Your pals have stopped in at a local bar after a grueling day at work. All you want to do is have a beer and chill out. In walks a group of goons, yelling and causing general havoc.
Suddenly, one of the goons swings his fist into the face of another patron. The bar has broken into an all-out brawl.
From above, you hear an omniscient voice: “Roll initiative.”
This is Dungeons and Dragons (D&D)—a tabletop roleplaying game that dominates the weekends of people of all ages all over the globe.
Originally released in 1974, D&D is a tabletop role-playing game which allows players to experience adventures through books, dice and imagination. Most adventures take place in a high fantasy setting, where players take on custom-made characters ranging from human to dwarf to dragonborn.
The game is now in its fifth edition.
With new material regularly, D&D has thousands of pages of content—and that’s not including what’s created (or “homebrewed”) by players.
“There’s so many books and dice and just paraphernalia, you want to buy and you're just like, ‘I want that man, that's so rad,’” 26-year-old D&D player Allen Haney told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
The newest expansion book for D&D’s fifth edition, Candlekeep Mysteries, was released March 16. It provides adventurers with 17 pre-written campaigns.
D&D is not without controversy, as the game was seen as Satanic when it was first introduced. Since its conception, religious groups have seen the game’s use of demons, devils and other monsters as sacrilegious. The open-ended nature of the game was also seen as a way for children to explore ideas that were banned from the church. Then, it evolved into a game played exclusively by “weirdos” and “nerds.”
Alexa Wingate, a 26-year-old St. Petersburg resident, has been a player since 2016.
Wingate said her first knowledge of the game came from Facebook memes about its supposed Satanic origin, but playing the game proved that allegations wrong.
“I was like, ‘This is not nerdy or bad or Satanic at all,’ ” Wingate told CL. “… I was like, impressed; I thought it was so fun. I love, like creativity, the improv, the camaraderie, the banter, the laughter. All of it was just such a good time.”
Recently, D&D has moved to the forefront of pop culture, with online D&D shows like “Critical Role,” “The Adventure Zone” and “Dimension 20” gaining millions of fans through their tenure. Series like Netflix’s “Stranger Things” have also brought the game into the public eye.
Haney is a member of Wingate’s group and has been playing since 2016.
“[D&D is] every emotion in the book,” Haney said. “Complete frustration to just jubilation. Your players will do the most stupid thing and you're just baffled by their decisions and then somehow they make it end up working, and it's just, it's jubilation because you've hit this such a low and now it's such a high.”
Haney said the comedy in D&D is second-to-none.
“I haven't laughed so hard, ever in my life, like I do playing D&D,” Haney said. “There is no comedy special, no stand up, no ‘Hangover’ movie. There's no movie that quite gives me the chuckles that I get from me and my friends raiding a dungeon together.”
In early 2020, Wingate and Haney’s group shifted from playing at Haney’s apartment to using Roll20 and D&D Beyond, two online services made specifically for tabletop gaming.
Roll20 offers a free virtual game board, where players can chat and display game assets as if they were in person. Memberships (up to $99.99 annually) let players upgrade to a premium account and gain access to additional material.
D&D Beyond doesn’t offer a play space but serves as a mostly-free virtual compendium of D&D materials. It allows players who may have limited access to written materials to manage their characters and resources.
“I do miss the aspect of everybody being around each other,” Haney said. “It's a lot more interactive when you are all together. But it's not so drastic of a drop off on Roll20 that you just don't want to play the game at all, because there are still those interactions and it's still a whole lot of fun.”
Wingate said she missed the in-person aspects of play as well.
“I will say there's something way more exciting about rolling a Nat20 in person with a physical die than there is doing it in the [virtual] game,” Wingate said. “Like, do we still get excited? Hell yeah. We all get excited, but it's not nearly like when you roll that 20 with a die in-person, [at] a table surrounded by all your best friends.”
The online services aren’t only littered with drawbacks, though.
Haney said an advantage of using Roll20 is the ability to better visualize maps and characters using the website’s interface and assets. He also said the virtual aspect made it easier for new players to get into the game.
“If you can't find a group locally, you can get a jump on rolling and get on with some dudes from, you know, across the world,” Haney said.
But players aren’t the only ones being affected by the pandemic.
Jason Acker, a long time D&D player and owner of Critical Hit Games in St. Petersburg, said customer loyalty has been “a big deal” for the store.
Critical Hit, which opened seven years ago, was forced to close for six weeks in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic and discontinued in-store gaming and activities for four months.
The store offers a wide play space for events and communal gaming.
“We would average between 30-50 players on Sundays and anywhere from 12-20 players on Thursdays for Adventurer’s League tables,” Acker said. “Obviously, all of that had to stop.”
Acker said that in response to store closures, Critical Hit opened an online store.
“We actually started doing deliveries, like pizza, but instead, it was board game deliveries,” Acker said, noting that Critical Hit’s sales were down 6% in 2020.
“That doesn’t sound like much of a loss,” Acker said. “But the first two months before COVID our sales growth was positive 30%.”
Players don’t see the pandemic as hindering D&D’s growth over time; its appeal comes from stories and connection.
Acker, who started playing using the first and second edition of D&D in 1991, said the possibility for original stories were part of the game’s mass appeal.
“Even if I was to say we're going to sit down and play ‘D&D Romeo and Juliet,’ it would still turn out different than ‘Romeo and Juliet,’” Acker said. “It would still feel different because … instead of reading Shakespeare's ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ you're taking a role. You know, what is it like to perceive that story as Mercutio?”
Acker said the game’s involvement on shows like “Stranger Things” contributed to its popularity, but the biggest attractor was that “we can sit down and play whatever story we want…. My character is not limited to just what is on my action bar.”
Wingate sees D&D’s growing popularity attributed to its human connection.
“The mass appeal is bonding and strategizing together and like that human connection, you know,” Wingate said. “And it's cool to that being in COVID-19, we can still do it virtually … I don't know what I would have done over the past year if I wasn't able to virtually meet up with all my friends almost once a week. It’s so fun to have that lifeline.
“A game could go really bad, or you could even have the worst rolls, but I won't regret meeting up with all my friends to play a fun game. I never leave a game regretting it,” Wingate added.
Haney said D&D’s growing popularity could be tied to the value of storytelling.
“Why I personally believe it's growing in popularity is, I feel like it's collective storytelling,” Haney said. “Storytelling as a group is just something that's in us as humans. I mean, ever since we've had the ability to relay information to one another, we've been creating stories, most stories have been passed down. And I feel like something we've kind of lost,” Haney added.
“We don't partake in collective storytelling as much. I mean there's gossip in there, you know, people enjoy that. People enjoy talking to other people and drama occurring in those conversations. They enjoy the intensity of those, so when you kind of transplant that into an unreal world and mystical world or a world that exists outside of your own that you can roleplay and exist in without the limitations of the current world it kind of appeals to everyone.”
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This article appears in May 13-19, 2021.