was role playing--the role of the contemptuous jackass. No matter though, the Chinese guy annihilated him and pretty much every other combatant to boot.

The playing field and Jason, in all his "SM" glory.

Did I mention Jason was wearing what essentially looked like a stylized burka? Yup, straight out of a Spirit Halloween store and adorned with this persona's initials on his cape, for one day he was not a dungeon master, but a "Street Master."

Me and a proper filmmaker got footage of the whole thing, my role focusing mostly on getting crowd reactions and conducting interviews. Look for an edited video on YouTube someday soon.

--Matt