Dice & prejudice - a story about being wrong

Posted by Lana Meeren on January 18, 2020 in Critical Role, D&D, Lost Mines of Phandelver, Shadowrun, TTRPGs,

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So around September of 2018 my partner started listening to a new Podcast whenever there was time.

 At first, I didn’t mind it much, but the continuous laughter drew me in more and more. Long story short I’m now at a point where I wait for the next episode of “that show”, which turned out to be Critical Role, weekly.

I’ve also just set up the next doodle for our D&D group to meet. You could probably say that D&D successfully got its fangs in me by now.

The funny thing about that is that up until I started following Critical Role, I held D&D up as one of those stepstones I wasn’t going to reach. 

I might be a nerd but at least I wasn’t that much a nerd that I played D&D, right?

What a fool I’ve been.

But why? I kept telling myself this aforementioned mantra even when I started playing tabletop RPGs in 2016. 

I might be a nerd, I might play tabletop role-playing games now, but at least I didn't play D&D.

The first game I tried was Shadowrun, a slightly less known franchise for people who aren’t really into role-playing games. Created in the 80’s it shines a dystopian view upon modern times. Big companies took over, wielding the power of independent nations while still only focused on profit. Magic came back as well, causing the birth of elven and dwarven children or causing grown people to outright mutate into orcs and trolls.
It’s a pretty grim fantasy and the characters aren’t painted as heroes. Instead, they are shadowrunners, criminals who work for hire, messing with the plans of a company, extracting or kidnapping key researchers or whatever other crime imaginable in a high-tech and magic world. 

Much like D&D, there's multiple editions and tons of rule and lore books. The game is played by rolling a number of d6 corresponding to the value you have in the skill. Five and six count as successes and 1 as a failure. Like in D&D you have to reach a certain threshold to manage a task.

I was introduced to it by my partner who made friends with someone who wanted to run a game. It was fun for a while and I enjoyed my character, but the GMs style and mine were not really compatible and I stopped going sometime last year after a session I particularly disliked. We’re still friends, just with the acknowledgement that I’m looking for a different style of gaming.

So, if I could dive headfirst into the world of Shadowrun, how did I manage to carry so much prejudice against D&D still? 

There are multiple factors to it I think. For one I didn't know about Shadowrun beforehand, it was a completely new thing I was able to approach much more open-minded. Maybe it was even cool. The second factor is the way D&D tends to be portrayed in the media. It was the very typical picture that the media keeps up, five nerds sitting around a pretty much dictator like acting Dungeon Master in a stingy dark backroom of a game store. An all-male affair with lots of sneering and rules-lawyering and way too seriously taken fantasy world. I never had contact with the game apart from seeing it portrayed like that and let's be honest, it's not an appealing portrait. Especially not if you're a female gamer with a tenacious authority problem. 

And that's where I have to thank the cast of Critical Role as well as my partner. 

Critical Role for showing me that this perception of mine couldn't be more wrong, that D&D is about fun and creativity, about being with your friends and telling stories. Ashley, Marisha and Laura especially for showing me that this was a game that other women enjoyed wholeheartedly, making me more confident about wanting to try it myself.

My partner found a way to make the rules seem less like something I would have to force myself to abide but something useful. Take children playing, one is a bank robber, the other a police officer. It might come to the point where the police officer declares to have shot the robber in the leg but the other kid fiercely declines and an argument ensues. 

At this point in D&D, the rules are there to have an easy way to determine whos right. The police officer shooting has to hit a number equal or higher to the robber's armour class...and also hope that the rogue isn't a monk who's gonna catch the damn projectile.

I still struggle with some rules but I can see the reason in them. Well most of them anyway.

But the understanding and different perspective opened me up to see the game as something else, something new, that might even be really cool to do myself.

So, when I got more into Critical Role, I stumbled upon their intro for Campaign 2. I think that’s what finally did it in the end. I listened to that and wanted to play. Really just desperately wanted to play. I wanted to roll some dice and see what was going to happen. 

A bunch of my friends were also interested in D&D, but most of us had never had a chance to play. And one day one of them jokingly proposed that we should play together online, and the idea took off. 

