Seven Men and Me

In the dim light of the old living room, seven men (and I, the only woman) huddle around a coffee table, each in a mismatching chair: Two sofas made of an ugly fading flower-printed fabric—the kind you’d find abandoned on the side of a road—two lazy boy recliners that are a roulette if they’ll fall backwards when you sit down, a rolling office chair, and finally the newest addition to the living room, the enormous overstuffed bean-bag. A man at the head of the table sits behind the cardboard divider adorned with a fearsome red dragon in mid-flight. He slides forward on his recliner as he describes a scene. Looking around the circle and meeting everyone's eyes in turn, he lifts his hands to gesture while speaking.

“Ahead you see two Duergar,” dark dwarves, “standing on either side of the gate. Next to them a fire giant—”

“I cast suggestion on the giant,” our bard, Fish, cuts him off. The Dungeon Master (DM) gives him a look that says, ‘are you really going to try that?’ After a moment of deliberation, he lifts his hands in a begrudging shrug and picks up his twenty-sided die.

“Okay then, what do you tell him?”

“Destroy the tower, rescue the half-elf, and run off into the Underdark,” Fish said, numbering off the tasks with his fingers. “DC (difficulty class) of sixteen.” I could tell he’d been planning this action ever since the DM first mentioned the fire giant.

The DM rolls the die behind the screen and flattens his lips before looking back up at the party huddled around the table. Everyone is sitting on the edges of their seats waiting for an answer. “The fire giant draws his great sword and lifts it over his head before bringing it down onto the wall.” He acts out the giant as he describes what it’s doing. The entire party throws their arms in the air and cheers. Fish’s suggestion had worked! “The wall crumbles under his blade and he brings it down once more, breaking a large section off of the wall. The runs off towards the tower where Alva (our half-elf ranger) is being held.”

My first experience with Dungeons and Dragons was walking to a stranger’s house to meet an acquaintance’s roommate. I’d only met Oliver for five minutes earlier in the day at my brothers’ apartment when he had offhandedly mentioned his Dungeons and Dragons group needed a cleric, a role that acts mainly as a healer. He was a tall man with tan skin and black hair with a tattoo poking out of his left sleeve. He was a very macho-looking man, and definitely someone I’d never expect to be interested in ‘nerdy stuff.’ In a rare moment of extroversion, I said I’d love to try out the game and offered to fill the role of the character he was looking for. He agreed and we exchanged numbers. He invited me over later that night to lay the groundwork for the campaign we would be playing. I’d sent my brother a quick text inquiring about Oliver’s character, and after my twin had vouched for him, I walked the few blocks in the dark and knocked on the door of a house. I would have thought the house was abandoned if it wasn’t for the several cars parked in the driveway. A tall, rounded man with a scraggly beard and glasses opened the door, and a few seconds later Oliver appeared over his shoulder. The stranger introduced himself as John, and together he and Oliver helped me make my character and the sheet that explained her abilities.

We’d already agreed on what class I’d be playing (the cleric). Class turned out to mean the main abilities of the character and would be the deciding factor on how you personally would play the game. John had given me the player’s handbook and showed me each of the races and classes, but I didn’t really know what each of them meant. He recommended the race of my character to be a gnome. I asked him why.

“I’ve wanted to try this character in my campaign,” he’d explained. “It seems like a funny combination.” I accepted his suggestion. He was going to be the Dungeon Master, so he must know what he’s talking about.

The final step was to roll my character’s stats. John handed me four six-sided dice and I shook them in my hands before dropping them back onto the table. He added the numbers together faster than I could read them all.

“Eighteen,” John said, and Oliver wrote the number down.

“Is that good?” I asked.

“Yeah it’s good!” John said, sounding surprised. He handed me back the dice and told me to roll again. I did this a five more times; each time the two guys seemed more and more impressed. Apparently I was a naturally good roller. I ended up with an eighteen, three sixteens, a twelve and a nine. I was told these were good stats. The two of them helped me pick which number to assign to each skill. The higher the number, the better my character would be at that skill. All the skills a character has is grouped into six attributes: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Each attribute subdivides into more specific skills, like dexterity branches out into acrobatics, stealth, and slight-of-hand. Clerics rely on wisdom to use their divine abilities, so that’s where I put my 18. The rest weren’t as important for my class, so I divide them out where I thought they’d fit best. The next time we would meet we would be playing the campaign John organized and wrote.

