If you have taken the time to read my highly engaging profile, you would know that I’ve been playing D&D since I was 9. I had changed schools and somehow became friends with the group of kids who played D&D.
I don’t recall what version it was because nobody ever used a rule book but given it was the early 90’s it would be anything from BX to AD&D. The only reason I’m ruling out OD&D is because someone brought in one of the little brown books one day as a novelty. We would hand draw our character sheets in cheap exercise books and play during our lunch break while sitting on the pavers in the courtyard underneath a huge tree.
Childhood memory being what it is, I’m not sure where exactly this event occurred but at some point my Nan must have read or heard something about Dungeons & Dragons and suddenly I was forbidden to play. And so began the dark times and it felt like years of my life passed where I wasn’t allowed to play D&D. About six months later somehow managed to convince my Nan to let me start playing again and it was the renaissance period. The group had moved to AD&D 2nd Edition and we even had rule books. I don’t think I ever had my own, we couldn’t afford it but I do remember borrowing the Player’s Handbook several times. We no longer played at school but we would go to someone house on the weekend, there was about five or six of us including the two regular DMs, and had sessions that lasted five or six hours.
The plot was almost nonexistent, the games were always dungeon crawls, character death was not uncommon, critical failure tables were brutal (critical hit tables made up for it, sometimes) but we had so much fun. We also played Cyberpunk 2020 and Magic: The Gathering and had massive amounts of fun with those as well but this post is about neither of those games. Most of the time, when we were finished our D&D games we would play Magic.
When high school happened we continued playing but with a slightly altered friend base. Overall I played for maybe five years before high school social dynamics meant that friend groups fragmented. Sadly I’m not in contact with any of the people I played with but the significance of the group and the games (Cyberpunk and Magic included) we played had a massive impact on the rest of my life.
A few decades later I’m playing D&D with my kids. They have the greatest imaginations, hopefully playing means they’ll keep it for longer than the current world wants them to, and they’re incredibly creative. The three of us really get into it and there’s not a lot of sitting but a lot of reenacting. Afterwards they’ll talk to me, full of excitement, about how they imagined creatures or places or doors, i think doors are significant and I think one of my kids still has the coloured in sketch I did for the very first entry (door) into the very first dungeon we ever played which was loosely based on Skara Brae.
Sadly my ADHD-esque issues mean that we don’t play as often as I’d like to but I’m working on unravelling that ball of twisted yarn that’s in the bag of feral cats. But I still see the impact the games have had, on my son in particular. He runs his own “D&D” games with made up rules and it’s been a lot of fun for us both. There’s maps and NPC’s with their individual personalities, wildly inaccurate travel times, custom character sheets and it’s all so great! Both kids draw fantasy related pictures and write fantasy related stories and I couldn’t be a more proud nerd Dad.
This isn’t the conclusion I thought this would arrive at, but I don’t write any of these with any particular conclusion in mind either and I let them go where they will. Regardless of how long we play D&D for, I’m not naive enough to think that this will last forever, I know I’ve already achieved what I set out to do. When I started playing D&D all I really knew about fantasy was that I liked knights and wizards but I tapped into a vein of creativity that I never knew I had and, being a passive and shy kid, might never have otherwise found. My kids are far more naturally creative (and exuberant) than I ever was or will be and they have used D&D to tap into their creativity in a big way. It’s storytelling and voice acting and acting and improv and abstract thinking and imagination and more all rolled in to each other in the form of an interactive story that they, as their character, take part in. This, and the stories and memories of it, will be with them for the rest of their lives.
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