In May, I had to reschedule D&D night.
It was meant to take place on a Thursday before a long weekend—looking back at my calendar, I think I was more busy the following week when we would play on Monday. Part of it was selfish, I had wanted to go see an old friend with my Dad and eat some steaks, and the other part was a genuine mix up for not putting that I had promised my Dad I would help him move some things out to the burbs, but as it was my first time rescheduling my group, I felt a little less bad.
Little did I know, our good friend Scott actually had a gift for me.
Apparently, the last time he and my parents had talked, they’d talked about my obsession with the wonderful and wild game of Dungeons and Dragons, a game that, apparently, Scott had played as a kid with his close friends. Even better, he had over 20 modules of the classic 1st edition that he wanted to pass on to me, a photocopied version of the monster manual (made at the local library and bound at his father’s work), a variety of dice, some small metal figurines (minus the dragon that used to sit atop the gold) and last, and most precious to me, a home-brew module to play Mad Max that he and his friend had written and typed up.
I was, very obviously, overjoyed. You can of course, find almost all of these things for free online, on eBay or variations on different forums, but to have them passed on meant something to me, like looking into a past life and seeing what meant something enough to store and keep for decades, untouched, survive moves and downsizing and still find its way to me. It’s a special feeling. So I immediately texted my group and posted on social media about it, to an overwhelming response of excitement. Even the other millennials new to playing were excited to see such a trove of goodies and even more eager to play it.
The response in the room, however, was far less enthusiastic.
My Dad (lovingly) called me a nerd, a sentiment echoed by Scott’s wife. “I didn’t even think people really played that any more.” Even Scott seemed sheepish and a little embarrassed by his collection.
“You do know,” I told them, “D&D has entered the common people’s lexicon—it’s no longer a dirty secret. Vin Diesel plays D&D!” I thought maybe the perspective had changed since most people had admitted to playing some form of the game, but still the opinions held true. They wouldn’t budge. This commonplace hobby had once been a dirty secret. So why is it a point of pride now?
Nerd and Geek culture has become mainstream, this fact is true.
Maybe not every component—after all, not every game or property has hit the shelves as fast and wide as things like the film and TV franchises for Star Wars, Star Trek, Triple A video games like Minecraft, World of Warcraft or Tomb Raider (many of which have also been optioned for film and TV as well) or hit anime and manga series that are too numerous to list. And rather than a occasionally bidirectional relationship where most people would find a property and fall deeply in, while sometimes, something particularly nerdy and off the beaten path would splash into the mainstream to be gawked, poked and prodded at before retreating to dark caverns. Now, through proliferation, everyone knows comic book heroes and video games stories, fictional lore and the conlangs that once faced skepticism.
You like that? has now turned into How have you not seen this? Movie marathon over TONIGHT.
(Oddly enough, some people push back against that, to say that nerds and geeks are still getting pushed into lockers for proudly wearing their Marvel or DC shirts; never quite making the connection that superhero properties are so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to walk through any populated area and not see someone of any size, shape, color or age wearing an Iron Man shirt and be surprised. You don’t become one of the most successful film franchises by only appealing to a small minority of diehard fans, which instead implies that superheroes are just too popular with the masses to ever go back to being just for comic book fans.)
And the label has become a point of pride, bolstered by everyone from billionaires in Silicon Valley to the average-earning Game of Thrones fan who read the books.
It’s not that it’s suddenly become cool to be a nerd or a geek, I think the love has always been there, for most everyone. We just never seemed to admit it to one another.
(Perhaps, I sometimes wonder, if it’s a weird reaction to the attitudes of Generation X, which mixed apathy and nihilism in a fascinating cocktail with MTV and being on the edge of trends and styles and new technology, but most of the people who are skeptical to the idea of playing to me, even having expressed interest int he game itself, tend to be from that generation. All of the sudden, even though video games had tons of women working in it, tons of people were playing Dungeons and Dragons, and most Silicon Valley programmers found their niche in this generation, we regressed to think that this stuff was just for nerds and geeks.)
Originally,
I was going to come back from my slight hiatus from blogging and talk about convincing people in your friend groups and coworkers to play D&D, since that was something I noticed that some folks struggle with, however, this idea has been wriggling around in my head for some time now.
I’ve never been shy about my hobbies—my work as a DM is listed on my resume even. My extended family knows. My neighbors. My coworkers and LinkedIn network. I tell people when I’m running sessions for the weekends, when I pull puzzles out of my repertoire for online trivia, when they ask me why I’m researching feudal systems of crop rotations: “Oh, this is for my Dungeons and Dragons group, I’m the DM, so I need to know this or that so we can play next time.”
I think people are more shocked at my blasé attitude more than the actual content of my free time.
