What’s your alignment, baby?

Like most young D&D geeks back in the day, me and my buddies often used D&D terminology in our regular lives as kids. Obviously, if you fell off your bike or skateboard and got bashed up a bit, you’d say “I think I lost about 5 hit points there” (in reality, being zero level, we probably only had about 3 or 4 hit points max). I remember as a teen surfing with another gamer, and he asked me how many wandering aquatic monsters did we risk randomly encountering. We saw sharks and jelly fish all the time, so those topped our list. Also in there was killer whales, “kooks” and killer bacteria (this was Santa Monica Bay, after all).

But my favorite “D&Dism” was a pick-up line that I actually used and ultimately got lucky with in my early 20’s.

In our teens, I had joked about how in the far flung future world of my gameworld, people used “what’s your alignment” instead of “what’s your sign” (the big real world pick-up line of the late 70’s, early 80’s).

At a party years later, I was enjoying the kegs and open bar, when a pretty blond girl asked me to pour a beer for her. Happy to oblige and a little toasted, I hit her with it “so…I’m a cool and easy chaotic good. What’s your sign, baby?”

Not even thinking it would work, she was fascinated and wanted to know what the hell I was talking about. At that point in life I never talked about gaming around non-gamers. I was totally in the closet. But for some reason I decided to tell this girl what alignment meant, and about the game it came from. She was sort of a bimbo and didn’t like sci fi or fantasy (not even Star Wars), but the opening I got with my gibbering D&D nonsense got me into her life and dating her for around three months. If I recall, it ended because we had nothing in common but being pretty. And I was broke around that time too. That does not go with “high maintenance” L.A. chicks.

You don’t really hear that “what’s your sign” line outside of Burning Man these days, but I still think knowing somebody’s alignment is a whole lot more informative about them than what month they were born in.