On Dungeon and Dragons, Self-Insert vampires, and the importance of playing pretend into adulthood.
Char, do a persuasion check- can you convince your readers that you're both mentally stable AND completely in love with a game that's basically playing pretend feat. twenty-sided dice?
...
I've been reading a lot about the importance of 'third places' recently. Those locations liminally existent between work and home, oh-so necessary environments for human growth. Places that allow comfort, entertainment, socialisation, amongst other abstract nouns that enrich an individuals' life. It seems that as of late, traditional 'third places' are quickly disappearing from the public eye, due in part to an increased acceptance of virtual communication in the post-Covid era (I would also argue that the degradation of small-town communities due to mass-monopolisation, the cost-of-living crisis, forced youth mobility due to an unstable job market, and the replacement of traditional community services with tax-dodging corporations may *also maybe* have the teeniest tiniest of things to answer for as well maybe...).
Whatever, or WHOever (yes, looking at you Bezos and Co.), is to blame for the current lack of 'third place' in 2022, the everyday person has been left to their own creative devices when it comes to finding a community. To give the algorithm its dues, the internet has done a somewhat decent job acting as panacea for the modern lonely condition. As much as I agree with those who assert the evils of echo-chambers, social media black holes and my favourite 'not-on-the-high-street' local joint: the incel pipeline, I must also speak on the internet's capacity to provide a warm resting spot to weary loners. Growing up as a lonely girl in the back end of beyond, without internet or friendship for a significant portion of tweenagerhood, it was not until I found people who shared my love of videogames, musicals and anime in the annuls of YouTube comment threads that I actually found a decent 'third place' full of people who challenged, accepted, and celebrated all that I secretly held dear. Up until this point, my 'third place' was, like many other loners', entirely in my own head.
For those of us with over-active imaginations, developed due to boredom or loneliness or trauma or whatever, one's internal third place can be incredibly rich, wild, and full of characters that are larger than life. As a seasoned escapist, who regularly spends hours before I go to bed, even now at the grand old age of 23, simply lying down imagining stories and fantastic scenarios, the loss of 'playing pretend' as an acceptable social occupation, was a tragedy. The internet did a pretty good job at filling that void, I think, before later being replaced by real-life 'third places' as I began to frequent my local theatre, college bar, and multiple other drink-based joints. But before I knew it, March 2020 ripped said concrete spaces away, leaving me back alone in the same childhood bedroom where twelve-year-old me devised teenage fanfic fantasies under a skylight by night. Upon returning to my internet space for comfort and now far-away friendship, there was but one 'third place' that kept me safe, sane, and connected to those I loved. And that fantastical place was found within the joint imaginations of my friends and I, in the form of a game called Dungeons and Dragons.
All these thoughts and more sprout when I consider the 'third places' in which I feel most comfortable and accepted, and so for this week's post I wanted to write a love letter to my favourite game. If you'll allow me a few more pages, dear reader, I plan to make the case for why Dungeons and Dragons occupies the tenderest of spaces in my heart, and how it may do the same for you, over-imaginative, under-occupied individual that you are. If you are already a seasoned player- please bear with me as I gush.
I hope you feel the same way.
One Reason Why I Love You: Bedroom Dreams and Fraying Seams, or why we needed D&D in lockdown.
So, why was D&D such an effective 'third place' in the midst of 2020 lockdown? To give you some context, by this point in time I'd played about twenty sessions, sat on the single beds or thinly-carpeted floor of my friend Aaron's university bedroom. There were normally about seven of us crammed in there, rolling dice elbow-to-elbow, crooning over each other's shoulders to peer down at a meticulously-tea-stained map.
D&D was intensely physical, so what happened when we removed that element of in-person wonder when Aaron decided we meet every week online for five hours of dice-based escapism during lockdown? Though something indeed was lost during the move to virtual play, I think the point of Dungeons & Dragons was never to escape into the ladybird-infested rooms of second-year student accommodation, but to escape into a new world. A world where I could be someone other than me. Be someone fantastical who sees fantastical things, where death and tragedy have no real-life connotations, and even the most horrific of events could be corrected through a well-spent inspiration die or spell.
It's no new notion for you, dear reader, I'm sure, that escapism through immersion into a good story can do wonders for the soul. Why else would art, drama, videogames, exist, if not for the thrill of losing yourself pleasantly, like wayward rambling in a slumbered forest. Tabletop games such as D&D however, are arguably like videogames on crack, as the medium necessitates an embodiment of character. In these sessions, a character is at most pictorially represented through a character-sheet drawing or static minifigure. They exist as moving beings not on any screen, but purely internally- in a player's head. In my mind, I can be anything I want to be, go anywhere I want to, limited only by my powers of imagination, and the luck of a dice roll. In March 2020, I was given full permission to submerge myself completely, swimming in the cool, clear waters of a good story as worldly stresses were left to rest upon the riverbank for a spell.
