I am a dork.

Those of you who know me only by reputation (or from my blog) may see me as this hipster cool twentysomething living it up in Sin City, bypassing the mile-long lines at the ultralounges, calling in sick so I can go to Ditch Friday at the pool at the Hard Rock and chat it up with celebrities, but really, that's just the image I try to cultivate.

Because my secret identity as a sappy D&D dork must be protected at all costs.

Thanks to my friend-in-law, Kurt, I have been playing Neverwinter Nights for about five years now.  (I have a very long attention span for games I like a lot and tend to play them over and over again.  I'd like to say I take an analytical approach, playing them differently each time to get the most out of the game, but I don't.)  This is easily the best D&D RPG game ever, although it's also the only one I've played (not counting a half-hour of WoW, in which I only barely mastered the controls).  I've beaten it a bunch of times, created dozens of different characters, and probably spent more hours of my life devoted to hacking up bad guys than I would care to admit.  When I first started playing, I had to make myself a schedule where I was limited to skipping only one class a week so I would not have to explain to the advisors in the education department why, exactly, I failed my freshman-level composition class.

Anyway, in this one expansion pack, one of the optional members of your party you can add is this fighter/weapon master tiefling, Valen, and if you are a female character and not a complete twat, he eventually harbors a massive hard-on for you. 

I am not kidding.

This is a picture of Valen about to confess his passionate and undying love for me.  We just got duped by a powerful demon and sent to Cania, one of the Seven Hells (the frozen one, I guess).  Now we are on a quest to discover this demon's True Name so we can get out of here and go get all hitched or whatever.  (He does not normally glow green, I am just holding the mouse over him.  By far the best feature of the game is that, essentially, all you have to do to beat bad guys is click on them, and the badassery of your character does the rest.  My Whirlwind Attack can take down four drow warriors at a time with just one click of the mouse--way easier than enrolling at that Kung Fu studio was going to be.)  

The grown-up part of me understands that this is all just a video game, that neither Valen nor my patently made-up character who wields two +7 katanas with energy-draining, electrical-zapping powers and can run around all day with 533 pounds of stuff (thanks to my +24 strength!) and beat up all kinds of undead dragons and such are not actually real people, but I have to say I was looking forward to this chapter of the game since I started playing it again.  Something about making a broody, angsty, ass-kicking boy go all weak-kneed and sappy is just so yummy.

And I think it's not quite as pathetic as reading romance novels?