Love, Hate & DnD

As I have stated in many of my posts, I recently came back to DnD after a 20 year sabbatical. I’ve jumped in with both feet, playing twice a week, starting Dump Stat with Stephen, putting out our first adventure, Druid in the Sewers, and now doing our bi-weekly podcast. It’s alot of work and I am happy that I am doing it. But I still feel that I’m holding something back, and that’s the difference between having a good time and enjoying myself to the fullest. As I’ve processed why I feel this way, I realized I quit the game because I was tired, and still have some fear about starting back up. Let me explain why.

I started playing back in the early 80’s. I wasn’t a fat, shy kid that hid in his basement and had no friends. I was a normal kid, with my group of nerdy friends. I was a pretty short,(until my senior year in high school, where I grew 5 inches over the summer) but I had a big mouth with no filter. I played some sports, and while I was not the best athlete out there, I also wasn’t the worst. But I was a nerd through and through, and this made life difficult at times.

Things were way different back then. Bullying was not a term that was thrown around when people were physically assaulted or insulted over the social media (mainly because social media consisted of passing notes in class). It was a very “boys will be boys” and “girls should listen and not speak” time in history. Being who I was, I made myself a target for those bigger and stronger than myself. In hindsight, I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble by just keeping my mouth shut, but it just wasn’t who I was. Every day was Lord of the Flies, and I was just trying to survive. I got into a good amount of fights, lost way more than I won, and never learned my lesson. Life was not like the 80’s John Hughes movies, where the loveable nerd was victorious in the end and got the girl.

DnD was my escape, but it was also a curse. I loved getting together with my friends on a Friday night and playing until 2am, only to get up late and start playing again. These were my best friends, and we bonded over our late night games. We immersed ourselves in our characters and I spent countless hours drawing maps and making adventures for my friends. I looked forward to those long sessions, seeing how my friends reacted to the chest that was actually a mimic, and doing it all over again the next weekend. But god forbid that people found out we played DnD. It made us targets. The mocking was relentless and, being the loudmouth that I was, often led to me getting my ass kicked.

So by the time I got to college I was tired. Tired of having to defend myself, tired of having to play in the shadows, and tired of the stigma that came along with playing the game. I played with a group of people my first semester and then just floated away from the game. I was tired of being a nerd, and college seemed like the perfect place to reinvent myself, as it is for many people. So I left the DnD community behind, and became a person that wanted nothing to do with the game.

Time passes. I’m now in my late 40’s and mostly comfortable in my own skin and being a nerd at heart. I started think about DnD a few years ago and how much fun it was. I remembered with fondness the friends I played with and how I enjoyed the escape from the daily grind. But I didn’t play. Along with the memories of how much fun it was came with memories of all the crap I dealt with because of it. As much as the world has changed in the past 30 years, I didn’t know if it had changed that much. So I held back, not sure if it was worth it.

Then I went to GenCon with my kids.

And it was amazing.

It was then that I realized the game had moved out of the shadows and into mainstream culture. There were 50,000 of my people all gathered in one place and having a great time. My daughter asked why everyone was so nice there. I realized that everyone (for the most part) was nice. People came to have fun, be goofy and play games with others who loved games as much as they did. It was almost like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. I thought to myself that things had really changed and it was time to get back into it. So I went to a couple of AL sessions, made some friends, and now play twice a week with an amazing group of people.

It’s that little part of me that can’t move beyond the past that is still nagging at me. I don’t really give a shit what other people think, and when I’m asked what I’m doing with my life, I feel more and more comfortable telling them that I’m doing a blog and writing adventures for DnD. At first I was vague about exactly what it was, saying I did some work in role playing games. But fuck it, what do I care at this point in my life. They want to judge me, that’s not my problem. So I’m getting more and more comfortable with my choices every day, but there’s still something nagging at me.

Maybe it’s because my kids are asking to play (and they have) and I’m worried that they might have to put up with the same crap I did. It could be that I see the world around me falling back into its old habits, with bullies trying to take back the control they lost to the nerd uprising that has taken place over the last 5-7 years. What I do know is that everyday I feel better and better about my choices, and I’m confident that soon I’ll be able let loose and enjoy myself without the little voice in my head reminding me about the past.