anyways d&d is a legitimately magical thing that is capable of forging and/or strengthening friendships and doing strange but good things to your emotions, and if you have ever considered getting involved with it but have not yet, i truly do encourage you to find a way to make it happen
so this post has made far more rounds than i expected of it and all of the comments made by people agreeing/talking about how good d&d has been for them/etc are warming my heart very much. but the other tags i frequently see are people saying “i’d love to but i don’t know how” or “i wish i could but i don’t have any friends i could play with, they’re all online” and i want to offer some small advice to them because i promise, there are still ways to get involved!
if your friends are all online, that does not make it impossible for you to play together! i am in three different d&d campaigns currently, despite only having one (1) person i know who i can play with and who lives in the same state as me – and even we don’t play in person, because two people isn’t enough for a campaign! all of my campaigns are on discord, using the video or voice chat functions and employing a more theater of the mind approach to combat. for people who really do like having maps and things, there’s also a site called roll20 that facilitates d&d games and has not only loads of tools, but lots of information about the game itself, like monster stats, spell lists, and even basic rules
if you are cool with the idea of playing online but can’t personally get enough people together for a group, or maybe are all so new that no one feels confident DMing, there are also ways to find online games that want more players! roll20 also has listings of existing campaigns looking for more people, and while you definitely want to try to find one that’s right for you, there are a lot of listings to browse that might make that possible. try talking to the DM of one that you’re interested in to get a feel for the general attitude and people involved with a game to see if you can find one you’re comfortable with. if you have a friend or two you’d like to play with, you could even both apply for the same campaign!
if you’re really, really set on playing in-person, try seeing if there’s a game store in the area that’s hosts adventurer’s league games! AL is an effort organized by wizards of the coast (the company that makes d&d) to put out special adventures for game stores, where anyone is welcome to drop in and play. there are some rules to follow for character creation, but it can actually be a very nice way to get introduced to d&d – it’s actually how i started playing! good, older, more experienced players are a great resource for helping you learn how to play the game. and if you’re really intimidated by even the character creation process, i believe that they will give you a pre-generated character sheet if you show up and say that you don’t have a character, but you’d still like to play (they did when i played for the first time! it’s just that that was about three years ago, so i’m not positive it’s still a thing. 5e was really new when i started playing) i will also admit that game stores can be an intimidating environment – some of the people who are attracted to playing in the adventurer’s league are unfortunately the more gate-keep-y kind of player. if you can, maybe bring a friend along with you to test the waters and see if your local store is a comfortable environment. when i played, i always went with two of my friends from high school. and though i am also of a demographic that is more likely to be looked down on in a game, my local store proved to be a perfectly fine environment for me. i might have been pretty lucky in that regard, but none of the players ever made me feel unwelcome or unwanted. one time, we found a powerful magic item and everyone at the table actually voted that i would be the best person to have it! so it’s definitely true that there are good adventurer’s league games out there where you can have a lot of fun, and there might be one that’s a good fit for you. and starting play in the adventurer’s league could even lead to you learning the game well enough that you’d be confident enough to DM for your own friends! (that’s actually exactly how my first group came together…)
i really hope that those who want to play but haven’t yet found a way to are able to find good games, because i am 100% serious when i say that having a consistent d&d game in my life right now is helping me through a rough patch in my life. i firmly believe that it’s a very special game that can be an amazing experience to participate in, and if any of these tips help someone find i way to, i will be incredibly happy. in fact, if you have questions about any of this at all, my inbox is open!
Speaking of the D&D Monster Manual, I love how the metallic dragons are good-aligned but still inherently dragons, so all the worst qualities of the evil chromatic dragons are just kind of twisted into bizarre eccentricities. Metallic dragons seem sort of like weird aliens that have vaguely heard of what it means to be a Cheerful and Jovial Friend but don’t quite have the hang of it yet.
Brass dragons are so dedicated to conversation that if someone tries to cut off a conversation with them early, they’ll breathe sleep gas at them, bury them up to their neck in sand, wait for them to wake up, then keep idly chatting until they’ve hit their quota of small-talk, at which point they’ll happily let them go. Copper dragons can be mortally offended if people don’t laugh at their jokes. I love it.
a thought: pitching a tabletop game set in Classical Antiquity to my gaming group is going to be almost impossible, but telling them it’s an original fantasy setting and then setting it in Classical Antiquity without mentioning any people or places they would know is just stupid enough to work
if i just never mention Athens, Sparta, Alexandria, or Rome, i should be safe
set the game in Pergamon and hope nobody ever googles it
god outta nowhere i just remembered the time i was in a game where the dm didn’t read one of the character’s backstories carefully enough and allowed someone to make it all the way to the final session with the hidden ability to turn into a motorcycle
lydia you cant just say stuff like this and then not explain exactly how this was performed
k so. one of the first big games i played with my current meatspace gaming group was a really excellent post-apocalyptic homebrew game. really excellent. but it was also wild as hell, had a lot of players, and was the dm’s first big game, so it was at times a real exercise in controlled chaos. and my good bro willie…my bro willie was kind of at the brunt of it. both in that he always to this day plays really chaotic characters that can’t avoid trouble, and also in that due to that and other misfortunes he died like every other session towards the end. he went through five or six characters by the time the campaign was over. one didn’t even last a full session. it was remarkable to witness actually.
but anyway, towards the end, the dm was fairly overwhelmed and dealing with a lot of other characters doing epic-level wasteland nonsense, and kinda threw reading willies backstories to the wayside. which was unfortunate for him, because willie hails from the ‘3 pages or more’ school of backstories, and by this time in the campaign was coping with his characters’ constant deaths by planning backup character well in advance, to the point where they all had intricate, complex connections to each previous character. so when he dies due to circumstances out of his control before the very last few sessions (the first but certainly not last character death he had due to betrayal: willie im still sorry) its not too suprising that he comes back as this brooding edgy darth vader guy with a five page backstory about how he had obtained a horrific nanosuit cyborg body, and the dm approves it, but sure as hell doesn’t read the whole thing bc he’s planning the final confrontation at this point.
cut to the middle of the incredibly serious final session, where his character and my character and my character’s children are fighting for their lives to escape the facility where they are currently caught in the crossfire between a raging, dying artificial intelligence and religiously zealous psychic juggernaut (long story). the dm is giving us a very bleak countdown of how long we have to get out before the whole place collapses but his character just turns to mine with a “don’t worry, just trust me” and willie smiles, looks up at the dm, and is like, “i activiate my nanite body and turn into a motorcycle”, which unfortunately was completely street legal with what he’d detailed in his backstory, so that’s exactly what he fuckin did, as the dm put his head in his hands.
end result: we survived.
this is my favorite 3 paragraphs ive ever read thank you lydia
Concept: That scene in every 90s high school movie where someone shows the new kid around the cafeteria (”that table is the nerds, those are the jocks, the goths, the cheerleeders” etc) except it’s a medieval tavern and each table has a different d&d class.
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