Let's Pretend.

There is a curious alchemy to group storytelling. Sometimes it turns into exactly the sort of thing that gets parodied in popular culture--four separate narrative threads butting heads, if possible with some impugning of another's talent, intelligence, masculinity, femininity, and/or venereal status. But then sometimes, a group gets together to tell a story, and it becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Today's entry into the latter category is further evidence for what a huge nerd I am: my current Dungeons & Dragons campaign. (Please feel free to lunge away brandishing crosses.) I've been gaming since I was about twelve years old, with the odd break due to lack of opportunity and/or interest. I've run more or less the entire gamut--tabletop games, drama-sodden Vampire LARPs, boffer LARPs (somewhere between dinner theater and a pillow fight), overpriced miniatures--and I've seen what I want to lose and what I want to keep. When the latest edition of D&D came out, I find myself both disinterested and opinionated, largely based on assumptions derived from previous editions and the oh-so-reliable Internet rumors. I called it immature, I called pointless, I called it one-dimensional; and then...one of my oldest friends offered to try running it.

And it was fantastic.

The rules are what they are; make no mistake. This is a game of egregious violence disguised as moral uprightness, and you will encounter both dungeons and dragons in your play; expect politics and fantasies of manners to often take a back seat to sawing off a monster's face. But, at the same time, this game is proving to be the best tabletop gaming experience I have ever had. Some of it is the rules allowing a fair amount of narrative flexibility; some of it is, genuinely, the rules allowing one's character to be heroic and epic (occasionally in the false sense I have previously ranted about). But some of it is just that the group I am playing with manages to synchronize and improvise in a way that makes the game better than the sum of its parts.

We gather up once a month, we pick up our dice, and we play for about 10 hours, give or take; then there are another 4-5 hours of wind-down and discussion, often sliding into other games and game theory; and then I wake up on Sunday with the guilty, heavy-lidded refreshment of the morning after a serious bender and a long period of sleep, the feeling of my entire body smiling secretly at the world, as though I, an adult, managed to get away with this.

These are the feelings games should elicit. These are the feelings stories should elicit. And if nothing else, I am proud to be participating in helping someone besides me feel that way.