I play Dungeons & Dragons. There. I said it. This isn't a great secret or anything; I freely admit what I do for a hobby as quickly as I admit to having been married twice, divorced once, separated for four-and-a-half years, and having two children. But that only tells you that I play a role playing game. It doesn't tell you why I play, or what the game itself entails, or why I feel the need to "come out" and say that I play.
I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time at the tender age of 8. That's right, I said eight….not eighteen. I didn't misspeak or leave out a 1 that leads to 8 becoming 18. Eight years old and I'm reading the same novels that my Aunt Gina is reading at the same time. Although, to be fair, she had finished them by the time I started in on them. She was a senior in High School and I was in the third grade. She was 18, but I was 8.
When I read these books, I'd never even heard of D&D. But there was something in those books that I found incredibly intriguing. Before reading them, I spent most of my time outside, playing "guns" with my brothers and our friends. We would run around the neighborhood with our toy guns, "shooting" each other and yelling "I got you!" when we felt we'd "shot" someone. This was basically "Cops & Robbers" or "Cowboys & Indians".
It was after reading those wonderful novels that I began to dream a different dream. I no longer wanted to be a policeman or a cowboy, righting wrongs with my six-shooter. I no longer saw myself as a bank robber getting rich at the expense of others, or a Lakota Sioux fighting for my very freedom. Instead, I saw myself living out on the road, taking up arms in an epic quest to save the world against insurmountable odds. All in a land filled with elves and dwarves and magic. This vision wasn't shared by most of my brothers or any of my friends, so I only really got to play "Lord of the Rings" with my brother Mark at my grandma's house. There, my brother and I would go for long walks on the outskirts of her farm, pulling up long reed-like cane poles from the ground and using them as if they were swords and spears. We would throw shorter ones like we were firing arrows from our imaginary bows, killing the imaginary orcs and goblins who dared oppose us. My Aunt Gina would want to hear all about our adventures once we got back to the house, so we would sit and tell her about the battles we'd imagined while we'd been out that day.
As I looked up to Gina with adoration, I did my best to be like her. I listened to the same music, which meant The Beatles, The Osmonds, The Jackson Five, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and whatever happened to be playing on American Top 40 with Kasey Kasem. I burned her incense, wore her headphones, and added many layers to the hip 70's artwork formed by burning candles over top of a Pepsi bottle and allowing the wax to flow down and build up around the glass. So it was only natural that I should want to read what she was reading. I remember her laughing when I asked if I could read The Hobbit, and we both still talk about her reaction when I'd finished it over a long rainy weekend at grandma's. I still love seeing the smile on her face as she recalls my first oral book report.
So I was already different from most kids my age when Dungeons & Dragons was first brought to my attention in the seventh grade. One of my friends in junior high played at a local hobby shop on Sundays, and he would often talk about the games during lunch. I really wanted to try it, but when I asked my parents for permission, they wouldn't let me play. I knew I'd found my way to play "Lord of the Rings" and my parents denied me my chance. They thought D&D was this horrible thing that would corrupt me and have me cutting the heads off dolls or killing small animals in my backyard. I tried to find a way around them, but they were too smart for me. They allowed me to hang out with Kenny after school or on a Saturday afternoon, but they wouldn't let me spend the night on weekends or when summer came around for fear I'd play D&D.
This was huge disappointment as I now knew that there were other people out there who wanted to be heroes, to slay evil beasts and rescue damsels in distress. To carry a sword or a bow and have brave companions to fight at our sides. But with my parents' decision, this was a pipe dream. It would be years before I would have an opportunity to play.
So I immersed myself in books, not wanting my imagination to be stifled by the closed mindedness of my mom and dad. I read many classics during my years in junior high, from Twain and Poe to Dickens and Fitzgerald. But I found myself drawn back time and again to Tolkien's classics, and started reading them, all four of them, as often as I could. Since I didn't own copies of my own, I was often at the City Library, checking out the books, reading them, and then returning them. My trips to the shelves holding fantasy novels paid off in other ways as well, as I discovered more novels by more authors. I began to expand my fantasy reading to more worlds than just Middle-Earth thanks to authors like Donaldson, Eddings, and Brooks. These authors combined with Tolkien to thoroughly capture my imagination and keep the fire burning inside of me to find away to unleash that imagination on the world.