Also unlike many of the other forms of escapism I allow myself to be carried away by, in this game, my friends are able to cruise with me.
Another Reason Why I Love You: Group Thera-play.
My DM and fellow players have probably helped me through more rough patches than I know of- and I bet that my friends would say the same thing. One obvious example of D&D as a form of comfort and therapy comes from it necessitating interaction with members of your party on a regular basis (although Aaron has done a truly wonderful job in cultivating an environment where each of us never feels pressured to turn up if we have other plans or simply feel too mentally drained). This was great for me beyond Covid, as the party graduated and some of my best friends moved hundreds of miles away from each other.
One thing that hit me particularly hard around that time was my move to a city that seemingly prides itself on anonymity ('how lovely to go out and not worry about seeing anyone you know!'). I can appreciate such a frame of mind, but for me most days I felt (and sometimes still do feel) so adrift, a little lonely and cut off from everyone else around me in a space where you can't look people in the eye without being perceived as odd. But though I felt like I was failing in so many aspects of my life (work, romance, life direction), I could always hook myself to the idea that on Wednesday evening I would be able to see my friends. Even if I was missing out on knowing them in the intimate, everyday fashion in which relationships are built at uni (seeing them in the kitchen, knowing what time they woke up, seeing the same outfit every week or so, all the good stuff), I would be able to at least get a small snapshot of their lives, know they were doing well, just exist alongside them for a few hours, asking 'what was your highlight of the week?' to varying reception. In some ways I think my overzealousness might have been too much in a lot of ways- the way I respond to chaos is by putting on a huge smile edging on mania, becoming maybe too eager to please, too loud, too intense. I think it was maybe not obvious that I was hanging on by a thread, instead possibly interpretable as my friend's old friend becoming 'London Charlotte'. A new version of me who was less sensitive and present, more boisterous, cosmopolitan, confident. Brash maybe- the kind of person I hate to think of myself as.
... On a completely irrelevant note can anyone wager a guess at my attachment style? If you search up 'anxious preoccupied' on Google I think you'll actually just be met with my Facebook profile picture...
Anyway, my point is I'm so very grateful to my friends/chosen family for putting up with me through those periods/now as well. But that's the thing about D&D, is the people who play alongside you are your team-mates, your community, there to support you in-game, but also through the conversations that happen before, after, in-between, sessions. Anyone who's even lightly dipped their toe into the realms of D&D forums, podcasts, or webseries will know that for many nerdy individuals, this game provides a space for acceptance. Despite its dubious roots in racism and misogyny, the community of players who engage with D&D has grown diverse, has grown to encapsulate all manner of imaginative storytellers, and for that reason has grown strong. Even though there obviously are still some dark troll dungeons where certain races, genders, people, would not be safe to tread, there are many parties, such as my own, that are glades of trust for all those who enter. And it is within this careful, carefree, cozy wooded space, that you are free to play as someone other than yourself. Or maybe that half-elf rogue really is you after all...
A Third Reason Why I Love You: Re-skinning and alternative living
Up until now, I've described Dungeons and Dragons as an external, escapist form of healing, but I could not write a love-letter to this particular tabletop game without mentioning the opportunities it affords a player to explore reality and heal themselves. You may think of this as a bold claim at first, given that at heart D&D is a game where you play a massively-overpowered hero with horns or wings or elven blood who is basically better than all the non-playable characters in every single way.
Well, yes, you'd be right in some ways. I can't argue that unleashing a fireball, or taking down an axe-wielding thug with one fell swoop of a fist doesn't feel deftly satisfying. But for me, and I'd wager a decent proportion of this game's player base, D&D - the safe-space facilitated by telling a collaborative story with friends - is increasingly becoming a way for individuals to explore themselves through roleplay. Through exploring what it means to embody a character different to yours, but wholly created and existent for as long as you play, able to interact with different versions of your friends, figuring out where our personalities end, and fiction begins.
