Zak needs foam core to mail his painting. On the way to the art store, a man stops him. Musician and artist Amanda Palmer is in town. The man wants to know if Zak will paint something on her body for an event. Palmer has millions of obsessive fans, but Zak’s face is unchanging and unreadable.

“Mandy likes Amanda Palmer,” he says flatly. “If she can come, yes.”

Although it’s polite, Zak’s expression offers little emotional comfort. It’s like he skipped the mirror stage in early childhood development on his way to somewhere else. But it doesn’t feel aloof or hostile, just highly alert, if a bit indifferent. I’ve seen this look several times now. It’s almost as if he’s waiting for you to keep going and say something else, hopefully something smarter, but you don’t, so he moves on.

And I have to admit, the more I’m with him, the sloppier the world seems. There’s something in the way his mind works that flenses fattened speech and thoughts. My old calculus teacher believed in eradicating the word “it” as an imprecise placeholder. “Doing so will make your mind more beautiful,” he would say.

It strikes me he would like Zak’s mind.

Mandy calls for her wheelchair. The photo shoot is finished and she’s waiting to be picked up. She gives Zak an address that’s about half a mile away and we go. It’s dark outside now. Zak asks me if I want to ride in the wheelchair. I’m horrified, but he argues that one of us should. The logic is shaky, but I get in.

The wheelchair is the kind you find in an airport or Safeway. It’s cheap and rattles. You can feel every bump. Mandy ran a successful crowd-funding campaign for a new wheelchair and they’re waiting for it to show up. Medical bills drive everything. All the money goes to them. For every $28,000 painting Zak sells, he sees about $9,500 after the gallery’s share and taxes. Specialists in EDS are rare and they aren’t cheap. One of them is in L.A., which is why they’re here.

Mandy’s changing needs drive the rhythm of Zak’s days. “It’s like this,” he says. “She asks me to get up and take the dog out. I don’t want to take the dog out. But then I realize she can’t. She doesn’t have a choice. That part may just be gone.” The day after I leave, I see a photo of Mandy in a hospital bed go by on her Twitter stream. Even in a T-shirt without makeup, visibly tired and with a feeding tube up her nose, she looks like a beautiful teenager.

As Zak pushes me in the wheelchair down Spring Street, a warm cement wind is flowing between the buildings of downtown L.A. We pass people and they move aside; I burn with shame. I focus on the breeze coming through the alleys. There is something wildly illicit about being here. I want to feel it. I don’t want to be a coward.

We find the apartment, but no one’s there. They left the door open for us, so we go in and wait. Zak examines the pictures on the walls, pokes around a rolltop desk. A woman comes in, terrified. We’re in the wrong apartment. A neighbor appears. He looks at Zak’s crusty punk glory. He looks at the empty wheelchair. It reads like a grifter move. We back out, quickly mumbling about a friend on the next floor, but get only glares.

Once in the elevator, Zak exhales and smiles a little. He says what we’re both thinking. It’s a good thing I was there looking so harmless.

Opening the door to the right apartment, which is filled with bright light and half-dressed, pretty women with pointed ears, I am overwhelmed by cotton candy and bubblegum pink. But I think it’s an aura projected onto the situation and that the color isn’t actually present.

The photographer is on the couch scrolling through the pictures on his laptop. Laney, Connie, and Mandy are looking on and seem pleased. Mandy, I notice, has little faun horns and her hair has been teased into a wilder shape. Behind me Charlotte says, “It’s Vanessa!” She seems so joyfully delighted to see me, my heart lifts. It’s not personal, though, just the genius of her natural gift. She makes the world seem like a surprise party just for you. Like Zak said, Charlotte was born to be a porn star, which reminded me of something he wrote:

The most hideous thing about pornography, of course, is that it works. On you. Excellent, witty, urbane writers can and do fly in from somewhere and visit pornography and write about it wittily and urbanely and make it all seem funny or make it all seem sad because it is always funny, and it is always sad. But it also works. On them. On you. —We Did Porn

The day of the game I get to Zak’s a couple of hours early so I can create my character. I haven’t done this for years and don’t remember how. Zak says he’ll walk me through it and gets out some characters sheets.

Zak is what some call an old-school Renaissance type. He says it’s likely I am, too.

“There’s a foolproof test. You come upon a bunch of baby Orcs. Orcs are, by definition, pure evil. Do you kill them?”