When I mentioned to my mother that I was going to try out Dungeons and Dragons, she thought I was joking. I was visiting my parent’s house for the weekend between my busy life as a college student, and my other siblings, parents and I were all sitting in the living room catching up.

“No way, that’s a freaking waste of time. D&D is a game uber nerds play, that is not a game that I want you focusing on. The people who are playing it are not the people I want you with.” Her voice sounded like a whip, sharp with no room for negotiation.

What caught me off guard is that it wasn’t the necessarily the game she was against, it was the people I would be spending a few hours with every week. The people I was playing D&D with didn’t seem that strange, they all seemed to be the same mild nerd-level as I was, not ‘uber-nerds.’

“I don’t mind you trying it,” my dad added. “But I don’t like the company you keep while playing it.” I hadn’t told them about who I was playing it with, where we would meet every week, nor anything about that. I had only told them I was going to try the game and that I was excited about it. Why were they already against it, they didn’t even know the details?

The next time we meet up we I had gathered every scrap of information I could about the character I had made. I didn’t have a Players Handbook of my own, so I printed out PDF’s I found online of my character’s class and race, along with all the healing spells that came with my cleric abilities. I gathered them all onto a clipboard and stuck a pencil on top before trekking the few blocks over to Oliver and John’s house. This is when the real action would start, and I’d finally know why my parents were so against it (my first act of outright rebellion!).

The first session started with John, our Dungeon Master, describing where our characters were and the reason we were all together. He then told us to explain who our characters are and turned to me sitting just to the right of him.

“Kenzie, describe your character,” the DM told me. Suddenly everything I’d hoarded onto my clipboard left my mind as all eyes turned to stare expectantly at me. My heart struggled to beat as I fought off the fight-or-flight instinct that always came with attention.

“Um… Can I go last? So I can see how to do it?”

“Uh, sure. Oliver, you go,” the DM said, now turning to his left where Oliver sat. Oliver described the appearance of his goliath barbarian Drog with his best rendition of an Australian accent. Next Ryan told us about Fish, the ever-charismatic elven bard, in the poshest British voice he could manage. Then we met Sephring the human fighter, Alva the half-elven ranger, Clout the monk, and Raven the necromancer. Now it was my turn.

“Okay, um… I’m Darian. I’m a cleric of the deity Habbakuk. I’m three feet tall,” that was the standard gnome height; I am not really three feet tall. “I have a shield with a bluebird on it, the symbol of Habakkuk. What else?” I had nothing like this prepared in my clipboard, so I was lost for what to do. The DM, thankfully sensing my awkwardness, moved onto his prepared storyline.

“That’s good enough. The castle walls are a dark stone, standing fifty feet high. Parapets line the top every few feet, and you can see two guards walking back and forth.”

“Are there any more?” Our half-elven ranger Alva asks.

“Roll for perception,” The Dungeon Master says, almost as if it were an instinctual reaction to the question.

The rest of the group slides forward in an unconscious mimic of the Dungeon Master and the circle closes in tight to watch Alva’s twenty-sided dice bounce across the tabletop. A sixteen. Alva added his ability modifier to the roll—a number that represents his characters skill— increasing the score to an eighteen. A perfect roll would be a twenty, so an eighteen is very good. That meant Alva most likely saw what he was looking for.

“There doesn’t seem to be any other guards nearby,” our DM says. Now was our chance to sneak into the castle to open the gate—or just break it down like Fish would soon do.

“In an RPG [Role-Playing Game], a group of players each assumes a role of an individual in a fictional world and, through a combination of decision making and dice rolls, they construct a shared story” (Hergenrader 6). The “Player’s Handbook,” along with hundreds of different websites and YouTube videos based off of it, explain the basic components that go into the shared story. The manuals give dungeon masters building blocks from which to construct the world the game takes place in. The dice add variable to the story and it more a game of chance that makes every decision a gamble—much like the real world.

