With only a couple of days left before the first night of DunDraCon, the only thing left that I can think of writing about is the what my friends and I do at DunDraCon. The first thing is that we rent a room for the weekend, this has to be done a few months early since the rooms are booked quickly. Usually that was my responsibility but last year I decided to phone in the reservation and got the wrong weekend. Before I just sent in the mail-in form, but I wanted to get two adjoining rooms so I tried to call it in. This year Dave got two rooms, he has to get there early to have a chance at getting adjoining rooms.

For years the four people that roomed were Dave, Eric Rowe, Chris van Horn, and I. Sometimes other people spent a night, but we four used it all weekend. Last year and this year, I doubt I'll sleep there but maybe one night. My brother will be there all weekend so he takes my place. There are two beds in each room and you can get a cot, leaving the fourth to sleep in a sleeping bag.

The first year we did this, I think on Saturday we went to sleep. Eric, Dave, Mark-something, and I were lying in our beds talking with the lights out. We just couldn't get to sleep so we talked about role-playing and Eric's campaign. Eric brought up the point that he lets the players change their characters at will, if they want to. He'll compensate if you make a character far better than everyone else's, but usually if we change something it's something minor, like being able to do buy something we normally couldn't.

We wondered why Chris didn't do this in the Erzo campaign, since he was much more of a munchkin then than he is now. Eric postulated that if someone asked to raise a stat a couple of points "in the interest of your character concept", then Chris would follow suit. Sometime later Chris came in from his LARP and he joined the conversation.

The room is dark. I'm on a cot, facing the window, little bit of cold wind blowing in and keeping me from getting too hot. Trying not to laugh, I say "so Eric, I was thinking about my character concept, and my character should be stronger than he is, can I raise his strength a couple of points?" No one else said a word while Eric thought about it, then said "sure". We waited with baited breath, until Chris said "Eric, I've been thinking about my character concept too..." Then we all broke out laughing. Couldn't stop for a few minutes.

Later that night, after talking some more. I noticed that Eric was just saying the time. He'd say something like "it's 3:45 AM", then a bit later Chris would say something which would start a bit of a conversation. Then after it died down Eric would say the time again. This went on for a good 10 minutes at least before it stopped. I didn't get it at the time and it had to be explained to me later. Apparently Chris likes to get the last word, so Eric and Chris were battling to get in the last word that night. Eventually Eric was reduced to saying the time while Chris would say something different. Chris later admitted that he said something under his breath to get in the last word.

Another tradition is drinking the rainbow, which started a year or two later. We just try to drink one drink of each color in the rainbow, although only one violet/indigo. We've added white and black too. The first year I remember because I decided, since I hate the taste of alcohol, to just drink each drink as fast as I could. So we'd all get our round of drinks and I'd start drinking and didn't stop until the glass was empty. Impressive when you do it for a half dozen drinks.

The last tradition is the Monday morning breakfast. We try to get up early enough to go down to the hotel restaurant to get the buffet breakfast. It's quite good although I never seem to eat that much. It's my treat and we talk about what we did that weekend. Pretty much the last thing to do before we leave and DunDraCon ends.