"and there was much rejoicing"

After about three months with a cribbed player character sheet, I finally have my hands back on the most useless player character ever to grace the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

Parker Gaiman, a character I rolled up this spring with an origin heavily based on the Lee-Kirby origin for Spider-Man, is a rogue/fighter/master spy I play for a biweekly gaming session in Branchburg. One of the other players, growing tired of my complaints how useless Parker was, suggested that I just needed to play him better, then looked over the sheet and decided, "No, you're actually playing him pretty well. He's an excellent roleplaying character, but he's not really designed for the adventure we're having."

The adventure we're having has involved a lot of encountering monsters from the D&D "Vile Book of Darkness" or some other nightmarish tome, and has resulted in Parker's narrowly escaping death about five times so far. Actually, he would have died, except we have a fairly high-level cleric in the party who has saved his skin each time.

A few months ago, I lost his sheet. Rather than roll up a new character, though, we used what the DM had stored on his laptop to recreate him, and I've been playing a shadow of the actual character, while fruitlessly looking for the original sheet.

Well, my dice, my D&D player's handbook, and my character sheet finally showed up Saturday afternoon, in the unlikeliest of places. My wife found them down in the basement, squirreled away in the box of children's clothes that the DM and his wife gave me, what, at the start of the summer, right after they moved to Branchburg?

I'm guessing I had found it was easier to carry everything with the D&D stuff packed inside the top of the box. Unfortunately, it was also easy to forget that they were there, and not easy to find things in the study when they're actually in the basement.

So now I'm back to the original sheet for Parker, but I'm still thinking his chances of surviving the campaign aren't that hot. Unfortunately, the DM just won't let us die. My best hope is to use an Uncle Ben moment to sic Parker against a band of marauding chain demons, and hope they take him out.