My D&D Origins
Dungeons & Dragons and TTRPGs are such a big part of my life that I often wonder, "why did it take me 31 years to discover this wonderful game?". The truth is, I had found it around 16 or so years ago.
I first fell in love with fantasy stories when I was a small child watching "Return of the Jedi" on a recorded VHS. Then really fell into epic fantasy when I read the Redwall novels by Brian Jacques when I was seven years old. The Redwall Novels were stories about anthropomorphic British wildlife characters (mice, badgers, ferrets, rabbits etc.) set in a classical European fantasy world. So started a love affair with swords and sorcery. In 2001, my father informed me that a film adaptation of his favourite fantasy book was to be released. The novels being a bit advanced for me, I read the prequel and excitedly went to the cinema to see "The Fellowship of the Ring". I won't ramble on about how much this movie changed my life, but it did. I was into everything and anything, fantasy and nerdy, from then on.
At 14 or so, I was browsing through my local toy shop. They stocked Warhammer and Magic the Gathering, and one day, a set of rule books caught my eye. The core books for 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. I was aware of the game mainly because I had VHS copies of the 80s cartoon of the same name that I had almost worn out. I picked the book up, thumbed through the fantastic art, and thought, "This is me all over!". I bought the box labelled “starter set” next to the books and headed home to rope two of my friends into playing.
I played Dungeon master and read through the book with the starter set. I remember it was a collection of small encounters with no story. Just plop them at the dungeon entrance and go! I approached it like a board game, giving my two friends two characters to run each. We got through the first encounter involving goblins. The next saw the players ambushed by orcs. In one round, the orcs obliterated the PCs. Was that it? What do we do now? It was anticlimactic. I will add that I had no easy access to the internet in 2003. I had no idea how a game of D&D was supposed to look. I had no Reddit or YouTube to turn to back then. With that lacklustre experience. We shoved the character sheets back into the box and never picked them up again. I think my friend still has the starter box I left there all those years ago.
After that, I only ever encountered the hobby being parodied on TV shows and movies I enjoyed, like FUTURAMA. One day, Robyn (we were just engaged) came home from a new job and told me she had been invited to play D&D with some of her new colleagues. She played through part of a campaign and told me tales of the party’s exploits. This was her first experience of the game, but that still didn’t entice me into giving it another shot. I later found out it was 4th edition D&D she had played.
In 2018 my focus was on attending the Con scene and making Cosplay. Cosplay friends had brought up conversations a few times about their D&D games and the Cosplays of their characters. Also, being around the Tabletop stalls at conventions piqued my interest. While searching through YouTube for content to listen to while crafting costumes, I came across a now-viral D&D actual play stream. It was very entertaining, and it started to dawn on me that I recognised some of the players from their work as voice actors. By now, you must know the stream, I mean. I watched many hours of it (still then in its first season) until I was desperate to play myself.
A Cosplay friend told us she had been playing for years and would DM for us. After overcoming the hurdle of getting five adults with commitments to organise a play schedule, I finally got to sit down and play Dungeons & Dragons again at 31. I was prepared with my level 1 human wizard. Even though all of us players had never played 5th edition, I had pretty much learned how to play from watching streamed games. I enjoyed my first game. The game wasn’t perfect, and there were some issues in the campaign that I will talk about in a future blog post. I didn’t suffer from the so-called “Mercer effect”, which is another topic I want to write about. Overall, though, I was in love with the hobby. The ruleset, the world-building, the miniatures, but above all, was the Roleplaying! I was hooked.
I now have so many stories involving D&D that have changed me as a human being. This is just how it began. I hope the end never comes.
Oliver