I’m a mom. I’m squeamish about meat. I can barely use flypaper with a clear conscience.

“Pure evil?” I ask.

“Pure evil.”

“I kill them.”

“You’re OSR.”

It’s not a tame comment. Debates over the true nature of Orcs and how dice roll may seem ridiculously esoteric, but the game is rife for post-colonial critique. After all, is not darkness simply colonial “othering?” Are not Orcs code for blackness? If so, how can they be accepted as pure evil by anyone but a racist? Or so the argument goes. Zak’s defense of OSR has gotten him into trouble with groups unable to separate the social critique of the game (race, gender, etc.) from its mechanics and style of play. It’s also why he zeroed in that particular question: You come across a party of Orcs; Orcs are by definition pure evil. Do you kill them?

Similarly, Zak has a clearly defined stance on two of the most important elements of the game: death and treasure. The 4th edition made it harder to die. After all, why commit that much time and energy when someone can get wiped out in a second? Treasure, too, changed. Traditionally, a player got “XP,” or experience points, by killing monsters and stealing gold. These points were how she “leveled up.” The higher a character’s level, the more skilled she is, and the harder she is to kill. But some viewed how XP was earned through stockpiling treasure as a form of incumbency. Why should one player have an advantage over another just because they got the gold in the last game? In the abstract it makes sense, but Zak opposes anything that lowers the stakes of the game. He believes in cheap death and good XP for treasure. When treasure is worth more than monsters, he argues, it may make sense to steal it rather than try a frontal attack and risk getting killed. This, he says, encourages problem solving. In his game — as in the 5th edition — everything is more dangerous. There are repercussions to your actions. What you do affects others.

It’s late afternoon. The painting by the window is finished. A black rectangle behind the girl’s head that was blank now has writing on it, not the kind of writing you can read but the kind you think can read, a script Zak uses to make the eye pass over. While he’s getting out dice, I ask him about meaning in art, mostly because I think I’m supposed to. He says he doesn’t care about meaning.

“Meaning is the least interesting thing about good art and the most interesting thing about bad art. There’s content in everything. I could make a giant shoe out of sweatshop shoes, but — ” he points to the cement beneath his feet, “I’d rather show what’s beautiful about that floor.”

He hands me dice. I roll. I tell Zak I used to always want to be a Ranger like Strider from Lord of the Rings. He says all hippies do.

“Radon Lanoi” turns out instead to be a very mediocre thief with fundamental traits — strength, charisma, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and intelligence — notable only for their lack of salience. Her “hit points,” which determine the amount of life force she has to work with, are dismal. It will be a miracle if she survives the night.

Zak says the only other character laboring under these kinds of numbers is “Kerowhack,” a human thief played by Playgirl spokesmodel, Tyler Knight. Tyler, like Charlotte Stokely, is a major star. Winner of the Good For Her Feminist Porn Award, as well as Heartthrob of the Year, and two Best Couples Sex Scene AVN awards — his list of accolades is long.

Tyler, who is both extremely talented and African American, was already an established star when “interracial scenes” scenes became an industry standard. (Strangely, scenes between African American women and white men don’t count as interracial because, well, that’s just plain old colonialism.) When I ask how many films he’s been in, he can only guess, “Somewhere between six and eight hundred.” It’s Tyler’s multiple Best Group Sex Scene awards that interest me most. They tell me that he’s a man who plays well with others, a natural collaborator, and clearly capable of setting his own needs aside. This, as I see later, will be his undoing.

Mandy, Connie, Laney, Charlotte, and two lapdogs show up around dusk. Soon after, comes Tyler, Adam (another veteran gamer), and a woman named Karolyn, on whose hands are elaborately configured rings connected by rails of silver and hidden chain links. In what I can only imagine is Númenórean chic, the rings wrap above and below each finger joint, some plain, some delicately knotted, one adorned with a seahorse. I learn later they’re orthotic. Karolyn, like Mandy, has EDS. She’s a writer and the rings are designed to allow her to hold a pen.

People take seats around the table by the kitchen sink and settle in. It’s a familiar moment for D&D players and here feels almost tender. Zak begins. Let me be plain in case it is not obvious; you want Zak Smith as your GM. If you only ever play one D&D game in your life, you want it to be at this table.