Dungeons and Dragons, by Kevin

Dungeons and Dragons is brilliant. Some people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. They are wrong because it is brilliant.

What Dungeons and Dragons is, is a role-playing fantasy game using dice and maps and charts and sometimes models and the power of your imagination to visit the most amazing incredible places that can only exist in the furthest furthest reaches of the universe if they ever existed at all or else in the depths of your psyche or else in a world that never existed anywhere ever whatsoever, such as Mystara, Ravenloft, Eberron, and Luxembourg. It is a multiplayer game, which means that you have to know other people in order to be able to play it, although I have on many occasions played it on my own in my bedroom in order to sharpen my imaginary powers. It is not always more fun to play with other people; it depends on whether they have the required superior intelligence that normally accompanies the creativity necessary for this game. People who like Monopoly or Scrabble or Subbuteo are probably not smart enough, and it is always a mistake to let one of them join in since they are too literal-minded and almost need you to draw them pictures. It is also a mistake to let ladies play, because the best D&D games are when you do not feel self-conscious about shouting things like "I Thwart Your Blade of Silent Shadows with my Wanking Spell!" while standing on a kitchen stool in a black cape and baseball cap on backwards. Ladies inhibit full enjoyment of the game and the player's freedom to express himself and immerse himself fully in the role. She'd think he was a div.


What you need in order to play

In order to play D&D, what you need is male friends, a rulebook, the relevant dice, and a character sheet. Everyone decides what character they are going to be or to use (regular players have whole books with the details of their characters in) for a particular game, and someone is chosen to be the Dungeon Master (not dungeon mistress, note. Also note that if you Google "dungeon mistress" you do not get ANY links to D&D sites. What does that tell you?). Each individual's character has a set of ability scores, which you determine by means of the dice, which tell you the character's strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Then you decide if your character is going to be a warrior, a wizard, a cleric, a thief, and whether he or she will be good or evil. This is all very important. It is no good deciding to be a warrior, for instance, if you have only rolled a 2 for strength or a 3 for constitution. It would be better for your character to be a priest or a virgin. On the other hand, if you get a high charisma score, it is better for you to be a thief, conman, politician, or ninja. In this respect, D&D is just like real life, in that you have no choice about your talents, it is just the luck of the draw. And also, like in real life, the most charismatic people are the best politicians, thieves, mass murderers, and the weakest and frailest people are girls, priests, and the elderly. A lot of people say that fantasy games are a waste of time, but in fact you learn a great deal about real life from them.

Once all the characters are assembled, they enter the Dungeon. The word "Dungeon" refers to any environment in which the game takes place. It is not literal. It is a metaphor. Your dungeon can be the treacherous gombeen salt mines of Nottingham, the labyrinthine palaces of Theowalcott Six, or even the Dark Realm of Shining Stallion Forests, a brilliant Celtic tundra, except for the forests, where dwell the unbelievably well-endowed and beautiful Jizzdrinkahs and the day is spent battling wild-eyed Nordic berserkers and the fifty-legged eyeless beast Kagnaknarok, he of the invisible sharpened beermats and paper-cut-inflicting vinegar breath.

Or it can be a dungeon. It all depends on who the Dungeon Master is, because it is he who decides which creatures you will encounter and at which point during the game. It is up to you, as a member of the company, to decide how to use your talents to respond to the particular situations that the Dungeon Master presents to you. The good thing is that, as you progress through the game, usually you acquire experience, which is also like in real life, so that you increase your skills and your wealth and other talents. You need to keep track of these improvements in your character book so that you can use them next time. If the Dungeon Master is Michael Williams, however, you will die. You will fall into a pit of Excretagoths and be forced to swallow faeces until your stomach explodes. It won't do any good complaining.


More Than a Game

Some people complain that Dungeons and Dragons is dangerous because it encourages participants to develop an interest in the occult, and this is just the start of a slippery slope that ends up with them becoming Satanists and slaughtering cats on makeshift sacrificial altars in the graveyards of deconsecrated churches in the West Midlands. They said the same thing about Harry Potter, too, you will remember. Except they said it about Dungeons and Dragons first, and Harry Potter is just a cheap rip-off that J. K. Rowling won't admit to even though I remember her when she was a bloke. You will also know, of course, that complaints like that are utter nonsense. And anyway, what's wrong with slaughtering cats on makeshift sacrificial altars in the graveyards of deconsecrated churches in the West Midlands? There's nothing better to do.

Besides, Dungeons and Dragons is so much more than just a silly fantasy role-playing game. There is a whole culture and lifestyle that has grown up around it. Not just the literature, although Lord of the Rings is unquestionably the finest literature ever written and proof of the superior intellect required to play D&D, but also the art—what D&Der didn't experience his first orgasm across a Frank Frazetta painting?—and, of course, the music: Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Rainbow, Judas Priest. All brilliant. And the world is filled with other genius artists who are secret D&D players but keep it secret because they know the public at large is too thick to appreciate it (My favourite record of all time is Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares Chthulu," which was written by Prince, a level 15 dwarf!!). It is perfectly possible, and perfectly reasonable, in my humble opinion, to spend your entire life in the Birmingham area playing Dungeons and Dragons and have no need whatsoever for any cultural references or experiences outside of a 20-mile radius of the Bull Ring (and even that's pushing things because it includes bits where black people live).

There. I hope that you will play Dungeons and Dragons, now that I have shown you how brilliant it is. Just don't expect to be as good as me at it.

And that is the end.





(Kevin MacPherson is the Mighty Celtic Warrior Nivek Nospheracam of the Aston University Alternative Realm Dwellers. If phoning before 6 p.m., leave a message with his mom.)