Like many my age — I spent countless hours in my friend’s basement, slinging polyhedral dice around a table, while characters like “Vince the Impaler” and “Grulach” stormed dungeons and towns looking for treasure. Most of the time we found trouble instead, but that’s beside the point. I am of course talking about the tabletop phenomenon known as Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons (or D&D) has been around since 1974, when it was designed and released by Gary Gygax as an alternative to tabletop miniature military games. Thanks to pop-culture references in shows like Stranger Things and podcasts like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, D&D is now actually COOL.
Matt Mercer from Critical Role
I used to run an IT Department at a small private school here where I live. Every summer I had a group of volunteer students who would come help me reset/clean iPads in exchange for service hours. One summer we spent just about every day listening to the aforementioned podcast “The Adventure Zone” (a show where 3 brothers and their dad play D&D together) and one day a student asked me if I would be interested in running a game for them and some friends. This turned into an after school club that I and another teacher ran for a couple of years. It was a ton of fun and I have some great memories of these stories we made up together.
Around this time, my son was just hitting middle school and he asked me if I would put together a D&D game for him and his friends for his 12th birthday sleepover. I planned out a small, one shot campaign with some pre-made characters for them. I honestly thought at this age, we would play for a couple of hours and then they would retreat to the bonus room to play Xbox.
6 hours later, we were still playing! The only reason we stopped, was because peepaw here got sleepy. They would have been content to play all night. We seriously had a blast. It was great to see these kids throw themselves in to a made up world, try out goofy scenarios and just all-around have a good time. We ate pizza, made silly voices and killed some kobolds. It was great.
That was about 5 years ago, and we still play with essentially the same crew on a regular basis. The past year has been a little different, due to COVID, but with tools like Discord and Roll20 it has been a breeze to transition over. I am just thankful to have the opportunity to share a game that I loved as I kid, with my son and his friends.
We have been playing the same campaign now for almost a year and half and it has been a ton of fun to build a world with these boys. I am excited to see where they end up going with everything.