There was an attempt to…slay a dragon with dice.

When I think about the differences between my childhood and the world that my kids are growing up in, there is one facet that would amaze younger me: Being a geek in today’s world is so…normal.

The highest grossing films are about superheroes. The biggest TV shows of modern times have storylines based on dragons and fantasy. This modern nerdtopia is not just the realm of greasy, feral teenage boys, either; Superman actor and professional panty-melter Henry Cavil joyfully enthuses about playing tabletop games like Warhammer and people respect him for it. Geekdom is no longer tolerated, but actively celebrated.

It was much, much different when I was growing up.

My dalliance with all things fantastical happened in my younger school years, when I purchased a book from the legendary “Fighting Fantasy” series, the cheerfully titled “Deathtrap Dungeon”.  This was a  “Choose your own adventure” book where the reader (“YOU are the Hero!” ) would determine how the story unfolded by making choices, which guided you to numbered sections of the text.  There was also an elaborate system to fight any monsters you encountered by following a set of actions, rolling dice, and deducting health points. The whole combat malarky seemed terribly long-winded to me, so I just assumed that I was always victorious and unscathed in such encounters, and focused my efforts on completing the quest by finding my way through the correct sequence of passages in the book.  This often involved having several fingers wedged between pages at once, so that if I made the wrong decision and suffered an untimely death, I had a consequence-free way of time-travelling back to several steps before any poor decisions. Through perseverance and no small amount of cheating, I completed the adventure and was hooked. 

It took a little while for me to understand that these books were a solo version of a wider tabletop phenomenon known as Dungeons and Dragons. Despite my interest, I never actually ended up playing the game itself. There were a couple of reasons for this.  The first was that it seemed an awful lot of pocket money to spend on a box containing essentially a massive rule book, some odd-shaped lumps of plastic with numbers on them, a paper map and bugger all else (the thriftiness was strong in this child).  More importantly, as I mentioned earlier, geekiness was not a badge of honour back then, and it was no small irony that those most longing to play this highly social role-playing experience were likely to be shy, introverted outsiders allergic to human interaction like me. So, instead of taking the difficult path of seeking out fellow-minded adventurers, I moved on to another interest, as usual.

Fast forward a few decades and one of the offspring was growing tired of the same old board games, and was looking for something to spark his imagination. I told him about a game from my youth where you get to create your own worlds, and adventures, and his eyes lit up with curiosity. And so, the following Christmas, one of his presents was a Dungeons and Dragons starter set.  He spent practically the whole of the holiday period reading the rule books cover to cover, and was really keen to try it out. With this, me and the rest of the family were drafted into undertaking our first adventure together. 

A large part of the role-playing aspect is defining your character. As well as all of the basic statistics needed to play through the game like strength and health, players are encouraged to create a backstory, the more detailed the better. The writer in me couldn’t resist the challenge, and so for the duration of the game, I would now be known as Kira; A 27 year old female rogue with a sharp dagger, and an even sharper tongue, with a natural distrust of others and a seductive green-eyed stare that hid a dark secret from her past…(I think my wife may have thought I was getting a little *too* into this whole character definition).  Our youngest boy became Punchy the Dwarf, and was basically only interested because his older brother had told him that you got to fight and kill things in the game. My wife, who was less enthusiastic about the whole thing and playing out of parental duty, was “some kind of elf”. With our group of merry adventurers formed, we were ready to embark on our path of battles and glory – away we go!  I was about to play the game that had tantalised me during my youth…

What no-one really tells you about the whole role-playing thing is how tediously long games can take. We managed about 2 hours before we all needed a break, and we had barely left the fictional village where we started. This is compounded by the constant dice rolling. So many dice, so many odd shapes of plastic, which you have to roll for Every. Fucking. Thing.  Roll a six-sided dice to look around the room.  Roll a twenty-sided dice to defend against an Orc’s spear intent on impaling your face. Roll a four-sided dice to check whether you can eat a sandwich.  Whilst the oldest boy was in his element, creating traps and running the show as the “dungeon master”, the enthusiasm levels sapped from the adults, and all the youngest boy wanted to to was to set fire to enemies using a spell called “Magic Missiles”  (which quickly became a family euphemism for farting in our household “..have you launched a magic missile, Dad?” so I guess something amusing came from the whole experience).  It turned out all the bits I’d skipped from the solo adventure books from my youth were the core experience of the actual game. It turned out that for me, the eventual fulfilment of being anyone, in a world where anything could happen, was just a bit…”meh”.

As I said at the beginning, fortunately geekery is mainstream and I dare say “cool” these days, and it wasn’t too long before our son found others in his friend group who were equally enthused by this odd combination of maths and storytelling. As for me though, in the words of those fighting fantasy books I treasured, My Adventure Ends Here.