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.
