I’m Dabbling in Dungeons & Dragons

It’s 2026, and I’m picking up DnD for the first time. Needless to say, I haven’t had this much fun in ages.

How It Happened

Personally, I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons. The closest I got was a couple years back when Baldur’s Gate 3 came out. The only reason I even played that game is because I used to play the Baldur’s gate games on the GameCube. Back then, they were action RPGs, and I haven’t really played a game like that in ages.

Unfortunately (or rather quite fortunately), Baldur’s Gate 3 is nothing like its predecessors. As far as I know, it’s the closest thing you can get to DnD in video game form, and it’s wonderful. I’ve played through it once as a Bard while keeping Karlach, Shadowheart, and Gale around.

Later, because there’s a multiplayer component, I played BG3 with some friends. We never really made it past Act 1 because we never leaned into the role play aspect of the game. We were mostly just a gang of murderers.

Of course, given its relevancy and my interest at the time, I was fed tons of BG3 related YouTube shorts. In fact, I watched a lot of DnD shorts, some of my favorites being ZachTheBold, Tater the Bard, CinderBlocksally, and Level 20 DM.

Fast forward a few years later and one of my buddies tells me that he wants to DM a campaign. A few of the same friends that I play friend-slop with also had some interest in DnD, so we decided to go for it.

The First Hurdle: The Character Sheet

So, it turns out that the hardest part of getting into DnD is making a character sheet. I was already familiar with a lot of the classes and how they’re played from BG3, but BG3 definitely holds your hand. There’s no calculating hit points and armor class by hand in BG3.

My DM specifically recommended that we just fill in a sheet, and he would trust us to do it correctly. So, for our first one-shot to test the waters, that’s what I did. I can’t say that it was the easiest thing in the world, and I honestly just followed a build guide to do it.

That said, what I found the most fun about the process was actually getting to flex my creativity. It reminded me of putting together articles on this site as well as putting together my dissertation. As I added parts, I kept going back to edit stuff I’d already done. There was almost a circular nature to the editing where I kept refining my backstory as I picked elements of my character (e.g., “yes, but why would this character have that spell?”). Perhaps I dug in too deep. Regardless, here’s what I ended up with for my backstory for a character named River Sticks:

River grew up in a southern town with normal redneck parents. Every day since River’s 2nd birthday, they’d kick him outside and say, “don’t come back until the sun goes down.” Naturally, River became one with nature, often relying on crawfish from the creek for food and trade. In fact, he was quite the handful in town where he regularly deceived traders into believing the crawfish were actually baby lobsters from the ocean.

Of course, toying with the townfolk and digging in the creek left River fairly bored most of the time. Eventually, he found enjoyment from slapping rocks, as each one had a slightly different sound. This music exploration led to River experimenting on everything, from washboards to spoons. It wasn’t until a trip into town introduced him to a banjo, which he obtained by offering a trader some “magic” beans.

Once River was about school aged, he gained his power as a sorcerer. It was a happy accident as River stumbled into a faerie ring on his way home as the sun was setting. Suddenly, he was transported to the faerie realm (i.e., Feywild) where he was drawn into a banjo battle with an elder spriggan, à la The Devil Went Down to Georgia. The deal: play for your freedom. The battle lasted several hours as it shifted from combative to a proper jam session. The fairies had so much fun that they granted River both his freedom and one of their mushrooms.

By the time River came to, it had been almost a week in the real world. The fairy ring was gone, and his parents were, ironically, worried sick. Over time, he was able to convince his parents to start letting him outside again, but every failure seemed to come at the cost of something chaotic happening. For example, sometimes River would “hallucinate” a Modron in his view. Other times, he would “hallucinate” a beard of feathers before sneezing it away. He thought maybe these were the result of taking the mushroom, so he vowed never to take any strange substances again. Then, one day while bored out at the creek, he accidentally dropped his banjo in the water. In a moment of panic, he reached out to grab it, which conjured a mage hand. This time, it was no hallucination. He was able to control the hand to bring back his instrument. At that moment, he realized that perhaps the fairies granted him more than just freedom. River was a sorcerer.

