I’ve been happily playing board games, in one form or another, since I was a little kid. Watching TableTop has reminded me just how much fun it can be to play a well-designed board game (or card game) with a group of friends. But as much fun as I have playing board games or card games–or video games, for that matter–nothing comes close to the experience of playing tabletop role-playing games.
I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons in 1980 by my friend Luke Johnson. We were in fourth grade. I played a dwarf fighter who died from a magical trap. It was like getting hit by an amazing drug. I was instantly hooked. Soon after, a high school kid who went to my dad’s church ran me through an adventure, then decided he was giving up RPGs and gave me all of his game books, which was very much like a heroin addict saying, “Hey, I’ve decided to quit cold turkey. Want all of my leftover smack?” In middle school, I bought and played D&D, Gamma World, RuneQuest, Traveller, Boot Hill, Top Secret, Champions, Villains & Vigilantes, Tunnels & Trolls…and it just went on from there, into high school and college and beyond, up to today.
What is it about RPGs that I love so much? Why is it that no matter how much fun I have playing other games, nothing gives me the satisfaction that RPGs have?
It’s because I’ve really been playing them all my life, long before I ever knew about Dungeons & Dragons. During recess in elementary school, I would lead my friends in games of “superheroes,” where we made up our own superheroes and pretended to save the world from supervillains and natural catastrophes. In pre-school, my friends and I used to pretend to be the Six Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Woman, and other TV show characters, making up our own stories and play acting as our heroes.
Role-playing games are about getting together with your friends and playing Let’s Pretend. There may be some game tactics involved, there may be elements of competition, but it all boils down to playing Let’s Pretend. Imaginary characters in an imaginary situation, and from this comes collaborative stories and experiences. It’s really nerdy improv. It’s fiction writing for extroverts with ADD. It’s collective dreaming.
Sadly, it’s not as easy to get my friends together to play regularly these days. We’re not in grade school or college these days. We’re adults with full-time jobs and family responsibilities that take up a lot of our time. It’s been months since the last time I played an RPG. Getting together once in a while to play a board game or card game is logistically much easier. But that just wouldn’t be as satisfying to me, so I keep trying to get a game going or get in on some friend’s game. Because it’s not just about getting together with friends, it’s not just about having fun playing a game, it’s not just about rolling dice or calculating your chances of hitting an orc with a sword, it’s about dreaming out loud with fellow dreamers.
That’s a special kind of magic.
2 Comments
I always tell people they shouldn’t think of D&D as a game, but as group storytelling.
We’re starting a new campaign on Saturday night (we met once before to roll up characters). Let me know if you want to know more.
You might enjoy this book; I certainly did. A quote from it:
I think this is the soul of why role-playing games like D&D and EPT were so popular with young boys. They provided a trellis work for the imagination to climb upon and thrive. Unsupported, your day dreams can wither; backed up by rules, pictures, model figures and the input of others, there’s no end to the amount of brain space they can consume. . . .
The power of the story, either writing or reading or listening to one, is that the imagination is tied to something that makes it go forward. . . .
D&D is, I believe, something virtually unique and unprecedented in human history. It’s a story you can listen to at the same time as telling it. You can be surprised by the plot’s twists and turns, but you can surprise too. It’s more interactive than any other sort of narrative I can think of. If its subject matter were more serious then it would probably be considered a new art form, and it’s probably surprising that nothing beyond murder mystery dinners has ever been evolved from it. This is why D&D is so addictive when it’s played right. It’s like the best story you’ve ever read combined with the charge a good storyteller feels as he plays his audience.
I think there’s a basic human need to listen to stories, but also to tell them. In D&D you get that tingle you imagine when you think of the ancient storytellers, dusk falling, the camp fire burning and the first line being read. It’s not like hearing “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” it’s like saying it for the first time and to a rapt audience that is dying for your next sentence.
I have finished games feeling physically drained and actually wanted to continue to have my characters buy food at a shop or smoke a pipe in a tavern just to calm down before breaking with the game world entirely. And sometimes even that wasn’t enough. The crucial difference between conventional forms of storytelling and D&D is that D&D doesn’t have to finish. Ever. It’s an open-ended story, and, if you’re emotionally engaged with it, the temptation is just to keep going.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I’ll check it out. And I’ll talk to you about the game at work. :)