PROLOGUE
I suppose it began there in that minimally furnished room lit by the warmth of the midday sun; I had been taken there to be tested and observed for signs of defect. As I sat in the corner she softly and calmly asked me why I hadn’t been doing my math homework, I knew not how to tell her the way insipid black lines piled up on pages and had no bearing to me at this point in time. She smiled at my nervous silence as she presented me with colored blocks and had me arrange them in different presentations as sand ran from a ornately shaped plastic timer. Then she sent me to the wooden table where a bespectacled youth sat waiting impatiently for her to bring over 2 big pieces of paper. I waited for her to leave to ask what it was we were being handed. “Monster mazes” he gasped in, hyperventilating.
The huge piece of paper was covered in intricate lines seeming to spiral around the page to the center where a hideous archaic beast waited. I read the foreboding story atop the page which warned of the beasts near invincibility only matched by a powerful weapon which was also conveniently located within the maze. Time passed and my visits to that room became sparse until one day she vanished. As more time passed, memories of my youth playing Magic the Gathering at friends’ houses, reading “The Hobbit” after school in the library while waiting for my math tutor, and recreating scenes out of Alexander Lloyd’s “The Book of Three” in Shenandoah National Park drifted from the peripheries of thought into focus. Even my hazier adolescent moments with certain fungus at the renaissance festival foreshadowed the coming experience.
THE PRESENT
Perhaps it was due to the stereotyping, or the stigma attached to those who played back then, or maybe the actual game itself, but for many years I avoided and even shunned it. It wasn’t till many years later (December 2010 to be exact) that a group of my friends hesitantly entertained the idea of playing “Dungeons & Dragons.” Each of us meekly mumbled our ideas about the game, waiting to see what the others thought; surprisingly there was an overwhelming interest in playing…this built from a mere interest into a chosen date with a few books, dice, and a bottle of mead. We sat there around the table not as a bunch of pimpled geeks with no future promise but as a biochemist dungeon master, a Clarkson graduated rogue, a future GM employed cleric and a troubled yet talented wizard.
THE GAME
The first thing you do before playing is create a character; strengths and abilities are determined by race (dwarf, elf, human etc.) or class (i.e. warrior, rogue, mage) all of which is done by an introduction from the starter set which teaches you how to play via story where you pick various options which shape your character. The game is determined by the dungeon master who oversees the players’ interactions with the imaginary realm. Just like reality, what you can and can’t do is governed by chance and ability; for instance, if you want to move a large rock in the game you would do a skill check of strength plus your ability modifier, which would constitute your ability to move the rock, and the roll of a polyhedron dice would determine randomly whether or not you were successful.
One main focus of the game is the series of encounters in which are you are limited to a minor action, move action and standard action. For example: I would grunt and draw my sword, move forward towards my attacker at a rate based on my speed (the number of spaces you move each turn) and then attack or use a magical ability. However, you don’t always have to fight – we were able to use our diplomacy skills and convince a bear-sized dragon to give us a magical suit of armor. We are totally coming back to snatch his gold after we level up and get stronger.
There are boundless things you can do and interact with if you have the imagination and a worthy dungeon master, which is what I enjoy about this game. True, there are limits such as your characters’ fallacies and/or time which is needed in large amounts to have a truly engaging adventure, but aside from these minor setbacks there exists a game governed by its own reasonable laws and rules. There are so many games out there based on the skeleton of D&D like Diablo 2, Final Fantasy, and World of Warcraft, all good, but all fall short. Why? Why are books better than movies? Things today such as the aforementioned games lack a certain degree of personal intimacy, where in D&D they give you a set of rules but the rest is based purely on the limits of your imagination. You are creating the world and action in your mind, where you can go crazy with minute intricacy.
Also, D&D has a latent secondary function as a sort of exercise for your brain…no, seriously. D&D combines simple mathematics, strategy, communication, memorization, storytelling and imagination… imagine how many areas of your brain you’d be using. It’s a shame they’re not using it elementary schools; it would be interesting to see if it could be used as a learning device, although it has a dark potential, ahem WoW people *cough* … I digress. I am in no way saying that everyone should play, for it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Different strokes fo’ different folks is the motto I live by. When it boils down to it, it’s just the same as anything else people do as a group: some people get together and go bowling, I scribble on paper and role dice. It’s simply a variant of required human interaction, nothing freakish or weird about that. I will end this by saying here that that long journey that started in those primitive mazes has come full circle into a fun and engaging pastime with friends. It’s strange to think that it all started with the smile of a kind woman…
source:
http://www.canonfire.com/wiki/images/9/9b/Baer%26Sego%26Fland.JPG
http://www.icoachmath.com/Sitemap/images/Regular%20Polyhedron1.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1224/1435044556_7f9b6bef33.jpg
http://www.criticalgamers.com/archives/pictures/DnD.5.6.06.jpg