Is this a tad garbled perhaps? A little confused or messed-up? Welcome to my brain (tbh I'm surprised it's taken you this long to figure out my logical messiness). Perhaps examples will help to illustrate me point:
In my history of engaging with D&D as a 'Player' (as opposed to running my own game as Dungeon Master), I have played three characters. And during the planning stages of this post, I realised how much these characters reflected my own life, the struggles I was going through, and how they served as vehicles through which I funneled my present problems. And now, ladies, gents, and other friends, let me introduce you to:
Sapphara, the blue dragonborn bard who grew from meme to anti-hero over a three-year game. Sapphara began as a bit of a joke- 'oh, I can be a dragon? Right, so it's gonna be tiny and blue and fight with a ukelele and be the theatre kid of my dreams!'.
...
That first session ended with me being stabbed, then revived, by one of my friend's rogue characters, understandably annoyed by this tiny bolshy blue thing. As the campaign progressed, my DM was faced with the progressively difficult task of making my character plot-viable in a horrifically serious realm. Six months in, he revealed to us that my character was the product of a torturous experiment, which had left Sapphara permanently stunted in their childhood body, incapable of growth into physical maturity. It was upon being given this plot thread that I was allowed to play with a *character*, forced to think upon how they would react to in-world characters and events with a mindset completely different from my own. I've never seen myself as an angry person, and can only pinpoint maybe one or two times in the past few years that the emotion has reared its red-hot head. But through Sapphara, I could trial both unfamiliar emotions, and those I knew like the back of my hand, such as loneliness, the new-adult angst of feeling trapped between childhood and adulthood, the feeling that no-one will ever understand the pain you feel every day. Yes, yes- this was very lame in a way, and I was definitely in no way alone feeling this way. It just felt like I was sometimes, especially during lockdown. But despite Sapphara's flaws, they were also free-spirited, light, carefree, and completely without my characteristic sky-high worry levels. They acted with their tiny blue gut, whilst I overthink, they were sensitive, common-sensical, ruthlessly assertive in a way I never dreamed of before learning how to set boundaries (something I'm still working on to this day, but I promise I am working on it).
Ruthlessness is actually something that most of my characters have in common. Though it's not very on-brand for my mushroom-frog-princess self, I have always kind of respected individuals who are genuinely practical in their decision-making. It's something I definitely lack, the one part of myself that does not adhere to my over-achieving Capricorn stereotype. That's the wonderful thing about the type of character exploration offered by Dungeons and Dragons though- you're allowed to imagine yourself into the shoes of another, cultivating empathy and testing out new emotions. Who would have thought that my ultimate power fantasy would simply involve the healthy assertion of boundaries?
This self-reflection/expression continued beyond Sapphara, who ultimately ended up destroying their mortal body so they could ascend to the Nine Hells to be with their Devil boyfriend (uwu)- an ending that saddened my other players, but given my perception of death as one not to be feared in a fantasy where the afterlife is certain, is one I feel suited Sapphara. In the mortal plain, they were trapped in a body they'd outgrown, without family or, following an argument with other party members, friends who needed them for survival, and so the afterlife was naught but the next great adventure for my little dragon. My second campaign character, the elderly Blodeuwedd, on a mission to emancipate her children after failing to protect them during a raid, unsurprisingly came about at a time after the second Covid lockdown, when I felt similarly responsible for my own family following a time of relational turmoil. Even the effervescent fish spirit Liliwen, annoying in her brazened obliviousness to the world around her, who started out as a joke whilst Blod was trapped in another plain, quickly reflected my reality as I moved to London, got louder to match the city and morphed into a version of myself who was maybe a bad friend...
I think a lot of people do this avatar theory, self-expression through D&D type-thing, something I've realised just from talking to my fellow players and reading Reddit posts. These people tend to be the ones who self-express through videogames too (I never played The Sims growing up, but do probably think I would have been the type of child to spend hours and hours creating my perfect replica in-game). But the equally beautiful thing about D&D is that if you're not a role-player, you don't have to be. You can just be you, but a wizard, or a dragon, or just slightly better at using a bow and arrow, and your friends will help you become even stronger. Exploring collaborative storytelling, acting with friends, even the occasional spreadsheet, this game has it all.
And there's no other real way to finish this very long ode of a blog post without just saying thank you. Thank you to this game, which has saved my mental health, my relationships, and maybe even my life during some particularly chaotic 2021 moments. Thank you to my DM, thank you to the friends who play with me, and play for me when I run my own games, and thank you, dear reader (who I guess already plays this game if you're reading this, for helping to create the community of Dungeons and Dragons. Thank you for shaping it into a space where people feel safe to escape, to experiment, to relax, to grow stronger, and above all to play.
Roll for my love? You definitely, most certainly crit.
My In-Game Friends- a madcap band of lovable fools. And I wouldn't have them any other way.
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