My name was Rezrom, and I was a teenager with blue skin living in a school for wizards. When I encountered the party, they were on the hunt for something—I can’t remember what anymore, but I led them to a room in the school where a giant serpent waited to destroy us all. The battle was slow and complex, but in the end, only the monster died, and the party, having found what they needed, continued on.
That was my first Dungeons and Dragons experience—a kind of dual audition, maybe, in which the group evaluated me and I evaluated this game. We met over Zoom during the pandemic. When Jay invited me to check out the game, I felt curious. But more than that, I lived alone and I had hours upon hours I needed to fill when I wasn’t working.
Fast forward to the waning days of covid, when we were able to vaccinate and gather in person. A new campaign started, and now I was Ransom, a snarky thief whose half-elf lineage was hidden from those around him, choosing to pass as human. I gave Ransom a tragic backstory. As a child named Varis, he witnessed his human father and elf mother murdered in front of him, along with his younger sister Caelynn. Varis fled and wandered until an elf thief named Adran took him in and adopted him, renaming him Pavel to conceal his identity should his family’s killers ever show up to finish the job. Adran taught him both about elven culture and how to survive on his own as a thief, using lies, deception, disguises, and agility to separate unsuspecting people from their valuables. When Adran died, Pavel evolved into Ransom, a loner whose distrust of everyone wanes only when he sees their utility to help him get what he wants.
Dungeons and Dragons has been a part of the culture for decades. It debuted in 1974 as three slim manuals to help players establish their world, their characters, and their quest. One person assumes the role of the Dungeon Master, and the others comprise the party. The Dungeon Master conceptualizes the land the party will travel, as well as the main quest (and its complications). The players, then, move through this world in search of an item, a person, information, wealth, or whatever the Dungeon Master has decided.
D&D’s widespread revival may have been inspired by Stranger Things, and especially the last season, which focused on the Hellfire Club at the kids’ high school. In the show, like in life, the D&D players are low on the social ladder. D&D’s nerdy reputation has existed almost as long as the game itself, and it is, pretty objectively, a nerdy pursuit. D&D worlds are populated by archetypes we most closely associate with the fantasy genre of literature, though the game’s rules could be applied to almost any genre a Dungeon Master desired. For me, D&D is a very unique intersection of two things I’m passionate about: video games and storytelling.
D&D is a video game occurring in the minds of the players. It operates using much of the same logic video games use. Players have “agency,” meaning they can affect the non-player characters and environments around them, and they’re forced to make choices. In video games, these choices are often limited by the buttons on a controller as much as they are the physics of the game world, but in D&D, such limitations are mostly absent. Players have a number of options at any given moment, which means the Dungeon Master, too, must have a lot of contingency plans in their back pocket. Players could, for example, mistake for an enemy a non-player character who holds critical information, thereby losing access to it and threatening to stall the campaign. In video games, this is almost never possible. The advent of open world games has meant now video games feel even more like D&D than they ever did. While completing the current campaign with my group, I’ve been playing Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, one of the most innovative open world games yet. In this game, players can climb any piece of landscape, and their weapons, movement, and activities are governed by both changing weather and the laws of physics. The most surprising addition to TOTK from the last Zelda game is the ability for players to construct anything their mind can dream up from any materials they find within the world, including a set of devices using battery power the player can enhance over the course of the game. These devices also respond to the laws of physics, making every contraption in the game reflective of how it would operate in our world.
Despite these innovations, open world games are still limited by story. There is only so much a player can do in the world, and quests in TOTK are largely sparked by interactions with non-player characters who need or want something the player must provide. There’s a main story quest, which constitutes the game’s narrative from inciting incident through denouement.
D&D uses storytelling skills to expand the game world almost infinitely. Each member of the party, along with the Dungeon Master, are co-creating the “story” of the campaign. Each player’s character has external wants, along with internal needs that may or may not be known to other characters. The story moves forward through a series of problem solving quandaries. Each quest, like in a video game, is prompted by an inciting incident. Unlike video games, though, players can ignore or delay completing this quest and set off to do whatever their heart desires, and the Dungeon Master must pivot to keep up.
The last thing D&D gives me that makes it very similar to writing is simple: community. D&D can’t really be played in a vacuum, like TOTK or other one-player games (though I’d argue in TOTK we are playing against the game’s creator). When I started this game, I only knew our Dungeon Master Jay, who is married to one of my best friends from high school. But since then I’ve gotten to know the initial group of four other players. A couple months ago, we expanded the game to include three more characters, each one bringing more laughs and ridiculousness to the game.
Though we’ve been playing for more than a year, only a few weeks have elapsed in our story. In that time we avoided execution for crimes we probably didn’t commit, found a stash of stolen crops, executed a complex heist mission that involved an aborted honey pot and ended with our mark’s (deserved) death, and set off on two new quests to earn a substantial amount of cash. I have no idea where any of it will lead, but D&D is a reminder that it’s the friends you meet (and sometimes murder?) along the way that make it all worthwhile.