It was in my sophomore year of high school that I finally got my first chance to play D&D. My family was visiting another family from church and after dinner I was hanging out with the couples' son, John. John was a couple years older than me, and my parents had a very high opinion of him, so it came as a shock to them when I came out of his room and told them that he was letting me borrow his D&D books. I remember them looking to his parents for clarification, and while I don't remember what was said, I do remember that I was allowed to take the books and the few dice he had home with me. To my parents, evidently, if a good Christian boy like John plays D&D, it must not be all that bad.
I can still see those first rule books. They were very old versions of the game, but they held my interest just the same. I sat alone in my room, listening to the radio and reading through my first D&D books. I can still smell the musty odor of books that have been stored in a box in a garage that allows in too much moisture. I remember running myself through my first adventure, one that was in the back of the rulebook, and discovering that I was lucky to be so fascinated with elves that I made my first character one. You see, one of the monsters was a ghoul and elves happen to be immune to their paralyzing touch! My love of elves from Tolkien's work was only intensified by that first gaming experience.
I kept to myself a lot few those first few months, just me and my imagination. Then I found out that another friend from school had just gotten D&D books of his own, and wanted to get a small group together to play. Our group turned out to be just three of us, but we got together once a week after school to play. Paul was the Dungeon Master (DM) in those early games, and it was his responsibility to guide the game, much like a director does in a movie or a play. Soames and I were the two players, and Paul had each of us running three characters at the same time, to ensure we had a balanced adventuring party. While there wasn't a lot of role playing in those early games, there was a lot of laughter and a lot of fun. I remember one of my characters, Cormack, dying and us stuffing his body in a chest because we didn't have a coffin and didn't want to leave him there, lying on the floor to be eaten by whatever monster came along. Good times.
As the years progressed, I graduated and left both high school, and my high school friends behind. I joined the Air Force, and between work, sports, and a new wife, had very little time for much of anything else. But I continued to read fantasy novels and still wanted an outlet for my imagination. Just after my 20th birthday, I finally found exactly what I was looking for. After a failed attempt at having a game with friends from work, I discovered a comic book/game store near my work. I stopped by to check it out and met some guys who played there on nearly a daily basis! They asked me to sit in, so I did, and over the next few weeks, I was playing almost every day after work for at least a few hours. I made a few good friends there, and as summer drew to a close, a group of us decided to take our game to someone's house and play each and every Saturday night.
It was at Don's house during those Saturday night games that I really found the type of game I was looking for. Don was DM and had an epic story to tell, with five core players who were in the game from its start. We spent hours each Saturday, working towards the goal of stopping the coming of an evil god into the world of men, and we did it by taking on the roles of our characters and interacting in the rich world that Don created with his words and our collective imagination. It was like participating in a novel instead of just reading it…starring in movie instead of sitting and watching it. I loved that game and all that I learned from it, about how to be a better player, and about how to run great game.
I've evolved into a DM myself over the years, and I continue to evolve as I continue to play. When I'm running my game on Sundays, I sit in anticipation, anxious to find out what my players are about to do with the information I've just given them. You see, I've spent the last week putting my imagination to good use. I've crafted a story for the players to run their characters in, a backdrop that is the world the characters live in. I've spent hours developing characters of my own, characters with goals of their own, and histories that have shaped them into who they are. I've spent days planning the circumstances that surround the players' characters, working out in my head how best to describe each scene that my players will see so that when they enter the dark forest of dead trees, the ground covered in broken bones and thick fog, they will feel the terror rising up in the pits of their stomachs, and be able to feel like they are there, within their characters' minds.
Dungeons & Dragons allows me to set my imagination free in a way that no other medium possibly could. I may not be putting my words down on a page for hundreds or thousands to enjoy, or writing a script that could show millions my vision of epic fantasy, but my target-audience of six or seven friends mean more to me than the nameless masses. I am amply rewarded each week when I see my friends' smile and tell me how much they're enjoying playing in my D&D game.
Dungeons & Dragons is the perfect way for me to enjoy the fruits of my imagination.
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