I’ve spent an ungodly number of hours, running, playing, watching, and reading about Dungeons and Dragons. I think it’s the most fun you can have with your brain, and some of the best with your friends. This unhealthy obsession was started around three years ago, when my friend Rob first hooked me in. His doing so has been the cause of a great deal of friendship and fun for me ever since. My hope is that in writing this article, I can convince you to do what I did: throw aside your preconceptions and dive in to this wonderful hobby.

In a video game, you might press X to jump, or Y to talk. In D&D, your inputs are your words, and the computer that figures out whether they work is your game master’s brain. The trade-off for this, is that you have to do some of the working-out yourself, by rolling dice and adding up some numbers. New players can initially be a little intimidated by this system. It does take a small amount of getting used to, but after 3-4 sessions, I promise that you can be as confident in rolling an athletics check as pressing X to jump. The numbers are as much D&D as the white lines on a field are football. D&D is the plans, the decisions, and the stories you make within those lines.

So, what do you get in return for this? Even in the most expansive, sandbox-y, open world video games, there are limits. The creators can only program in a finite number of solutions to each problem that you face. A stealth game, for instance, may give you the ability to sneak into a mysterious mine by sticking to the shadows, or infiltrating via the sewers. In D&D, the only limit is your imagination. What if you want to gain entry by posing as a member of the miners’ union of workers, and convincing a particularly stupid gnome to let you in? What if you decide that you like the cut of this shady mining corporation’s jib, and you want to switch sides and join them? Well, in D&D you can.

When new players first realise this, their first reaction is almost always the same. “I’m going to try to steal all her gold!”, “I’m gonna stab him!”, “I burn the building down and run away!”. It’s analogous to when you drop a fresher off at university for the first time. They suddenly realize that they can drink all they want, there are no curfews, and nothing to stop them eating two Greggs sausage rolls a day (don’t ask). Exercising that utter freedom is liberating, and is often hilarious for its absurdist incongruity. Of course, most soon realize that long term, Greggs sausage rolls aren’t all that nourishing. Players usually move on from being a ‘murder-hobo’, as the disparaging slang goes, to the new experience of collaboratively creating a story.

Your story could be anything, from a simple quest to retrieve a magical mcguffin, to a labyrinthine political conspiracy. Generally speaking (and there are exceptions), it’ll be pulpy and in broad strokes, more Star Wars than Shakespeare. But I can’t stress this enough: the amount of investment you get from having an active role in creating a story is absurd. The adrenaline rush our group experienced, when with 15 sessions of build-up, we finally faced off in a pitched battle against our big bad guy had us bouncing off the walls. When two of our party died in the resulting battle, we felt real remorse. The catharsis we all felt upon finally winning was intense and exhausting. Players may sometimes pause, and wonder why such simplistic, serialised stories evoke such potent emotions. The reason is that they played, and shaped, and moulded those stories, rather than just observed them.

Even more than similar senses of humour and interests, shared experience with others builds strong friendships, with trust, empathy, and rapport. D&D creates this feeling in a powerful way. Before writing this piece, I asked my home group about their favourite moments of our game, and they unanimously responded with the river incident, when we attempted to go around a bridge where an ambush was laid, by fording a strong river upstream. In the resulting stupidity and chaos, involving a makeshift swing over the river, two of our characters almost died. This happened over a year ago, and we still regularly recount and chuckle at the time that the land’s greatest heroes were almost defeated by a body of water.

A subtle sleight of mind happens when we recount this story. Obviously, we weren’t fording a river, we were chatting and rolling dice. But when players recount their games, they never say “Do you remember when my character did this?”. Almost always, they go “Do you remember when we did that?”. This is the ‘illusion’ of shared experience in D&D. It’s the creation and investment in a narrative, through which you work together to forge plans, resolve conflicts, and respond to emotional moments. D&D is teambuilding on steroids, and I’m proud to say that I have forged my closest and dearest friends in its fires.

I feel it would be remiss of me to discuss D&D without mentioning what is, to me, its biggest flaw. To put it frankly, cultural perceptions of D&D are significantly male dominated. More depressingly, those perceptions have a hefty basis in reality. D&D was created in the 1970’s as an all-boys club. For just one example, Len Lakofka, a key figure to the early D&D scene, argued in the article ‘Notes on Women & Magic’, that whilst female characters may, with hard work, replicate the achievements of men in magic, they can never be as effective a warrior. This, and a million other forms of sexism woven into D&D’s early history have had an effect. As a result, the arguably three most famous GM’s of D&D (Matt Mercer, Dan Harmon, and Chris Perkins), and the two lead designers of the game (Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford) are all guys.

The situation, though, is improving. Figures like Marisha Ray (Creative Director, Geek and Sundry) and Satine Phoenix (Founder, CelebrityChariD20 and Host, GM Tips) promote women’s creative roles in the game. Entirely gone is the absurd notion of different abilities for male and female characters, and key figures have spoken at length about the need to modify fantasy tropes to promote inclusivity of groups others than straight white guys. Sexism still exists within D&D of course, most visible in the horror stories on D&D forums of how female players are treated in game stores and the like. Slightly heartening is the fact that the community at large seems almost uniformly united in both their disgust at such stories, and in the need of change. I sincerely hope that this progress is enough to ensure that the next generation of GMs, creative designers, and players are well represented by others than the male, often straight and white, stereotype.

Slowly, but with luck, surely, D&D is emerging into the sunlight as a game that everyone can enjoy, rather than the hermetically sealed and negatively perceived community of times gone by. This fact, and the limited role I’ve been able to have in showing people this game, is so pleasing to me, because it’s a hobby that everyone should have a chance to enjoy. Trying it out is as easy as buying some dice and asking others if they’d like to play; the resulting fun, experience, and friendships will be worth every second.

If this piece has in any way convinced you to give D&D a go, I’d recommend starting with watching Geek and Sundry’s ‘Critical Role’. Matt Colville’s ‘Running the Game’ series, and Satine Phoenix’s ‘GM Tips’ are also useful resources. All of these can be found on YouTube.