Yahoo Lifestyle How Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me How To Be Brave In The Real World
It was the summer of 1979, when I was 11, when my life became infinitely nerdier. My new neighbor, JP, taught me how to play a new game.
But it was more than just a game; it was a portal into the kingdom of fantasy and into an all-encompassing experience called Dungeons & Dragons. I was Ethor, and I was entranced by D&D’s spell of magic rings, wizards, dungeons, orcs, elves, dragons and quests.
“You descend into the tomb,” the Dungeon Master said. “Thick cobwebs cover the passageway and ceiling, blocking your way. What do you do?”
“Um,” said Ethor, a dwarf warrior on his first adventure. “How about I slice at the webs with my sword?”
“OK, if you really want to do that,” the Dungeon Master replied with a maniacal smile. “Roll to hit.”
Ethor rolled a 20-sided die, which clattered and spun and came to a stop on the tabletop. “An 8. Plus 3 for my strength. That’s 11.”
“Bad news, Ethor. Your blade does not slice the webs. But something has been disturbed. You hear a hiss. Dozens of legs scramble along the web.”
“What are they?”
“Giant spiders rush at you. Now what do you do?”
All that summer, I played with JP, the other neighborhood boys and, rarely, girls. From elementary school through high school, I played nearly every Friday night, immersing myself in this fantastical, sometimes farcical, heroic adventure game powered by polyhedral dice, graph paper dungeons, Mountain Dew and our imaginations. Those days are preserved in this Super 8 movie I shot in 1981.
This year, the visionary tabletop role-playing game, or TTRPG, celebrates its 50th anniversary. While Dungeons & Dragons was popular in the 1980s, since then it has significantly leveled up in cultural cachet. TV shows like “Stranger Things” and “The Big Bang Theory,” celebrities ranging from Vin Diesel to Stephen Colbert, and Twitch streamers like Critical Role and Dimension 20 have yanked the game from the closet ― and basement ― and into the limelight. During COVID lockdowns, Zoom D&D was a lifeline for many gamers. According to Hasbro, whose subsidiary Wizards of the Coast publishes D&D, 50 million have played the game to date, and the audience is less white and male than ever before. Sales are strong, and will likely remain so as a slew of D&D rule upgrades and nostalgic looks into the past hit the marketplace to coincide with the anniversary.
Here I am, a 58-year-old nerd, still playing years later, and I’m enjoying the game’s newfound respectability.
For those unfamiliar with TTRPGs, here’s how they work. A Dungeon Master, the head storyteller, referee and world-builder, prepares the loose scaffolding of a story and quest, complete with allies, creatures, traps and other obstacles. The Dungeon Master describes what the players encounter, using concrete and novelistic details (and sometimes goofy improvised character voices). The players, each assuming the role of a “character,” such as an elven wizard or dwarven warrior, describe how they respond to the situation. Each character’s traits, gear and statistics are logged on a piece of paper, which helps the players quantify what makes their hero tick; they might have a 16 strength (high) but a 7 charisma (low), or a magical item that increases their chance of triumph. Die rolls — usually using the 20-sider — determine an action’s success or failure.
But mostly, D&D is a shared social and storytelling experience. And that story is one that binds players to each other in ways that you might not expect.
When I first played, the game served as a testing ground, a safe outlet for imaginary derring-do. In real life, I was a chronic introvert. But when I was immersed in Dungeons & Dragons, I was brave and uninhibited; I took risks. Finding power and expressing agency, my friends and I would laugh, cheer and goof off, sharing a secret language that made sense only to us. The game’s arcane rules spurred my interest in history, language, geography and reading.
It’s important to remember that in the 1980s, when D&D first exploded on the pop culture scene, the game was feared as a menacing influence on America’s youth. The so-called Satanic Panic pigeonholed D&D with other “corrupting forces,” such as heavy metal, rap music and comic books. Parents, educators and psychologists baselessly connected D&D to kids worshipping dark forces, losing track of “reality,” even committing suicide. Nowadays, the game is being harnessed by these same groups to help kids and adults manage social anxiety, stress, isolation and other mental health challenges.
To be sure, D&D can’t compete with the visual splendors of your favorite video game. But it’s worth logging in the annals of pop culture that the fundamental concepts of most TTRPGs — equipping an avatar with weapons and bling, exploring an open world, completing tasks to gain experience points and level up — were all pioneered by D&D decades before they were adopted by mainstream video game culture. Fortnite, Minecraft, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Final Fantasy and countless others stand on the shoulders of a simple game played with pencils, dice, paper maps and dorky figurines.
Sometimes you need a place to park your psyche and your fragile ego surrounded by the soft cushion of fantasy. When I was a teen, D&D was not a bad place to retreat for a few years. It served me well, protected me and nurtured me. It gave me confidence and allowed me to test my imaginary mettle.
That was then. Why would D&D still lure me in, some 45 years after I first played? More than heroic projection, the power of storytelling has always captivated me, then and now.
As a middle-aged dude, I still find myself eager to pretend that I can embark on dangerous missions and do what I can’t do in real life — be brave and powerful, harness magic, slay dragons — in a swords-and-sorcery realm of my own design. I can tell stories that put me and my nerdy friends at the center of the plot. (In my memoir, “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks,” I recount my journey to accept the call of nerddom.)
On a societal level, we don’t exactly sit around the campfire at the end of the day to recount our heroic deeds anymore. I suppose Netflix has taken up that mantle. The internet, social media and the 24/7 news cycle have united us in new ways. But technology also isolates us on islands and in silos. We’ve allowed streaming content and digital distractions to effectively usurp our ability to entertain each other with a simple narrative. D&D brings people together, ideally without their devices, to create something from nothing — our imaginations — that has meaning because it is shared. D&D fills a cultural void and lets us flex our storytelling muscles once again. If you ever want to learn, I teach newbies to play.
When was the last time you played make-believe?
To be honest with myself, I also play TTRPGs for another reason: I’m chasing that high I felt when I was 11 years old, when I first became enchanted by D&D’s magic. The rattle of polyhedral dice remains a clarion call to that long-ago, faraway feeling.
“What do you do?” the Dungeon Master asks.
In my heart, I still want to do what I can’t do in 21st-century real-world life. Sword by my side, my comrades reading their weapons and spells, I want to stride into danger, into the unknown, into a realm of measureless possibility.
I want to tell that tale — with you.
