It's déjà vu all over again.
Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?

If you haven't, you're going to find this funny.

If you have, you're going to find it…eerily familiar.

Anyone who has ever played D&D fully realizes that the amount of enjoyment you derive from the game largely depends on the people in your group. It only takes one bad personality to suck all the fun out of what should be an enjoyable, creative, entertaining evening of the game that *ahem* personifies the essence of geekdom. I have had the fortunate experience of playing with several wonderful groups of people, including Scattagorical Staff Writer, Melissa Horal. (As a side note, Lemurish Staff Writer, Matt VanWinkle, was often invited but always declined... except for one memorable cameo appearance as a werewolf, which is much more frightening, and worth lots more experience, than a lemur). I have also played (for very short periods of time) with a couple groups of people who could barely exist together in the same room, let alone attempt playing a coordinated game.

Some of the bad apples include:

• The Rules Lawyer
  Self explanitory. These guys can be fun people to be around... until "an issue" comes up. Three hours later, the game resumes.

• The Rules Anarchist
  No rules apply to their character at all. They want their character to do anything at any time. If you have a good DM, their characters are generally killed or turned to stone fairly early in the game.

• The Moron
  These people doesn't understand or care about, not only the rules, but the game itself. There are several subtle gradations of this type, many of which can actually be fun to play with (adding a random element to the game) but more often than not they fall into the "obnoxious" subtype. Not only is their character often killed quickly, they are also often dispatched for, well, anything that will get rid of them as quickly as possible.

If any of this sounds at all familiar, then check out this little feature that was linked to on FARK.com over the weekend. It features a couple examples of the above using 8-bit graphics from the original Final Fantasy game:

www.cliveblackledge.com/8bit/8bitDandD.html#1

Apparently, the audio has been around the net for awhile - here's another version with some better graphics... including a whiny, Mountain Dew loving monster:

www.ifilm.com/filmdetail?ifilmid=220487

I have many fond memories of playing this game and no Mountain Dew loving monster is going to take that away from me. That is, unless he rolls a 20 (damn lucky monster).