As River got older, he sought out fairy circles to learn more about this new power, yet they never appeared to him. Instead, new spells would force their way out, often against his will and at the worst times. For instance, he learned chaos bolt while hunting deer. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much left of them to take home to eat. He also learned about the chaotic backfiring of his power while thinking back to all those odd hallucinations. In fact, River became a bit of a town legend when he suddenly turned into a sheep while bartering over some trinkets. If River was a little smarter, he might avoid town altogether, but he somewhat enjoyed the chaos of it. After all, it could never hurt anyone, right?

Ultimately, I had a lot of fun writing this, and it’s inspired me to write more fiction, something I never thought I would be into. Perhaps the current dystopia we live in has created the perfect breeding ground for escapism, and DnD was the catalyst for me and my friends.

What Kind of Player Am I?

As someone new to DnD, I already have a role that I like to fill: charisma. I find it really fun to try to solve problems with words, and I really enjoy the chaos of messing with the DM. In fact, I like chaos probably more than I like charisma. It’s the reason I went Wild Magic, and my DM loves rolling the table. We’ve already leaned into some of the extended tables you can find online as a result.

To just illustrate the chaos, we just recently failed a stealth mission where our stealthiest player rolled a one in the middle of a group of goblins. While he was trying to disengage from the fight, he left me the perfect hole to fill. I have this goofy ability from the DM where if I fail a wisdom saving roll, I radiate damage around me. I wanted to try to proc it, but I accidentally passed the role. My DM loved the idea so much that he forced an impromptu table roll. By the magic of whimsy, I somehow rolled to teleport away from the fight.

You might think that scenario is lucky, and I would agree, but it’s even funnier than that. Since the goblins are particularly dumb, I was planning to capitalize on the teleportation by selling it as a “show of force.” In other words, I tried to argue that I’m so strong that they shouldn’t even fight us. As of now, the session left off there, so we’ll see how that pans out.

Spoiler: it’s me from the future here to tell you that this encounter ended even funnier than I could have imagined. The intimidation failed, so we ended up fighting the goblins. For whatever reason, everyone was rolling comically high, so cantrips like firebolt were one-shotting goblins. I suppose I can’t say I didn’t warn them. Anyway, because we’re online, I had a ton of fun digging up gifs to visualize each of the goblins as they were lit on fire or split in half. Did I mention DnD is a fun game?

If you’re familiar with the alignment chart aspect of DnD, you’d find me squarely in the chaotic good corner. That’s a place I aspire to be in real life as well, so I think it fits well with my character. I like the idea of doing the right thing but maybe not in the most acceptable way. I often do break rules if I don’t think they make sense. Why would my character be any different?

With that said, if I were to ever play a different style of character, there are few on my mind. For one, I love to play supports in games like Overwatch, so I wouldn’t mind playing a support character in DnD like a Bard or a Cleric. I also am not opposed to going the Dark Urge route. In that case, I really like the Barbarian because the rage mechanic is a lot of fun.

As for other classes or play styles, I might enjoy a Dexterity build for the usual sneaking and pickpocketing mechanic. I also think I would enjoy playing a Druid and talking to animals, but I really didn’t enjoy them in BG3. I’m also not really interested in an Intellect build because role playing “smart” is too weird. Wisdom seems more fun to me. Who doesn’t want to be the old sage of the group?

Beyond that, I don’t enjoy min-maxing in any game I play, so I’m not particularly interested in trying to work out some broken multiclass. If there is a useful skill from some class, I’ll grab it, but otherwise I really enjoy the depth of the classes alone. That said, I could see multiclassing if it made sense for my backstory. For instance, River might take on a level or two of Bard to fulfill that entertainer role.

The Future Is Pen & Paper

I’m going to be so honest. I’m really enjoying playing DnD. Being able to sit down with your friends (even virtually) and craft a story together is life changing. I feel like I’m getting to know my friends in new ways, though some of them are definitely who I thought they were.

Ultimately, I feel like this is a much better use of my time than doom scrolling or token maxxing. I’m literally just living. Perhaps this will inspire you to do the same.

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Usually, I would end this with some articles, but I’m not sure I have anything related to share. Perhaps these video game articles are close enough:

• Phantasy Star Online: A Beautiful Mess
• 30 Best Video Games Over the Last 30 Years
• Procedural Spell Generation

As always, feel free to take your support the extra mile by checking out my list of ways to grow the site. If not, feel free to take care!