Get ready – I’m about to badly date myself. When I was in sixth grade, one of my teachers started up an after-school Dungeons and Dragons club.
Yeah, you don’t need to say it: it was a long, long time ago. Tom Hanks’ epic Mazes and Monsters breakdown was still to come, and Jack Chick’s infamous Dark Dungeons tract wouldn’t make its appearance until two years after that. The game hadn’t yet achieved the notoriety that would draw bad press, the “tsk tsks” of religious groups, and (much later) the goofy memes. D&D was still new enough, and obscure enough, that a forward-thinking teacher was allowed to cook up an extracurricular club in the school library every Wednesday.
After that first session, I was hooked. I ran home and begged my mom to buy me my own copy of the rules. For the next two years, almost every hour that I wasn’t in school or sleeping was spent holed up in my room with a pad of graph paper and my prized copies of the core Advanced D&D sourcebooks, crafting epic campaigns that no one would ever play. Once in a rare while, I’d get together with friends to play a session or two, but it was the pure joyous creative process of building dungeons and castles and medieval towns that was the primary draw for me.
The addictive hook was so intense that my parents used D&D as an effective consequence. If my grades weren’t up to snuff or I wasn’t turning in homework, the sourcebooks and folders full of my scribbles and maps would vanish for a week or even a month. Then my parents would forget, and I’d find the hiding place where they’d stashed the books, and I’d sneak them back to my room to work in secret – and the cycle would begin again.
As the years went on and the novelty slowly faded, other distractions took D&D’s place. For a while I dabbled in Squad Leader; then video games took over, and became my primary hobby through high school and college. But nothing was ever a perfect substitute for that early experience with tabletop role playing.
A Momentary Relapse
Shortly after my wife and I married, I happened to be in a board game store and for some reason picked up a Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook. I’d missed a lot in the hobby over the years – the increasing complexities of D&D’s second and third editions, the subsequent spinning up of Pathfinder (the game for people that found D&D too simplistic), and the rise and fall of the game’s popularity.
The early word of mouth about Fourth Edition was good. Finally, I thought, there was a fresh entry point for the game I’d most loved as a kid, a modernized game system with a strong market presence.
So I picked up a couple of Fourth Edition sourcebooks and ran my somewhat-interested wife through a couple of pre-made adventures. It was fun and we had a good time, but it didn’t totally grab us. The combat seemed grognardy, slow, overreliant on miniatures and drawing inspirations from video games for its mechanics. Even the character classes felt wrong. After a few sessions, we stopped playing. “Hm,” I thought. “I guess I’ve outgrown D&D after all.”
Over the next couple of years, I would periodically dip a toe into the tabletop RPG pool. Even in my years away from the hobby, I liked reading sourcebooks – the sheer creativity expressed in campaign settings is incredibly inspirational for all types of game development.
I loved reading about other tabletop systems, too. For a while I considered creating a Gloranthan HeroQuest campaign. But if D&D Fourth Edition had seemed too mechanical, I found HeroQuest lacking in any truly interesting mechanics. I respected and admired players who could use the loose framework of narrative systems like HeroQuest to spin collaborative tales together, but the system didn’t quite scratch the lingering childhood itch.
Further, I was pretty pedestrian in my thematic tastes. Tabletop games had moved beyond the generic fantasy of my childhood D&D – to Star Wars RPGs, cyberpunk, horror, and all kinds of other creative and unique themes. But even though it’s no longer “cool” I LIKE generic fantasy, as does my wife. Wizards, elves, orcs, and all that Tolkein-inspired stuff are comfort food around our house (we still rewatch the Lord of the Rings movies every year).
The Flame Rekindles
At some point, I started to notice the buzz around D&D’s Fifth Edition – a reset from the divisive direction Fourth Edition had taken, an attempt to get back to basics and strip away some of the cruft while still embracing the deep core mechanics that D&D players loved for years. It sounded like the developers had finally recaptured the magic.
D&D had also made fresh inroads in less-geeky media, playing a much-publicized role in the plot of Netflix’s Stranger Things. And the old objections from the morality police decades ago didn’t have the same bite any more; social media and violent video games provided jucier targets to blame for the decline of America’s youth.
Then I stumbled on a video of the actor Vin Diesel playing D&D. I was a couple of years late to the final transformation of the hobby into something the “cool kids” were playing, but now I fell hard down the internet rabbit hole.
By December, I’d watched more hours than I’d care to admit of people playing D&D online. Critical Role presents an unscripted but definitely idealized version of D&D, with a truly talented DM in Matt Mercer and a table full of professional voice actors who love the game.
Still, even knowing that any home game I cooked up would be nothing like Critical Role, it was inspirational to see the game played as I’d imagined it could be. For me, D&D was always about building a collaborative, partially improvised story – but with enough bite in the mechanics to provide structure and enough genuine player agency to make even a complex computer RPG feel like tic-tac-toe.
You can guess how this particular tale ends: I bought a stack of shiny new Fifth Edition sourcebooks and scheduled a family D&D day before the holidays. Fast-forward to January and I’m all in – running a full-on campaign for my wife and ten-year-old son, a mix of pre-made official adventures and homemade content. I’ve played more hours of D&D in the last two months than I did in all my teenage years, and (unless they’re just humoring me) everyone seems to be having a blast.
The game even extended its tendrils outside our immediate family. My brother-in-law heard we were playing and bought my son a Monster Manual and a dice tray of his own for Christmas. As my son poured over the pictures in the book, his uncle told him about the paladin he played as a kid – with wistfulness and excitement and maybe a hint of jealousy. (My brother-in-law’s schedule keeps him pretty busy, but I bet with a little effort, I could get him to the game table.)
The Circle is Complete
Last Saturday, I woke up late and staggered out to find my son hunched over a sheet of graph paper in the kitchen. “DAD! You’re FINALLY up! Roll a character! I want to be the Dungeon Master for you!”
An hour flew by as I ran through his creation with a freshly-minted level 1 half-orc fighter. I say this not just as a proud dad of an only child, but as a game developer: his very first adventure, entirely homemade, was GOOD. He’d really thought about the encounters and the theme, he’d done some math to figure out what monsters I could handle at first level, and he even included a logic puzzle. Like any good DM, he even creatively improvised when I went off the scripted rails.
As I battled through the challenges in my son’s adventure, slaughtering bullywugs in a swamp while seeking a fire sword in a hidden temple, I felt like I was right back in sixth grade again, eyes widening at that very first after-school club meeting as I realized how tabletop role playing could feel.
Even though my son had only made a short adventure with a handful of encounters, it felt like a whole world was out there, chock full of adventures and treasures – and whatever lay behind that next dark dungeon door was waiting just for me.
Comments, as always, are welcome! Tell us about your own tabletop experiences, or ramble on about your crazy homebrew half-gnome half-Drow alchemist / barbarian below!