In my quest to find out how good D&D players played, I came across Critical Role, a group of voice actors that had a campaign together. The DM John had mentioned it in passing, and when I looked more into the group, I found it had hundreds of multiple-hour long sessions and had innumerable followers. So I figured it must be of a good quality if so many people were dedicated to following the story. I started listening to the podcast while I walked the fifteen minutes to and from school as a study guide to improve my own game play.

The players in Critical Role were much better at staying in-character than my group was, but I figured that was okay because we weren’t as serious about the gameplay as the professional group was. Our group just got together once a week to play out a storyline, not to record ourselves for others to listen to. We mostly enjoyed the social aspect of it.

One Saturday while walking to my fifth session of Dungeons and Dragons, clipboard stuffed in my satchel-like purse and an excited spring in my step, my thoughts about what was going to happen next in the session were cut off by my phone ringing. It was my mom. Friggin’ shoot. I answered the phone otherwise she’d call me again later while I was at D&D.

“Hello,” I said, trying my best to sound casual.

“What are you up to today?” My mom asked. A common question from her, but not one I wanted to be answering at the moment.

“Um…” My mind started a sprint for a plausible lie, but I’d never been good at lying.

“You’re not going to Dungeons and Dragons, are you? I thought your father told you not to.” She’d guessed it by my hesitation alone. In my mind’s eye, I could see her disapproving glare that matched the sharp edge to her voice. I’d gotten away scot-free my first few time playing, but now my decision was catching up with me.

“Mom, it’s just a few hours, why can’t I play it?” I asked. Now I was standing outside the DM’s home in a very Hallmark Movie-esque kind of way, torn between ‘Honoring my father and mother’ like I’d been taught since birth and wanting to try out something I found myself enjoying. It wasn’t anything bad, just a group of friends talking for a few hours, so why was she so against it?

This last summer while I’d been staying at my parent’s house for the summer between semesters at college, I cleaned, sorted, and organized their basement. I’d done it while looking for a summer job so I wouldn’t feel like I was taking advantage of their kindness. It had taken an entire month to sort through my mom’s stash of hoarded ‘gifts’, holiday decorations, keepsakes, craft supplies and food storage. While deep cleaning the game self, I’d discovered a first edition Dungeons and Dragons box set halfway-smashed and haphazardly shoved underneath.

Inside the box were somewhat flattened figurines, a Dungeon Master’s manual with a giant nearly nude red devil on the cover holding an equally almost nude woman, and character sheets written in large, meticulous lettering. The three character-sheets belonged to one of my aunts, a stranger, and an unlabeled one.

I spotted Alva across campus walking towards me, and I waved at him as we approached one another. I’d been playing with them a few months now, and I felt a lot more comfortable talking with them as they were no longer strangers.

“Hi Kenzie,” he said, and I echoed the greeting back to him.

“So are we meeting for D&D tomorrow?”

“I can’t, I’m out of town,” I said as apologetically as I could. I felt bad missing out, both because I didn’t want to miss and I couldn’t contribute to our team while away. But I had also wanted to meet my twin girlfriend who lived out of town.

“Oh, well we can’t meet then,” he said with his characteristic semi-smile.

“Why not?” I asked. They’d done it several times with other players, so why couldn’t they meet without me?

“We’d all die. You carry us, or we’d all be dead otherwise.” It sounded like a cheesy movie one-liner, but it came right out of his mouth. And apparently my obsessive tracking of their character’s health points had paid off. By now we’d passed each other and were both walking somewhat backwards.

“Oh, well… I’ll see you later then,” I waved and continued on towards my next class, and he did the same. I wouldn’t realize how true his statement was until our next session.

