Send in the Barbarian

Dungeons & Dragons made me a nerd in high school. Now, everybody wants me to teach them how to play

Dungeons & Dragons made me a nerd in high school. Now, everybody wants me to teach them how to play

L from behind the screen that hides my story notes and dice, I wait for a decision. The group at the table — made up of fathers my own age and their middleschool-aged kids — huddles together to discuss strategy. I’ve just described what their characters see in the cavernous room around the bend in the cave: goblins, a dark wizard, and an ogre. We are here to run through the basics of playing Dungeons & Dragons. I’m their dungeon master.

The game itself is an exercise in shared storytelling. The dungeon master, or DM, provides the background, world, lore, and scene at hand. The players take turns declaring what actions they want their characters to take. Once the action is complete, the DM describes the outcome. Sometimes, the story turns out dramatic and intense; other times, it’s hilarious and low-key. This short adventure, played over three Sunday afternoon sessions, is coming to its climactic end. The object of the players’ quest lies on a goblin-surrounded altar: a ruby that can summon terrible powers. Their task is to rescue it from the foul clutches of the wizard so further evil might not be summoned into our imaginary world.

I describe the battle tactics of the bad guys, and the players tell me what their characters are doing. We all roll dice to see if each action is a success or failure. The fathers are playing hal ings (similar to hobbits) and dwarves, and the kids are playing a hulking barbarian, a sly elven rogue, and a human martial-artist monk. Each player’s opinions and ideas are heard equally at the table. Do they rush in, swords and spells ashing, or do they sneak past, hoping to avoid detection?

The consensus this time is the same as the last: send the barbarian in rst.

D garnered its peak publicity in the 1980s, when evangelical groups around the world were convinced that it was a gateway drug for occultism and demon worship. Of course, that was all nonsense. The stories told in D&D can be dark or light, depending on the will of the group. One of the most popular tabletop role-playing games in history, D&D has been enjoying a worldwide renaissance — thanks, in no small part, to fantasy franchises such as Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones. Stars such as Vin Diesel and Stephen Colbert play the game; musicians, including Owen Pallett, have written albums inspired by it; and it features on popular TV shows, including Community, The Big Bang Theory, and Stranger Things. Youtube is chockablock with live streams of semi-famous folk broadcasting their campaigns.

I started playing D&D when I was ten. My family had moved from rural Ontario to Brampton, and things were not going well. I was bullied constantly. In 1981, as I remember it, you didn’t call the cops or notify the school about bullying; you either solved it yourself, by ghting back, or your dad went over to your bully’s house and had words with his dad. These things weren’t working for me: too many bullies to deal with and a dad who put in long hours at work. So I mostly developed my shortdistance sprinting skills.

Then, one day, my father did solve things: he came back from a golf trip carrying a red box containing rules and dice and said, “This looks like the sort of thing you’d like.” He had no idea. Suddenly, I was a seven-foot warrior who could punch the face o a troll. I was a powerful mage who could harness ancient powers to consume my enemies with re. I was a stealthy rogue who could blend e ortlessly into the shadows and sneak attack when the moment was just right. I ventured fearlessly into dark forests and forbidden dungeons to battle goblins, orcs, ogres, and dragons. And I never had to leave my room.

I sidled up to the other nerds at school and told them about the game. We formed a group and stayed in at lunch. I ran the sessions and they played the characters. I began creating a massive world with maps, political systems, polytheistic religions, races, and supernatural powers.

The maps themselves were so detailed that they went from continent down to kingdom down to city down to oor plan of a building. I lled notebooks with lists of gods and royalty and mythological history. It was a fantasy world I worked on for nearly ten years as my friends and I shielded ourselves from reality. Once powerless, I was suddenly powerful.

Fantasy became less interesting in my late teens when my fantasies changed. I discovered girls. Also: beer, parties, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. I went to, and dropped out of, theatre school. I got into poetry and travelled the world. I lived an interesting life without dice, keeping my fond memories of D&D hidden from my artsy new friends. There was a stain about the game, a sense that a “frivolous” past might make people take me less seriously.

A few years ago, I turned forty-three. I was well past cool by any stretch of the imagination. My wife and I had a ridiculous spread of four children between us, who ranged in age from six to sixteen. Try nding a Friday night movie everyone can agree on. So one evening, I said, “What about a game?”

I unboxed my archives of maps and notes, all of them carefully annotated in a fourteen-year- old’s attempt at calligraphic hand. Drawings, stories, rules, maps; it was all there, waiting. I was back. And to my surprise, everyone loved it. My wife, a former track star, was now an elven assassin. Everyone looked directly at each other over the table, eyes bright, describing their next move in detail, moving their miniature warriors around the grid map, engaging with the story, building powerful avatars of good. No phones, no screens, no video games, no earbuds — just a family talking and laughing for hours.

We kept playing like this until the teens got more teenish and the little ones became bigger ones, and soon they all started playing D&D in groups with their own friends, and our family game took a back seat to a variety of social obligations. I felt a little abandoned. I broke my decades-old rule about not talking nerd in public and started to tell friends about the game.

I discovered three kinds of people in my circle of friends: those who had never played but had always been intrigued, those who had never stopped playing, and those who had stopped but were totally ready to get back in. These last ones were artists, musicians, HR specialists, writers, lmmakers, and marketing managers. They were people who had taken years away from the game to build new stories and worlds, ironically based on skills learned in the game — storytelling, con ict resolution and co-operation, problem solving, and dramatic expression. Before long, we’d started our own game. We met weekly at a dining table, drank beer instead of Coke, and have been playing ever since.

Recently, a friend tagged me in a Facebook post. She’d seen a dad she knows asking for guidance on how to play D&D. He wanted to play with his son, and he was looking for someone to show him the ropes. Other dads also expressed interest. I obliged — and they have come each week, their kids sometimes bringing friends.

While my dad introduced me to a pastime that would consume my teenage years and drive my hyper-christian mother apoplectic, he certainly didn’t play with me. He didn’t understand the game or care about it. But the dads I’m coaching have a di erent framework, a di erent set of fond memories. And they’re eager to pass them on.

A zeitgeist was afoot. We nerds, inheritors of the earth, had come out of hiding.

I that sending the barbarian in irst is a winning strategy. The hero of the game is a slender, quiet, twelve-year- old boy named Corbin in real life and Grog (a.k.a. “Muscles”) for three hours on a Sunday afternoon. He ran in and distracted the ogre while his teammates went for the ruby. Tomorrow, he heads back to school. But for today, he’s a heavily muscled barbarian with a massive sword and the adulation of his friends as he rolls a twenty to strike the ogre down.

We wrap up the story to this point and count the mysteries left to solve. Where was this ruby from? What powers does it possess? What was the wizard trying to do with it? All fodder for future games. While D&D games can go on for years, this is the end of the road for my introductory “course.” I’m handing the reins over to one of the new dads to continue. I hope they keep me up to date on what’s happening. I want to nd out how the story ends.

Or how it keeps going.