Dungeons and Dragons and why it might be what we are all waiting for

When I was a guide, the scouts I knew spent whole Saturdays locked in one of their dad’s garages playing Dungeons and Dragons. No girls wanted to or dared enter. I imagined it was fetid and sweaty and that maybe they dressed up for role play.

I didn’t think of it again until the pandemic when a close friend has been playing it weekly with her daughters, her partner and her ex-husband; amicably and for hours.

Suddenly I was interested. Girls? D and D? And they didn’t seem to be dresssing up!

So I asked about it and what I heard made me really envious. I wanted to play so luckily Santa brought us a starter pack, but both of my kids refuse to play. And we don’t have a Dungeon master (or was it Dragon master?), the person who narrates and constructs the story of the game.

So I asked Iain to talk to me about it on the podcast which you can listen to here and below;

What I found was that D and D is an amazing way with experimenting with the bits of you which don’t normally see the light of day. So, for example, I could create a character who is an extrovert, attention-seeker to see how that feels, or I could let my shadow have a play by creating a character who is jealous and greedy and seeing the consequences of that.

Iain, as you will hear, is clearly a really skillful story constructor and I look forward to at some point playing D and D with him, but in the meantime, I think it really is the most amazing tool for encouraging imagination and experimentation which is more than just a game.

So, in fact, not just for geeks and boys after all.

Here are some links which Iain recommended:

The Critical Role:

Critical Role: https://critrole.com

https://springhole.net/writing/general-roleplaying.htm

https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/best-games/best-tabletop-roleplaying-games