How far does your relationship with Chris go back?
TL;DRNick Elms has known Chris since primary school and tells how, as teenagers, Chris ran D&D with scripted voices and sound effects, which lasted only about three sessions because it was too much work.
We went to primary school together. It goes back a long way. But yeah, I'm glad you gave me a heads up on that, because being put on the spot with "Tell me a story about Chris" I think could have ended with career suicide for me.
Tell me a story about Chris.
One that hopefully won't get me fired, and I think anyone who's seen Chris will probably attest it's fairly accurate. Go back to when we were like 15 or 16 and we just played D&D. Chris kind of got bored with the wooden delivery from the DMs. Somebody would be droning on, and he's like, "This needs more emotion, needs spicing up." So he got this idea to bring his friends in to do voices for the creatures, writing a script, getting sounds like rain sounds or wind sounds in the background. And he's having us all doing these crazy orc voices or dragon voices and things like that to play on a tape recorder while he's DMing. Probably about 40 years back, nearly.
What kind of DM [was he]?
It was fantastic. But the thing is, I think it only went for about three sessions, because it was so work intensive. Like I said before, we were all quite good artists at school, so we were even drawing concept art for environments, just to have the maximum amount of immersion for this game. But I think we got about three sessions in and everyone was like, "Jesus, this is too much work. It's like a job. We're only 15." But yeah, it was an experience. I think everyone who played those campaigns, even for three sessions, would remember it. Certainly Erin and my younger brother Simon, who's the financial director.