"It is necessary to have goals and try new things." First off, duh, but stick with me, I promise this goes somewhere. High school me was given this very obvious “advice” ad nauseam, as I’m sure high school you was as well, and after hearing this for the umpteenth time, I thought making a list might actually be common sense. The list itself was not conventional per se, as it had very little (read: nothing) to do with academics (I made a separate list for that, but that’s not what this story is about). On this list, I had three extracurriculars that I really wanted to get around to in my time at Tufts: Join an a cappella group (which was a lot of fun, just not quite right for me), do more theatre in college (which is my major here, so that one was important) and play dungeons and dragons. That last item took me until halfway through my sophomore year to get around to, but good golly am I glad I did.
This is the quickest rundown of Dungeons and Dragons I can give, just to bring those of you who have never had contact with the game up to speed: it is a fantastically intricate yet surprisingly intuitive role playing game where you craft a character, join a team of other adventurers, and under the rule of the part referee/part narrator/part vengeful god known as the dungeon master, you and your group take part in the most ridiculous, exciting and amazing games and expeditions. There, now you know about Dungeons and Dragons. Welcome to the club.
Easily the greatest part of the game is how able you are. What the hell does that sentence mean? Bad writing aside, it means that you can potentially do anything. The game is built so that you are much better at some things than others, and since everything is determined by dice rolls there is a certain amount of luck involved. I have played games however where people just want to do the strangest things, and because they have the right skills for it and roll the dice well, they accomplish it with flying colors. For example, in the game we played last year, I was a bard (a magical musician. Almost as useless as it sounds, but loads of fun to play). My gang walked into an extremely nice inn, and upon noticing how fancy it was, I decided to con the man at the desk out of about 500 gold (I don’t know what the exchange rate from made up gold standard to American dollars is, but in game, that was a good amount of money). Because my character was really good at lying, and because I kept rolling well, I somehow convinced this poor desk man that I was that night’s entertainment, my entire party was part of the entourage and they get to stay for free, and that my fee for the evening was the aforementioned sum. Was this a dick move? Absolutely. Was it completely unnecessary and super fun? Oh yeah.
Now, its an unspoken rule of D&D that everybody who plays the game understands: nobody wants to hear about what you did last night in D&D. Honestly, its awesome for you, but from the outside you just look and sound very silly. Point is, I won’t bore you with the gratuitous details of cool stuff my party has done, but I will include some little excerpts from our adventures at the bottom of the article if you’re keen for a look at the nonsense we get into.
“Mister blogger man?” Yes, reader? “The title of the article says that you’re going to talk about why this is all important.” Oh crap yeah, I almost forgot about the POINT OF THIS BLOG POST. So, why am I even talking about this in the first place? As strange and unusual as the game itself seems, I think it is an extremely fun and important thing for people to try, because it’s a kind of fun you don’t find much of at our age.
If you were anything like me, running around in your back yard as a kid brandishing sticks or toys as improvised props to use in the imaginary game you were playing was nothing unusual. My friends and I would spend entire days advancing the storyline of some asinine game we’d invented, thwacking each other with “swords” or “lightsabers” and having more fun than our little bodies could contain. Unfortunately, that sort of fun starts to fade. It’s harder to run around with sticks for an entire day in a made up world and take it as seriously as I once did (the absolute worst part of growing up is, as always, growing up). For me, acting helps me get back to that kind of fun and assuming a character that is different than myself, but not everybody has that outlet. Finally the point of this entire blog post: D&D is exactly that kind of childhood fun all over again. You can get so lost in these characters and so invested in the events, that you will stand up and cheer when you succeed, you will become scared when the Dungeon master starts to make faces or roll more dice, you will feel sad when a character in your group dies, and you will have a crazy amount of fun just talking to the people you’re playing with in character.
I am crazy lucky that the people I’ve played with have all been theatre people, meaning that they create their characters and really get into them. It makes the game so much more fun and interactive. It really takes me back to all those games I loved as a kid, but more importantly, it’s an amazing outlet in your week, to just goof off and have fun with your friends. No thinking about work or classes, no thinking about the stress you carry with you every day as a student, your only concern is “how the hell are we going to get my centaur body onto that boat so I can help kill all those pirates?” True story.
I recommend this game to anybody who craves an imaginative outlet, and I especially recommend this game to the people who cannot relate to any of the childhood antics I talked about above, because everybody deserves to experience that specific brand of fun. Make it a goal, try something new, put it on your list, I seriously doubt you’ll regret it.
-ed
Blogger’s note: The word “blogger” in Microsoft word is considered spelled wrong, but the word “umpteenth” is somehow correct…
Here’s some of the cooler things that have happened in our campaign:
-We were in a rather large battle with a Lich (super powerful undead wizard) and the whole party was doing tons of damage, then the bard plays a song for barely any effect, but it was still enough to kill it. Effectively, we killed the Lich with rock and roll.
-There’s an ability called cleave, where if you kill your target, you can continue to attack an adjacent one. Normally, this is really cool when somebody is able to cut down one enemy and move on to the next, but last game our fighter was able to kill a dragon with one blow and proceed to kill two more people in the same swing. We were cheering him on. It was ridiculous.
-The answer to “how do we get the centaur on the boat to kill all the pirates?” is to pretend to sell your centaur friend as rare merchandise, collect the money for him, then after he’s placed on the boat with his hands tied, he starts killing people with his hooves, while the rest of the party surprise attacks the rest of the boat. The plan worked poyfectly.
-On that same pirate ship, only one member of their crew managed to dive off the ship and started to swim away, presumably to go get help. One member of our party cast sleep (a spell that does exactly what it sounds like) and the swimmer just sank like a rock. That was so cold, and yet so awesome…
-A member of our party decided to buy a guard dog, which by the way is a completely useless purchase, and the dog just sort of followed the party around for a while. Then, we met something called a mimic, which is essentially ditto from Pokemon but it changes into the form of something else and lies in wait to try and eat you. Long story short, the owner of the guard dog got caught by the monster, the party traded the dog for his owners life, the dog died a hero. His name was Polonius. “O, he is slain.”