Later that day I found myself making puppy eyes at my partner, asking them if they didn’t feel like being the DM for a group of batshit crazy people who mostly knew each other from chatting online. They had some experience running one-shots in Shadowrun which was more than the rest of us could say. 

Weirdly enough they agreed. And so, we started making characters and reading the rules.
The next days were a struggle for me deciding if I wanted to play a cleric or a druid. 

In the end, cleric won out. But, what race? I was super into Tieflings and Firbolgs, but I decided against both because I wanted to move away from what I had seen on CR, so I choose the next weirdest race I could find and ended up creating a Tabaxi life domain cleric.
My partner sifted through official adventures and finally picked up something to start us of with.

Now, nearly a year later we’re usually trying to play at least once a week, with the usual breaks as all of us have Uni and jobs going on, and we left the starting adventure, The Lost Mines of Phandelver, way behind. Our characters are Level 5 and we’re very entangled in the homebrew campaign and all the intrigues that our DM has dreamed up for us. We are trying to save the world and every now and then it feels like we do take a step in the right direction.
I’ve grown a lot closer to the friends I’m gaming with and it feels great to chat with them regularly. Also, I managed to develop a terrible dice addiction and am only saved from the same fate regarding minis by the fact that we play online and don’t use them anyway.

Dungeons and Dragons acts as a creative outlet for me as well. It takes the kind of dread I feel for being responsible for a whole story, instead I create parts of the big whole along with the others. There are secrets to discover that we prepare for each other, our characters know each other for a few weeks now and I can’t wait for the big dramatic reveals regarding the backstories we thought of.

All in all, it’s a more social experience and something I’m excited for days ahead. 

I had discovered D&D a while I was still playing Shadowrun and was already drawn in, I think discovering what it felt like to play that, with a DM I had a much more trusting relationship with tore me away from it in the end. I like the rules of D&D a lot more, they are simple yet very effective. They set a clear outline and leave tons of freedom for players and DMs ideas to unfold around. Levelling and skilling is much easier than it is in Shadowrun and the D20 based dice system ensures that you don’t have to be super skilled into a task to have a shot of achieving it.

And to be honest, the world is friendlier, at least generally speaking.
Of course, there is a multitude of settings to play in and D&D can easily turn into a cyberpunk game as well, but the general fantasy settings like the Sword Coast are easier on me. I feel like there’s enough dystopia already happening around me, I don’t need more in my free time.

My past-self, priding herself on not being a D&D nerd could not have been more wrong. But what she perceived as D&D is also not my reality of playing the game. 

It’s not that I don’t respect the world our DM keeps creating for us, despite my authority problem, its quite the opposite, I am very invested in it. But the rules are enforced by someone I trust not to abuse them and someone who accepts criticism and lets us as players question their decisions because it's all of our game in the end. It's very civil and argument free as well. 

We’re also almost all girls, so far away from the typical portrayal of the game that I don't even connect the two. And we're blessed with a DM that knows the rules but lets us be creative and gives a lot of space for the “rule of cool” to make our ideas count. 

And I think that’s the important thing I took from Critical Role, D&D is about having fun with your friends and it’s a lot of different things for different groups, but rarely is it what the popular media has made it look like for years now. It’s creative and free.

By now I’m at a point where I seriously recommend everyone to try the game with some people they like. 

Just around Christmas I introduced my parents to the game and ran them through the same adventure that started it all for me, The Lost Mines of Phandelver. Acting as the DM is another fun dimension of Dungeons and Dragons, although it tends to give me the increased dread feeling of being responsible for larger parts of the story again. That might get better with practice, I will probably find out. 

My mother built a Tiefling ranger and my dad, true to his entire gaming history, build a dwarven cleric. Although my mother was a bit reluctant at first, they both enjoy stories and they both latched onto telling their parts of the story very quickly. We had a great time, with the added benefit that there was no loosing involved, but collaboration, so we all had fun the entire time. It made this Christmas special. 

And that's in general something D&D has given me, a lot of special moments with people I love. I'm very glad to say that I've been wrong and that I'm a total nerd, one who even plays D&D.