A legion of animated skeletons with +2 short swords careens towards you, a Warlock summons the flames of Phlegethos to engulf your village, and an Ethereal Cyclops devours your companions. On top of all of that, you're out of Pepsi.
This is Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons is the closest thing to a hallucinogenic drug that most nerds will ever take. You sit down with your friends and, using rulebooks and dice instead of LSD and bongs, you enter a collective dream. One among you --- the Dungeon Master --- narrates events. He or she (statistically speaking, it’s probably a “he”) creates a world ripe for adventure, using maps and funny voices as needed. The rest of the participants --- the players --- create characters and pilot them through that world. Rolling twenty-sided die takes the place of throwing knives and figurines take the place of Goblins and Warlords. Together the players work their way through quests, conspire to gain treasure, and distract each other from the fact that they don’t have girlfriends. (Disclaimer --- that was a joke --- I know several people who both play Dungeons and Dragons and have girlfriends. In fact, one of them got to know said girlfriend by playing Dungeons and Dragons. So take that, stereotypes.)
Of all the magic that goes on in Dungeons and Dragons, my favorite is storytelling. In Dungeons and Dragons you don’t watch a character fight battles, you storm into the battles and fight them for yourself.
Most people see roleplaying games as just a way to spend a night telling nerdy jokes with your friends (Example: a bibliography? Now that's what I call "sourcery"). Fun as that is, I think Dungeons and Dragons is about more than twenty-sided dice and diet soda. I think that if you stop playing Dungeons and Dragons when you stand up from the gaming table, you never fully understood it in the first place. I think fiction, in any shape it takes, is about finding a certain place. Not just Winterfell or Endor. A place we all contain, but may rarely visit.
I (as far as you know) have never eviscerated an orc, impaled a Frost Troll, or defenestrated a hobgoblin. How can I find truth in characters who do these ridiculous things?
Like the characters they hold, stories about heroes survive what should logically kill them. Through the Fall of Rome and the Bubonic plague, through generations and millennia, these stories have endured. They've emigrated from Sumerian tablets to scrolls to comic book panels to Apple tablets. People having been telling stories about people who stand up to fight their monsters ever since we figured out how to speak.
These stories survive because there is a chamber in the human soul that never stops believing them. There is a chamber in the human soul that doesn't care that Dwarves do not exist or that winged sandals would never generate enough horsepower of lift to grant Hermes flight. Stories and heroes live in this illogical chamber of the human soul. And, on a good day, so do I.
Modern stories also take their heroes from this chamber, they just dress them from a different wardrobe. Whether they're wearing capes, spurs, or a red hunting hat, these heroes battle monsters.
Despite what we've been told, none of these heroes have ever existed (I'm looking at you, Robin Hood). These stories are lies. So why does this "chamber of the human soul" that I’m raving about matter? Doesn't it sound like something that belongs on a motivational refrigerator magnet?
As ink on a page these stories have no power. Verbs can't bandage wounds. Semicolons won’t cure Ebola. Words alone don’t change anything.
That is where Dungeons and Dragons comes in. I think we need to let the heroes from these stories seep into ourselves. We can’t watch anyone else fight our battles. We must find a way to fight them ourselves.
