My experience with Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t go back to the beginning. That would be kind of hard, as I’m not 50. It does go back to some of my earliest memories. For me D&D always started as a storytelling game, probably because the way the first DM I played under introduced it to me.
Derek convinced us to play because he was and is a storyteller. He knew that I loved The Hobbit, Narnia, King Arthur and Robin Hood. The pitch was simple — “Do you want to tell your own stories in the world?”
The answer was simply “Yes.”
We played with, those simple dice that needed a Crayon to color in the numbers. For some reason I only remember d6s and dungeons.
D&D is what started me on my journey to tell stories. I always thought those stories I would tell would be fiction. As of yet, conventional publishers haven’t accepted any of the short stories I’ve pitched.
But it also started me on the journey to be a journalist, and that worked out to be sports (mostly soccer) and then marketing tales. Derek’s connected to that journey too, but that advances several years into high school and again to when I was an emergent baseball blogger (which didn’t work out).
Later in my journey Dungeons & Dragons became the central point of my strongest friendships in those harsh teenage years. Like many GenX suburban white males, I was a latchkey kid in a neighborhood with cul de sacs and basements.
Those basements provided our play space and our avoidance. We avoided thinking about divorcing parents, impending nuclear annihilation, ozone depletion and whatever other terror the nightly news foisted on us.
Erik, Justin, Abel, Colin, Jacob, Andy, Chris, and the others — we hid from all of that. There were early video games, many board games, and other role-playing games, but it was D&D that was our unifying factor. The stories we told via rolling oddly shaped dice and convoluted rules gave us an escape. We were big, damn heroes. We were anti-heroes. We were thieves and priests and archers and wizards. We adhered to the noble codes that our imperfect real lives could not. We violated those codes to see what would happen.
That late 80s to early 90s version of D&D that we played was sometimes in dungeons and always dragons. Every world we played in had dragons in the background providing terror, often ending in a TPK.
My second D&D era was about avoidance. The stories and people helped me make it through the bad times — puberty, divorces, fights with friends, being the outsider from the in-cliques. Without that group I’d be a horrible athlete, the storyteller incapable of finishing a tale, a ‘gifted’ kid who avoided hard work, someone with constantly broken ankles and a body that doctors considered brutally altering because I was dramatically smaller than my peers.
In the Army I nearly avoided D&D. During my time at DLI I did participate in a Vampire: The Maquerade LARP in Pacific Grove, California. That was the only place I met non-military people while in that hybrid college-military experience. In 5th Group one of the 18D (combat medics) invited me to do solo play with him as the DM. That was basically impossible to keep up because our deployment schedules didn’t quite overlap. We also never played when deployed together. I’m pretty certain no one in his ODA knew that’s what we did when we hung out outside of work.
Then D&D disappeared from my life.
I thought I grew up.
I thought I didn’t need the funky dice, the tales.
5th edition brought me back after not playing regularly since 94 (the 5th Group experience was 97-98).
My current era of D&D is broader in playing styles, stories told and the people I play with. There have been two dozen people who have played in the now-seven campaigns within the World of the Everflow. Plus I’ve been a player in four campaigns and hosted a charity actual play for YachtCon.
Where my first era of D&D planted the seeds of creativity and the second era taught me math (and kept me as sane as I’ll be due to avoidance), this third era of my Dungeons and my Dragons is about exploring fellowship, exploring philosophical issues, confronting the issues of the era rather than avoiding them.
On this 50th birthday of D&D I discover that my eras of D&D are the eras of my life, showing a maturity in my life while being skills and abilities I continue to use in this life.
My game doesn’t really have dungeons. Dragons aren’t omnipresent. But it’s still the same game.
My game doesn’t roll characters. They’re created for story rather than optimization. It’s still the same game.
My game isn’t in the Forgotten Realms or another official world (or third party world). It’s a world concocted by me and mutually, continually created by us. It’s still the same game.
For forty years this game has been present in my life. At times it has been my most defining hobby. Other times it was locked behind a haunted door in my head, hidden but influencing my personal journey.
Today I don’t lock my passions away. People get to see them. They can judge me — whatever.
We’ll play in public today. Something that was nigh impossible in the 80s, when even my own family thought D&D meant devil worship.
Today we roll for initiative.
