Role-playing maims.

Speaking of America, I guess there's no more American hero than the Western gunfighter. The period of the Wild West was terribly brief in retrospect, and yet no other specific time and place has caught the imagination of people around the world the way the American West has, from the end of the Civil War to the closing of the frontier in 1890 (with some scattered Western adventures before and after). 

In my more concentrated dorkness days I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. You younger fellers may not know that the D&D home company, TSR, had role-playing games in other genres, and my own personal Geek Squad tried a lot of them. Gangbusters was a Roaring 20's adventure; Gamma World was a post-apocalyptic adventure. We enjoyed them, although they were not as much fun -- nor did they offer the kind of playground for wild imagining -- as D&D.

And yes, there was a Western role-playing game. Boot Hill operated the same way as the others -- a game master would set the scene, players would create characters, motivation would be provided, and off you went.  

What I remember best was how great my character looked, and how useless he actually was. By the time his dice-rolled characteristics were determined, I had a lean, mean, blazing-fast gunslinger. Unfortunately, he could not hit the broad side of five barns, stacked or aligned. His aim was terrible. His draw was the fastest in the land, faster than any non-player characters we ever encountered, but once that gun was out of its holster it might as well have been a pickleball paddle for all the good it did in combat. Sure, he might get a lucky hit, but mostly he was great for getting the drop on people, outdrawing them and hoping they wouldn't go for the leg iron.

In real life, in actual gunfights, other cowboys might have been similarly impaired. It's one thing to shoot a can off a fencepost, but another to shoot at moving men who are shooting back when the adrenaline is coming out your hat. In the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, yes, three of the nine men involved were killed, three others were wounded, and two more ran away. Thirty shots were fired, but the whole thing took only 30 seconds, and they weren't all using pistols. Doc Holliday had a shotgun. A lot of missed targets, I reckon. 

The event has invited all sorts of dramatic interpretation, necessary because the story is so famous but the climactic fight so short. The 1993 film Tombstone is more than two hours long, and you can't have a film that long with a fight that lasts just half a minute. In it, the OK Corral battle runs almost five minutes, according to YouTube. Definitely more guys should have been dead if they'd been blazing away that long. Maybe some horses and chickens, too. 

I'm not sure how I got into this narrative hole today. I was just thinking of my Boot Hill character, who probably died in a gunfight -- I don't recall, but Boot Hill did not offer magical healing like Dungeons & Dragons, so characters tended to not last. I think he could he earned a ballad just for his speed, though.

They called him the Rattler

Faster than light

Quickest with iron

In any gunfight

Nobody would challenge

That brave caballero 

Whose gun was as useless

As a vegetable marrow

No matter the target

He aimed like a wimp

Could hit nothing smaller

Than an inflated blimp

One day an old lady

Called him a bum

For using his rocker

As a place for his gum

Of course he outdrew her

And punctured the air

While her old shaky gun hand

Done parted his hair

We buried the Rattler

In dry desert spot

Faster than lightning

But couldn't hit squat

Fastest gun in Boot Hill. I reckon.