I love Dungeons & Dragons

Posted by Heath on March 6th, 2009 @ 8:51 pm, filed in Geek Life, Heath

I’ve been having a good week.

Sometimes when I’m telling old stories from high school days I’ll talk of a fellow named Chris. I usually follow that with a quantifier, for example, “You know about submarines, just like Chris, my old DM.”

The two letter acronym is unfamiliar to the listener and they cock their head to the side quixotically.

“Oh, DM,” I say, “You know, Dungeon Master.”

The listener does not straighten their head. Sometimes they shake it from side to side, as though I were a puppy that piddled too far to the port side of the papers.

Dungeon Master as a relationship descriptor makes sense though, trust me. It’s like saying my old employer, or my old ex-girlfriend… or perhaps most accurately, my former crack dealer.

I played with Legos straight up through my sophomore year of high school. And I don’t mean built with, I mean played. Complete with dialog and mouth made explosion noises.

I had a lot of pent up imagination.

A good role playing session with friends is like injections of imagination straight to the heart.

There was a time when the over-turned canoe in our backyard could be used as a river raft, the New York state weed life crowding its sides reborn as wild Amazon jungle. The whiffle bat paddled the journey forward, or whacked a path as a machete,  and when enemies closed in it was brought to the eye, hands steadying the yellow barrel, and brandished as a shotgun.

The path of the imaginary buckshot was pre-ordained. The codes entered into tree bark keypads came from your own mind. If your friend was along for the journey the marketplace of perilous ideas would grow exponentially but so two would be the squabble for claiming them.

The genius of Dungeons and Dragons is that it added a loose framework of rules to our imaginations. There is uncertainty in the way the dice land on the table. There is the very real possibility that we’ll fail. Even when we succeed we seek to continue on, just like our real lives we embrace our shared victories but the moments never seem finished, the game never seems won.

It’s this sort of full immersion that makes people shake their heads at me. Like I’ve exposed a part of myself that they didn’t really want to see. I remember being picked up from a five hour session and excitedly explaining to my mother how I rode my griffin through the rigging of the enemies sails, how I lost my arm in a vicious fight, or how I was granted divine powers from worshipping my pantheon of gods.

Yes, that’s the cranial rotation inducing stigma. Certainly society has moved on from damning D&D as dangerous and instead focusing on video games and music videos, so, I’m not writing to defend it. I’m demanding you embrace it.

When was the last time you finished up a game of checkers and dreamt about life as the checker piece that night? When was the last time you sprung your friend out of jail, knocked the guards unconscious, took an arrow to the shoulder, made a daring leap into the moat when your previously made plans fell woefully apart, and barely escaped to the night… accruing no real injuries or suffering no real consequences for your actions? When was the last time you felt like a kid, perched on upside down boat in the woods, vanquishing foes with a yellow plastic weapon?

Chris, my old DM, e-mailed me about a week ago. We’re trying to scheme a way to get back to that place we shared, that last great high we rode. We’ve been passing ideas back and forth lately and some things have been taking shape. A new group of heroes on a new boat with new dangers already threatening our survival. The dice may never tumble from the bag and strike the table but there has already been a tremendous amount of joy garnered from the brainstorming. As I fall asleep, I don’t imagine the eight hours of work ahead of me,  instead I see vague visions of a rogue sailor donning a long brown coat, foolishly trying to use a weapon unfit for the sea but too prideful to compromise, and legions of his pursuers clouding the waters all around.

I’ve been having a good week.