Okay, I’m going to tell you something and it may be pretty shocking so I think you should probably sit down. Are you sitting? Comfy? Okay, here goes. I like some pretty nerdy shit. If I’m being honest, on a scale of one to Milhouse Van Houten, I’m a pretty low level nerd. I don’t own any dragon shirts (or wolves howling at the moon), I cannot tell you anything about Star Wars that you don’t already know, and while I have played World of Warcraft, I mostly just followed my husband and his friends around and tried not to die. All of this changed recently, though. I hit a new level of nerdery even I didn’t see coming. My friend Matt had asked me a while ago if I wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons with him, his brother, and their cousin. I originally declined because I’m a FOOL but also I was really busy at the time and I hate new things and meeting new people is something that I seem like I might be good at but fills me with a really specific type of anxiety that I can only describe as pukey? Anyway, he asked me again about two months ago, because they had started playing and it was obvious they needed at least one more person. This time I accepted and also volunteered my husband to play with us because I am both an excellent friend and bossy. It turns out that D&D is not a joke and you cannot just kind of show up and follow your husband and his friends around and try not to die. I learned this very, very quickly.
I wasn’t totally in the dark on all of this stuff (thanks, Hudson!) BUT I really, definitely, absolutely did not know what I was getting myself into. I started to look around the interwebs to get an idea of the level of research I had to do/what I was going to need to know for our first night. This is when I found out that I should have been on Reddit all day everyday for approximately the last six months to get up to speed. YOU GUYS. There is so much to know! It’s like learning a new language! The player’s handbook is (and I’m estimating here) approximately 3 billion pages long. The guide to building your character contains more detail than an instruction manual on how to operate a rocket in space and they use word combinations that you could only know if you were already a D&D expert (someone has to roll a constitution saving throw? I’m sorry, what. the heck. does that mean???), and also there are SO many options for everything. Do you want to be an elf? A half elf? A high elf? Do you want to read 500 pages on what all of these options entail because you can borrow my handbook. Bring a friend to help you carry it when you pick it up. Lucky for me, Matt is also an excellent friend so while I was making one of those boards people usually make in movies when they’re trying to solve a murder with sticky notes and red yarn so I could try to keep everything straight in my head, he offered to help me. Turns out, Matt is super into and excellent at building characters. He got me through the rough patches and didn’t even make fun of me once (to my face) when I continued to ask the dumbest questions and get confused about the simplest things (jk, none of it is simple, it’s all very confusing). This also led to my first interaction with Matt’s brother, our DM, Justin. Turns out, Justin is even more into building characters and D&D than Matt, me, or any other human on the planet, possibly? He also can recall like 85% of the player’s handbook at will, which is both scary and impressive. I once spoke with Justin for an entire hour while he gave me the rundown on a bunch of different things D&D related and even though I took notes and asked 600 questions, I am still not 100% sure what we actually talked about and if I understood any of it? One of my notes actually said, “Justin says this is important and I think that I need to max out int?” So, it went really well, is what I’m telling you.
After my extensive and thorough research, I was not even close to being ready to play, but I am woman of action so I wasn’t about to back out on my first game night. Did I maybe have a mini anxiety attack about embarrassing myself in front of Matt’s family because I really, really, for real, did not know what I was doing? I don’t know? I’m definitely not confirming or denying that for you! How dare you ask me such a thing? So we all Skyped in (some of us live far apart from each other) and I was almost immediately lulled into a false sense of security because Matt’s cousin and his wife are are super nice and not scary at all and I felt this slightly familiar sensation and realized that I was actually having fun! This lasted maybe 15 minutes? Then we actually had to do stuff! Like roll dice! Hey, did you know that there are several different kinds of dice? There are AND most of them serve a very specific purpose in D&D and while I now have a better grasp on this, that night I panicked basically every time Justin said the phrase, “okay everyone roll…” followed by some other word that in life I am very familiar with but in game felt like maybe he was speaking German? Swedish? Elvish?? I don’t know but, oh man, I was very confused. Despite feeling like an unsupervised toddler in a foreign land, I did make some decisions and do some badass stuff! I killed a bear! But also, that was bad and if I had thought about it for approximately 10 seconds, I would have remembered that my character adores nature and animals and would never, ever, under any circumstances kill another living thing unless she absolutely had to. Whoops! After a few hours, we called it quits and everyone waited until we had logged off to laugh at my bumbling.
Here’s the thing though. I really, really love this game a lot. It’s partially because I really, really like the people I play with. We lost a member (Susan, I miss you and someday we WILL start a D&D girl gang together) and gained a new guy and everyone is silly and not at all afraid to run head first into a battle we are in no way prepared for and just see what happens. We spend lots and lots of time getting sidetracked and trying to make each other laugh, and sometimes my husband spends (wastes?) a good chunk of time trying to convince us that he is more powerful or capable than he actually is, and sometimes we forget to check for traps and sometimes we almost get murdered by a horde of rats, but we are always united in our quest to annoy the DM as much as we possibly can, and it is always, every time, the best time. It’s also because everything about this game is really interesting to learn about. There are so many possibilities and ways to play and things you can do. I am still not always comfortable but every time we play I use my imagination more and I laugh more and I roll the wrong dice less. We as a society are correct. Being nerdy IS cool and we all should have caught on a long time ago.
I’m going to go prepare for when I ultimately make Justin so angry, he kills me immediately with something dumb like a boulder or a baby dragon, or a horde of rats, and roll my new Princess character. Sparkle Pants is going to be a BEAST.
Is That Weird? 