The six of us were on an airship flying home when Drog spotted two wyverns in the distance. As they gained on us, we realized they were each carrying a hobgoblin rider. We had just a few seconds to prepare for a fight, and we decided to tie an immovable rod (A magic pole that, if you click the button on its side, it’ll magically stay in place and hold up to 3000 pounds) to Drog. That way when Fish cast the flight spell on him, if he fell, he could catch himself and we’d come back for him later. That was the plan, at least.

When the wyverns caught up to us, our two archers, Alva and Sephring, started firing arrows at them, but that wouldn’t be enough to take them down before they broke our airship. The wyverns each carried a hobgoblin—one was a wizard and the other a normal fighter. As the fight progressed Fish was knocked out with wyvern fire, Sephring was dueling the hobgoblin-fighter with his possessed sword, and I was reviving Raven, who was passed out with an arrow in his chest. It was Alva’s turn, and he had the brilliant idea to try and tie up the wyvern without a rider.

“I take the rope, run at the wyvern, and leap,” Alva said. “And tie myself onto his back.”

“And tie yourself onto the rope somehow?” The DM asked.

“No, I’m just jumping. I’m going to tie myself to the wyvern,” Alva repeats again. A murmur of oh-no’s and pleas for him to tie himself to the airship filled the background of Alva’s turn.

“Okay, so you jump up on the back of the wyvern? Um… I’m going to need you to roll an athletics check against its athletics to see if you can hang on,” The DM instructs. Alva’s dice bounces across the tabletop and I can see his determined expression fall.

“Nat(ural). one,” Alva said, sounding much like a child that had accidentally broken something. He was going to fall to his death, and everyone knew it.

“Alva starts falling,” the DM said simply. “He runs out and pulls out a rope and jumps off the boat to grab the wyvern, and he does not grab the wyvern.” John’s description was lacking its usual gusto, and I could tell he had not planned anything remotely close to this. Now it was my turn, the last in the lineup, meaning that I was the only one able to act in time to save Alva. A few sessions ago I had welded an immovable rod into my cleric’s shield, so if I somehow got to him and stopped us before we hit the ground, we’d had a chance at not dying.

“Did I notice him fall off the boat?” I asked, and the DM nodded his confirmation. “Okay, I jump off the boat after him.”

“What?” Sephring asked in shock. “It’s 500 feet! 500 feet kills you!”

“I know, but I have a chance and that’s what my character would do.” Because we jumped at during the same round, we were falling at the same time according to the list order. As the party fought off the two wyverns above, Alva and I plummeted towards the ground. 300 feet every round which meant 300 feet every six seconds and 12 seconds before we’re both dead.

Alva and I grabbed onto each and I positioned my ‘immovable shield’ beneath us and activated its magic. We both slammed into the shield for 300 feet worth of fall-damage, which meant 1 six-sided dice worth of damage every ten feet. 30 dice worth of damage. We still might die.

The Dungeon Master took thirty six-sided dice into his hand (yes he really did have that many) and shook them all. I could hear the rattle of plastic bouncing off plastic, taunting me as the DM literally had Alva and my life in his hands, and dropped them onto the table. He began adding the dice together, and each additional dice closed into my health point total. If the topped more than sixty-one—my cleric's total point amount—I would pass out. If it doubled it, I would instantly die.

Next time I called home, I asked my dad why he didn’t want me to play Dungeons and Dragons. The question had been weighing on my mind since my fifth time playing.

“I played it when I was young,” my dad said. “I had the special dice and the little character pieces like the monopoly pieces. I played it in seventh, eight, and ninth grade with all the uber nerds because I fit into that category.”

“You played dungeons and dragons?” I asked in disbelief. He had to be joking. He was the anti-game stickler in my family, always telling us to be profitable with our time and to never waste a moment.

“I played it in junior high school. Then I grew out of it. To play it in college is like playing hopscotch and foursquare. It’s a little odd for a college student to be playing it. It’s a fantastic fantasy game, but it’s for the people that struggle with reality. They prefer fantasy life rather than real life.”

My entire dungeons and dragons group seemed completely normal to me. They were college students like me. They all reminded me of my very normal brothers in one way or another. I was in college, on the Dean’s list even, and had a job on campus in the Writing Center. I lived my life normally… right?