Once, at work last fall, a friend of mine was shocked that I played and ran games. “You actually do that?!” She was so excited: “I’ve always wanted to play, I just didn’t know anyone played, especially not here.” Here, at our tech company, where people belong to a variety of formal and informal clubs and frequently debated nerdy things, not to mention the amount of toys that were displayed on desks. (Please pour one out for my four soccer bobble heads, my Raz from Psychonauts figurine and my Wonder Woman Funko pop which are all still trapped in the corporate office while we all work from home.)
So I told her all about my campaign, my group (which contains more women than men, an elementary ed teacher, a B2B seller, a health receptionist, an application support person and a major in international relations) and that there were a few game stores that definitely would have games and ways to find a group, if she didn’t want to look online. In fact, the game is probably more popular than ever and the resources to get started easily available.
It can be an intimidating game—something I want to talk about when I finally write my post on convincing people to play— but when you break it down to its basic parts, we’ve all already played it, in backyards and empty fields and sandlots and playgrounds. Games where pirates were at war with soldiers, and you built your own towns and cities out of sticks and leaves in tiny lean-tos, where every Nerf battle had an elaborate history of the factions at war, where your spies went after stuffed animals that were hiding secret formulas and where Spongebob could join the kids from Rocket Power and Hey Arnold! for a day on their bikes.
Even now, kids film their favorite scenes from books and TV shows and movies on their phones with their casts of friends, create endless amounts of fan art and stories and original works, without being taught.
And just like those imaginary games, the barrier to entry for this one is so low. All you really need is pencil and paper (or a freely available internet app or phone app), some friends, someone willing to set the stage and play crowd control and some dice (though you can also replace the physical dice with an app). The rules are available online for free, for most editions of D&D. Or you can play through campaigns from Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, even popular films like the cast on Film Reroll does. You can spend a whole day on one game or meet for an hour every week and do a one shot.
It’s weird to talk about nostalgia for a thing I never did as a kid (my first taste of D&D was in fact the episode of Community which also made me, a self conscious teenager, cry) so I can’t really say I was the classic, Spielburgian ‘kids on bikes’ of my day but playing the game does make me nostalgic for those days of playing pretend. Of building snow forts and fighting off imaginary wolves with your friends, of creating fake cities and fake missions for spies, for roaming through corn fields and thinking you were trapped in the empty vastness of the midwest without any help even though dinnertime was in 40 minutes and just down the street.
Stories have been and continue to be an inherent part of being human. It’s even one of the differentiators between humans and animals—while their language can communicate, it cannot comprehend things not in the here and now. There’s no imagination for things that don’t physically exist, like the object impermanence of babies that lasts a lifetime.
Every one of us is a storyteller, to varying degrees. And to be an amateur, in the most base sense, is to do things for the love of them.
A while ago,
nearly a decade I’m realizing, Dove put out an award winning commercial “Camera Shy” where various women hide from the camera, asks “When did you stop thinking you were beautiful?” before contrasting them with young girls who all dance and sing and perform for the camera.
Sometimes, I look at the people who have confided in me that they used to play D&D or that they always wished they could play and I wonder: “When did you stop believing that you were cool, just as you were? When did you think that your interests were all alone on a deserted island, unable to see or hear a kind face? When did you stop thinking you could do whatever you wanted with your free time, that you could start pursuing what you loved whenever you wanted?”
When did you start thinking that this passion, this interest was something to hide?
It took me over a year to finalize my dreams, crafting my campaign and setting for my home-brew world, finding some players, into a reality, but all of the work is worth it for one little thing: at the end of every session, for some ridiculously wonderful reason, my players give me a round of applause and thank me for bringing them all together. That’s really all I do as a DM, bring like minded adventurers together and send them on a quest to have a little fun.
There’s a quote I love from Roald Dahl, which says this:
“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”
Life can be so short, so why pretend to be cool and cold? Why hide your interests? Why limit the amount of enjoyment you can gain out of this one life, this one experience that you can craft?
In an uncertain and uncomfortable and sometimes dark world, white hot and passionate is the only thing to be.
Please note, these are simply my thoughts and opinions when trying to process the weird reactions that I personally receive when talking about my ‘ultra nerdy’ hobby of killing manticores and disarming traps for fun in an imaginary world. I cast no aspersions on any of the people described or alluded to and all similarities to persons dead or alive are purely coincidental. (Yes, I realize the ‘cast’ thing is a pun—that one’s for free)
In the coming weeks, I’m going to be posting my Session 0 module here in case this inspired you to let your ‘nerdy’ passions out, I’ll link it here when it’s available. Who knows, maybe I’ll post some more stuff too, if people are interested.
<3,
Steph