“I’ll make a heal check later. Right now, I’m vomiting spiders.”
To some students, a phrase like this doesn’t phase them while playing Dungeons and Dragons. First published in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a personalized fantasy game played in a choose-your-own-adventure style, has given the masses a game where the story is made by the players. Typically, D&D is played using a board and dice, but can also be played online.
“Essentially it’s about getting together with a bunch of your geeky friends and creating your own characters with their own persona that’s completely different from your own,” sophomore Marcus Jackson said. “You can play a really light hearted game of D&D where you just get together with some friends and create a silly story and silly characters and embark on silly adventures together.”
Players make a character customized to their personal tastes, or the exact opposite of the player.
“You can easily customize your character to be exactly how you want,” Jackson said. “There are tons of races to choose from and so many classes to fit your play style or just whatever you think is cool. You get to design what your character looks like because you create the image that’s in your head. Once you create your characters, you and your friends embark on whatever journey you like. You can visit towns, fight ghouls, dragons, dwarves, venture out into some forest or visit cities.”
These characters are used throughout an adventure, commonly known as a campaign.
“I enjoy D&D because it is liberating,” junior Emily Robertson said. “My character is a rogue, so basically my character just runs around stealing things and setting stuff on fire a lot. It’s kind of liberating because I can do whatever I want with no consequences for several hours.”
Campaigns are played in sessions for however long they are dragged out. Throughout a session, players are faced with monsters, dragons, mazes and puzzles that they have to overcome to move on.
“It’s team building,” sophomore Jessica Witcher said. “I would love to set up a campaign with a sports team because it really brings people together. You have obstacles that you have to get past whether you’re fighting it, or maybe it’s a puzzle or a maze, but you have to work together and collaborate.”
Throughout a campaign, there is one person that runs the show called a Dungeon Master, like junior Jacob White. The Dungeon Master is in charge of creating the scenarios given to the characters while maintaining the realistic continuity of the game.
“I have to facilitate the game and make sure everyone is following the rules and I also have to write up the entire story,” White said. “What ends up happening is that I write this nice big story and I have to throw away half of it because nobody goes down the roads I want them to.”
Although the game is over 40 years old, the sudden popularization of the Netflix show: Stranger Things made viewers more aware of the D&D community. Yet, the community in Chatham County is smaller compared to communities out west.
“I think that if you enjoy video games, you should at least try Dungeons and Dragons because in a way it was the first form of video games created,” Jackson said. “Sure, it’s played using paper and dice, or some people play it online, but the point is that you get to create your own video game and play however you want without the limitations that video games bring today with stories and gameplay restricted to what the game designers wanted you to play. D&D is not only for hardcore geeks and introverts.”
– By Madison Clark
