Dungeons & Dragons

I never really considered myself a serious Dungeons and Dragons player. My brother introduced me to the game in elementary school and since then I dabbled at family gatherings or when a couple friends were getting together to play, but never anything more than an hour or two every so often. Then, sometime between my first few weeks at Grinnell and now, I got into the routine of spending six hours a week on various campaigns, which means I’m spending more time rolling dice, making lewd jokes and bad puns with friends, and seriously considering the gender dynamics of dwarven society than I spend in any given class. That’s a time commitment edging on fanaticism, and I have no idea how on earth I got there. It’s like the time I woke up with, “3:00! Burling Library! Bring [unintelligible]!” written on my arm with no recollection of writing it: I know I’ve made a commitment, and from the looks of it it’s pretty serious and a little bizarre, but I have little idea why or how.

It’s not the mechanics, that’s for sure. I’ve seriously tried, but I’ve never been able to get myself seriously invested in doing math (D&D-related or otherwise) or moving little tokens around on a grid. But still, there are a couple of times when the originality of the encounter really engaged me, there’s always that rush of adrenaline when your character’s health goes into the single digits or you’re within striking distance of killing a monster you thought was unkillable, and the genuine excitement from everyone else in the group is enough to carry me through the rest of the time.

That last part is key to why I stick with it, I think. Outside of cross country and track, nearly every close friend I’ve made at Grinnell has been through D&D. It’s an odd group for me to fall into, since it tends to feature the computer-programmer crowd (which might explain our different views on the innate joys of combat-math), but they’re definitely fun to hang around with. D&D attracts a wide variety of people, from fantasy buffs to stats nerds to people who just need somewhere to kill three hours on a Saturday evening and somehow can’t think of a better to spend it than cramped in a tiny classroom arguing over a dire badger’s armor class. I tend to have trouble socializing when all the conversation has to come organically from the group, so it helps to have a constant barrage of zany quests and magical hijinks to kickstart conversation. And, somehow, I feel like I get to know people better when they’re pretending to be a half-orc cleric from some imaginary country than just going up to them and saying, “hi.”

Which brings me to the role playing element of D&D. Over the course of two years I’ve played six characters, ranging from a deluded cleric who worshipped a intellectual property lawyer operating out of Manitoba as an all-mighty giver of divine laws to a cynical rouge drifting around the countryside, searching for any evidence that his son might still be alive. The fantasy element for me is never really thrashing goblins or casting spells, it’s trying to get into the perspectives of these characters and their situations, to leave my own worries of homework and internships and the future for a couple of hours and inherit some significantly more entertaining worries. Of course, I’m making it seem more serious than it really is, half the time I build my characters to get as many jokes out of them as possible (my favorite was a cleric who recited hyper-violent scripture that was always strangely apt for any given situation), but it is really nice to have a little vacation from myself now and then. 

And I do really get into it. A week ago I apologized to the dungeon master that my character always said such awkward things in social situations. The dungeon master said they thought it was just part of the character and pointed out that I didn’t act like that in normal situations. It was disconcerting to realize that I’d been acting and, in a way, thinking as a character without realizing it for the past two months. I won’t say I’m particularly good at this kind of method acting, but it does feel pretty freeing.

It’s strange to think that some of my best friends know me primarily as the dirt-poor warlock who has to split rent on a cardboard box with a roommate or the pretentious noble who runs a failing bookstore. Then again, as much as these characters are ways to get away from myself, they’re also part of me. I realized a few months after the campaign with the cynical rouge ended that his depressing ideas were some of the same ones that had been floating around in my head lately, and the way he denied the loss of his son wasn’t too different from the way I tried to deny the end of childhood. In a way, it’s a way for me to be more open and honest about myself than I can in most circumstances. Which isn’t what you expect to find in a game where you spend half the time beating up mythical creatures with medieval weapons for a variety of poorly defined reasons. But whatever, I’ll take what I can get.