"Oh!" said his wife. "It's like the War"

February 21, 2018 8:52 AM

Owen Stephens recalls how in 2000/01 he ran a roleplaying session for Wizard of the Coast's then new Star Wars D20 game when an elderly gentleman with actual commando experience showed up at his table. (Hat tip.)
posted by MartinWisse (19 comments total)

Good find! Reminds me of Ishmael Beah's Moth piece about how being a child soldier in Sierra Leone made him the best paintballer in his American high school.
posted by apparently at 9:01 AM on February 21, 2018 [17 favorites]

A delightful story, well told.
posted by namewithoutwords at 9:12 AM on February 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

That was great!
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:13 AM on February 21, 2018

That was great! Thanks for sharing.
posted by Gwynarra at 9:37 AM on February 21, 2018

Not surprising. Didn't the Brits pretty much invent modern tabletop wargaming?
posted by Beholder at 9:41 AM on February 21, 2018

That was wonderful.
posted by COD at 9:54 AM on February 21, 2018

I always find it funny when a military fetishist gamer who can't shut up about tactics and weapons and correcting everyone's vocabulary ("You mean rounds, actually.") bumps up against an actual member-of-the-military gamer.

("Yeah, well, when we trained for this they taught us to..." "You trained for this?" "Yeah." "You were in the military?" "Yeah, I was an Army paratrooper. So anyway..." The look in the fetishist's face is priceless.)
posted by BrashTech at 10:11 AM on February 21, 2018 [16 favorites]

This warms the cockles of my whatever as a veteran, graybeard nethacker...
posted by jim in austin at 11:03 AM on February 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Good stuff. Somewhat related from today, "my mom rolled a druid"
posted by exogenous at 1:02 PM on February 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is the tabletop version of Christopher Lee telling Peter Jackson what a man getting stabbed in the back sounds like, isn't it?
posted by tobascodagama at 1:10 PM on February 21, 2018 [24 favorites]

I call bullshit.

He would have pronounced it LEFTenant.
posted by rudhraigh at 1:26 PM on February 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

This was such a wonderful story and the Lieutenant and his wife sound like they are fun at parties.
Perhaps there's something about that generation.. my 21st birthday party (the 'demure' family one), my grandparents brought along their house-guest - an elderly english gent they'd met oh god knows how many years ago they're all so OLD oh crap and he's seated opposite his is going to be tedious...

....who turned out to be a retired RAN Admiral, with so many stories about the war and subsequent decades spent mostly at sea. All told with great alacrity and spirit, an utter delight. I have never - before or since - enjoyed a dinner party more.
posted by coriolisdave at 2:51 PM on February 21, 2018 [15 favorites]

Dashed amusing!
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:02 PM on February 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I could listen to these short Owen Stephens stories all day. Thanks!
posted by jjwiseman at 4:11 PM on February 21, 2018

@apparently’s Post also made me think of that time Andrew Exum learned that Hezbollah is pretty good at paintball.
posted by mountainherder at 4:36 PM on February 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

I was worried things were about to get awkward. Instead, Darth Vader was lucky he wears dark-colored pants.
posted by BiggerJ at 6:33 PM on February 21, 2018

My thoughts exactly rudhraigh
posted by glasseyes at 6:31 AM on February 22, 2018

I was at a games convention a few years back where the RAF had for some reason devised a stargate tabletop game.

We hopped in as an additional SG team to assist with the mission and spent an entertaining 45 minutes as a skirmishing group clearing the path back to the gate for the main team.
I've no idea if they did anything with the game, but somewhere there are a bunch of RAF officers pretending to be Jaffa in their spare time.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:49 AM on February 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

He would have pronounced it LEFTenant.

I think that could be chalked up to the guy's retelling. He puts on the british accent but forgets some of the more pronounced differences in pronunciation. He might have used "flashlight" when in the actually encounter the brit would have used "torch" or "elevator" vs. "lift".

It probably would have stuck out at the time but it's possible that his brain made the LEFTenant=LIEUTenant translation when he heard it and then he remembered it as LIEUTenant.
posted by VTX at 11:59 AM on February 23, 2018 [1 favorite]