I don’t know what other people spend their Monday nights doing, but my friends and I play pretend for almost four hours every week. 

The first time I remember hearing about Dungeons & Dragons was in 2016, from a new show on Netflix called “Stranger Things.” From that introduction, it seemed like a scary game I would never want to play. As I got older, I learned that, while “Stranger Things” pulls heavily from D&D, quite a bit is fabricated for the story.

This past summer, when my friend asked if I wanted to join her boyfriend’s D&D campaign, I was hesitant, but said yes anyway. Including the Dungeon Master, or DM, there are six of us who are a part of the “Legends of Esthen” campaign. While we all knew each other before playing, now we’ve all become friends and have a lot of jokes stemming from the campaign.

This campaign is a “homebrew” campaign, meaning the DM created the story and the world we are playing. We still play by the majority of regular D&D rules, but there might be a few differences as this campaign has never existed before. I havent ever played any other type of campaign before, but I do have to say, this homebrewed story is going to be hard to beat if I do ever play in another campaign. 

Not only do you and the other people in the campaign play the characters you have created, but the DM also plays NPCs you can interact with almost however you want. If your DM is like mine, they will have a different voice to go along with each character, and you never know what a character is going to sound like. 

So, after being a part of and playing in this campaign since August, I can confidently say that playing D&D isn’t as cringy as it is made out to be.

At first, it is a lot to learn, and honestly, I still don’t know everything, but I have a solid enough grasp to play pretty efficiently. DandDbeyond.com is a very useful website that helps you through each step of creating a character, from their race, to traits, to what actions they can take. D&D Beyond can even generate character sheets, giving you a quick and accessible look at everything you need to know about your character.

As someone who grew up reading and watching all things fantasy, I was very excited to learn we would be playing in a fantasy world of curses, dragons, magic wielders and evil men controlling the king. 

What I really loved was making my character and writing her background. Having consumed so much fantasy media, I had many different ideas for what and who I wanted my character to be. In the end, I chose to make my character vastly different from myself and yet still include some familiar characteristics. Any character you can dream up or think of, you can make in D&D.

Having a set time to play once a week makes it part of my schedule and it’s one of the only times in my week I’m not at all focused on school. I’m focused on a bunch of make-believe characters in a make-believe world fighting make-believe monsters, and I could not be having more fun, most of the time. 

After playing for eight months, I am very invested in the world my DM created, and it does make me sad to think about how we only have five or six sessions left, but I am so ready to figure out what these past months have been leading to. 

So yes, while D&D might be a little nerdy, if you play with the right people, have a DM who allows you to make use of your imagination and creativity and embrace the experience, I wouldn’t say that playing D&D is cringy at all.

Categories: Life