Saying yes to adventure

It’s incredibly difficult to capture what D&D can be in 30 or 60 seconds. That may be part of why the latest advert for the Starter Set, Heroes of the Borderlands is 75 seconds.

That’s also a short amount of time.

My sessions are typically three hours. We’ve played nearly a dozen campaigns in 5th edition from 2014 to the present averaging a game session every other week for the past 11 years.

Critical Role plays closer to four hours on average with the main campaign playing about 40 sessions a year over that same stretch.

How do you introduce the layers of play, the layers of friendship and the depth of potential in a minute?

Wizards of the Coast did that by showing a generation of players who said yes to adventure in the 90s and now play with their kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFOiXvVidwo

Saying that first “yes” to playing D&D

The people who introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons way back in the 80s introduced me to science fiction, to creative writing, to journalism and debate.

Later the second group I played with introduced to the concept of joining the Army, anime/comic books, writing my own game, and British comedy because we played Twilight:2000, Albedo, TMNT, Synnibarr, MERPS and of course D&D.

Saying yes to Vampire: The Masquerade helped me during language school, when the stresses of required success were overwhelming and I needed an escape from the combination Army-university life.

A year later saying yes to D&D with another nerd in 5th Special Forces Group helped me be myself while being all I could be and more. Those duet sessions created an escape and creative outlet.

Then I stopped.

Saying yes later

As my soccer blog matured and jobs came-and-went 5th edition D&D came out. I didn’t have a group. I hadn’t played in two decades except for those dozen or so sessions with a combat medic.

But, I was intrigued.

I asked my friends who wrote with me, who edited, who advised a small soccer blog as we grew.

Those first sessions of 5e included grand friends who helped each other learn the new system, remember our pasts and tell tales of glory through fellowship.

Those campaigns tuckered out and then ceased due to a wonderful job opportunity and then the pandemic.

Yes during covid

My last yes to adventure was when one of those friends asked me to DM again. During the pandemic I’d stopped running sessions. I still played, but online play and my DMing style don’t get along. I tried it once, in an actual play.

This yes meant getting a new group together. The old groups had scattered. Unlike the characters in that D&D advert I’ve never managed to maintain a group across decades. Not even my brother who was part of that first yes still plays.

But we got together.

And it grew. It taught me to share my world with another DM. This most recent yes reminded me that the fellowship at the table is as important as the fellowship of the characters.

This yes has our group playing in public, right in front of other people who don’t know what D&D is. We played with strangers who became friends. We introduced others to the game.

Marketing D&D

Saying yes to playing role playing games took me a lot of places.

And in 75 seconds the marketing team behind D&D reminded me of all of that. Taking us backwards on a journey of glory, of watching a child grow up, of a pregnant woman playing the game and a group of friends who stick together from 1995 to the present is brilliant.

Where will yes take you?

To the Caves of Chaos and The Ferments. To rolling d20s at a brewery and getting on stage at a security event. To Krynn, to Theros, to Sigil, to Exandria, to Trinyvale, to The Strix, to Wagadu, to al-Qadim, to Grim Hollow, to Drakenheim, to Midgard, to Obojima, to Eberron, to the darkest crypts and the glorious eternal afterlife, from dragons to halflings.

But mostly it will take you on a journey of friendship and discovery of the stories that you are unable to tell yourself.

That’s what saying yes does — it opens you up to things beyond what is contained within your own being.