Hey friends! Welcome back, and thank you for joining me again this week. Sorry this post is a few days late, but with everything going on in the world right now, I couldn’t think of anything non-COVID-19 related to write about on Thursday, and I figured there was plenty being written about it already. So rather than posting about that on Thursday just to “stay on time”, I figured I’d wait until I could come up with something different to write about this week. I will warn you that this week is probably going to be even more rambling than normal, and I know I say that every week, but I feel like this week, it’s especially true. Hang in there, there is a point in all of it, I promise.
As I have mentioned before, one of my interests is D&D (Dungeons and Dragons). I don’t want to dive too deep in to the nitty gritty of it, but for those of you unfamiliar with D&D, this is the basic premise. You find a group of people interested in playing a campaign. The group generally consists of 3-6 players and 1 DM, or Dungeon Master (also referred to as a GM, or Game Master in other non-D&D tabletop RPGs). Each player creates a character, choosing a race and class, and coming up with a backstory for their character. The DM provides descriptions of the characters’ surroundings, creates NPCs (or non-player-characters) for the characters to interact with, and provides exposition and narrative to help keep the story moving along and to give the players objectives. From there, the possibilities are really endless, as the players and DM work in tandem to craft a story. Now that I’ve laid out the very bare bones of what D&D is and how it works, I’d like to explain a bit why I enjoy it so much.
My first exposure to D&D came roughly 4 years ago. My roommate had a friend over and he asked if we would be interested in dipping our toes in to D&D a little bit. He had created a couple of first-level characters, and wanted to have us do a very stripped-down campaign, like…something we could do in an hour or two instead of some ongoing story. I knew nothing about D&D, other than what society had led me to believe – that it was a game played by extremely nerdy societal outcasts, often played in parents’ basements. Needless to say, I was a bit skeptical and reluctant to play, but I also wasn’t great at coming up with an excuse not to play on the spot, so I begrudgingly took a seat. As I looked over my character sheet, my curiosity got the better of me, and my desire to understand what I was looking at overtook my trepidation at being sucked in to Nerdsville.
After he explained to us what everything on our character sheet meant, my roommate’s friend determined we were ready to embark. He set the scene for us, describing our character’s surroundings (we had just walked in to a pub), as well as what brought us there (we had seen a posting on a nearby sign post requesting help clearing out a cave of goblins, and to see the pub owner for details). When he was done describing the setting, he asked me and my roommate a very simple question: “What do you do?” I was still feeling a bit hesitant about getting into the game, and I think that led to some confusion, because my reaction was “ummm…what do you mean ‘what do I do’?” He said it was very simple: he’d describe the world we were in, but the progression of the story was entirely dependent upon what our characters decided to do. If we wanted to talk to the barkeep, we could; if we wanted to talk to other people in the bar, all we had to do was say so; if we wanted to just say ‘eh, forget this job’ and turn around and walk out of the bar, we could do that too. This is where we started working together to create the story.
The session went ahead and we clunkily made our way through talking to the barkeep, getting the contract for the job, and heading to the outskirts of town and clearing the cave of goblins. It wasn’t very smooth, and there were a lot of questions asked and misunderstandings of the rules, but in the end, the goal was accomplished. After my roommate’s friend left that night, we both looked at each other and shared the same sentiment: That. Was. Awesome.
From there, my roommate and I both became quite interested in D&D, and searched out YouTube videos and podcasts of actual play campaigns (the first D&D podcast I ever listened to was Board With Life, but have since also found The Adventure Zone, and, on YouTube, Dimension 20: Fantasy High, all of which I highly recommend). The more I got in to it, the more confused I became at the negative social stigma attached to it. Video games aren’t nearly as negatively stigmatized, and the only real difference I could see between playing D&D and playing Skyrim on XBox was that one you played at a table with other people to create the story, and the other, you play on a television by yourself discovering a story someone else created. That is not to say that one is any better than the other, it was just interesting to me that one carried with it such a negative stigma and the other didn’t.
Since that first exposure to D&D, I have become more fascinated with it, though I wouldn’t call it anything close to an “obsession”. At first, I thought it was just a method of escapism I was using to get away from the humdrum of everyday life, or as a creative outlet, but I’m beginning to realize that there’s much more to it than that. Sure, those things are a good part of the appeal, but I think there are even more important aspects of D&D that help shape its players in to better, more well-rounded and caring people.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “how can playing a make-believe game like D&D possibly make someone a ‘better’ or more caring person?” This is probably going to get a little abstract, but please just bear with me.
When you sit down to play D&D, you are playing as a character that is not yourself. The character may have some similarities to you, and certain parts of your personality will probably shine through to your character, but by and large, they have a different backstory, different abilities and flaws, and different motivations than you do. So right out of the gate, you’re forced to think and view the world through a different perspective than your normal real-life perspective. On top of that, you have to figure out how your character fits in and interacts with the other players’ characters – again, who all have different backgrounds, strengths, weaknesses, fears, and motivations than the players controlling them. This helps you (whether conscious of it or not) to think of your social interactions in a different way than you normally would. Being forced to view things in a different perspective and interacting with others in ways you normally wouldn’t can help build real-world empathy in you, the person, not just in the character you’re controlling.
In addition to helping you become a more understanding and empathetic person, D&D helps you actually physically communicate with others. In a day and age where most of our communication is done through text or email or FaceTime, ‘real’ face-to-face communication is fading, as is our ability to do it effectively and to read social cues. Much like this blog has begun helping me make my thoughts more coherent (this post is an exception), regular face-to-face communication becomes easier and more natural with practice, and D&D helps with that.
And last but not least, D&D allows you to be creative. So you want to be a humanoid cat that lives in the woods and worships tree gods? Cool, you’ve got it. Creativity can also mean coming up with alternative solutions to problems you encounter. You want to try to secretly infiltrate the castle instead of just walking through the front door? Awesome, do that instead. Creativity is much more than just coming up with a new idea or drawing a new picture or writing a new song; it’s a way of looking at the world and realizing that there is almost always more than one way to approach a situation or a problem.
I could probably go on more about why I enjoy D&D, and what I think is so great about it, but I feel like I’ve rambled long enough. If you’re at all curious about D&D and want to look in to it yourself, check out Board With Life, The Adventure Zone, or Critical Role wherever you get podcasts, or find Dimension 20 on YouTube, Twitch, or Dropout.TV (heads up, they do all contain adult language).
Thank you again for joining me this week. I know things are going pretty crazy all over the world right now, but we’ll get through it. Feel free to leave me a comment below, and see you all next week! 🙂
Musings Of A Struggling Creator 