Dungeons and Dragons

I’ve been playing Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) for the better part of a decade now, specifically Wizard of the Coast’s (WOTC) Fifth Edition (5e). Jeez, DnD has a ton of acronyms. My first proper go at DnD started sometime around 2016, my freshman year of high school, with the 5e starter set adventure: Lost Mines of Phandelver. I’ve been playing DnD on a mostly weekly basis, excluding a few hiatuses, ever since.

My original intention with this blog was to spend some time recounting characters, campaigns, and miscellaneous stories from over the years that I’m fond of. However, that quickly spiraled into a relatively comprehensive recap of every major campaign and character I’ve ever played. It has also been a very pleasant activity to recall and try to map out a timeline of everything. For that reason, I’ve decided to relegate DnD and the recap to its own Project entry, which I will try to keep up-to-date moving forward.

Instead, I’ve decided spend some to discuss DnD on a meta level: my relationship with it, opinions on it, and how it’s impacted my life. Plus, maybe I’ll splice in a few of my favorite anecdotes from the recap.

Dungeons and Dragons has been a major part of my life for nearly a decade now. It has been the main recreation activity of my closest friend group from my freshman year of high school through to now. Additionally, my involvement in DnD has grown past that, leading to meeting new people and even effecting my collegiate life and career. In that time I have made a lot of memories and created characters and worlds I’m very proud of. All this to say, DnD is fundamentally intertwined with my being and has been a key hobby and personality trait of mine for years.

It’d be difficult to overstate the impact DnD had on my social life across the entirety of my teens and early 20s. In high school my core friend group attempted to pick up DnD after bouncing off of it a few times due to confusion. Things really stuck when we started playing Lost Mines of Phandelver, from the 5e Starter Set.

A brief aside on Lost Mines of Phandelver as it’s my favorite official DnD Module. I’ve both played and ran Lost Mines several times. The combination of my love for low level fantasy aesthetics, LMoP being my first adventure, and it generally being well-made, has lead to it being foundational to my DnD experience over the years. In fact, each time I’ve played LMoP has been a bit of a milestone of that stage of my life and DnD experience. Honestly, I think it’s about time I played through it again. In the time between starting this blog post and posting it, I have started a new play through of LMoP.

Following that initial run of LMoP, I’ve been playing DnD with mostly the same group on a mostly weekly basis ever since. In that time, I’ve created a lot of characters, campaigns, and memories that I will never forget and DnD rapidly become my main hobby. Since then, books and dice were purchased, terrain and miniatures were 3d printed, and entire worlds have been captured in elaborate Google Docs, OneNote Documents, and Obsidian Vaults. I could write several blog posts about the variety of DnD side projects we’ve done over the years.

A particularly memorable milestone from the early days was the construction of our DnD Table. Initially conceptualized during a general hang-out between a friend and I at 2 AM, the DnD Table was the first big group project and buy-in we did. We planned it out and all pitched in to buy the materials. With the help of a friend’s dad, and his tools, we managed to build it. The DnD Table was a large octagon with approximately 12“ trapezoidal wooden player areas, with cubbies, surrounding a recessed felt surface for battle maps. We proceeded to use it for a few years, kept inside the resident DnD Room (AKA our friend’s childhood bedroom) until approximately 2020 when COVID hit.

Speaking of COVID, it marks another relatively major milestone in how we engaged with DnD. Once lock-down really started, we began playing DnD online. In that time, a few different campaigns took place: Planet B and Monster Hunter being the two main ones I participated in, plus some one-shots, a few sessions of Princes of the Apocalypse, and a campaign I didn’t take part in. Playing online obviously took some time to get used to and some growing pains were had along the way. We tried two main VTTs: Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, as well as various levels of using their integrated systems.~~I would have loved to use Talespire, but they refused to accept my closed beta application, but I’m not mad or anything. ~~ Overall, my personal favorite way to play online was Roll20 for battle maps, Discord for voice chat, and IRL character sheets and dice rolls. Online DnD wasn’t ideal, but lots of good moments were had, and I’m glad we still played during lock-down.

On the topic of character sheets, that’s something I figured out a satisfactory solution for very early and have been using ever since. For character sheets, my preference is a printed sheet generated via More Purple More Better (MPMB). MPMB is a PDF with a lot of automation features using Adobe Acrobat evil. Content, such as things published by WOTC, is input via JavaScript and is easy to import or homebrew. Other than the automation features, MPMB also automatically formats mechanics (spells, class features, etc.) into useful shorthand. For me, this manages to hit the perfect balance of having immediate access to rules almost as written, maintaining a well formatted sheet, and ease of creation. My only grievance is the use of Adobe Acrobat, a program designed in a lab to cause me distress. I highly recommend MPMB and encourage supporting the Patreon.

The next major milestone would be DnD’s presence in my college life. Around my sophomore year of college, I had been playing DnD somewhat consistently for about 5 years and during that time I still mostly played weekly with our usual group of people, not much change there. However, I did apply for a job at the universities Makerspace.

Important context: I’ve been 3D printing, both SLA and FDM for about as long as I’ve been playing DnD (~9 years). Obviously, this lead to the two mingling and me trying my hand at printing terrain, miniatures, and props. Most notably, my entire perusal into SLA printing was due to being unsatisfied with the results of FDM printing miniatures on my Ender 3. This topic could be definitely will be its own project entry/blog post, so I will refrain from discussing much further.

After some time as a student employee at the Makerspace, being the only person with SLA printing experience, I quickly became the SLA 3D Printing Manager. In that role I was able to conceptualize, seek much needed funding for, and host a workshop titled “MakeDnD”. The premise was a weekly workshop teaching attendees to use tools in the Makerspace to make props for DnD and playing DnD with them. This included SLA printing miniatures, fabricating wooden dice boxes, and making casting epoxy dice interspliced with sessions DM’d by me.

My time at the Makerspace was the highlight of my collegiate life and directly lead to my current, then internship, now job and I imagine it would have been a much different experience without DnD. It also is one of many examples of a core character trait of mine: I introduce people to DnD. My DnD antics, including the establishment of an unofficial Adventurers League, lead to some of the most important friendships I maintain to this day.

Since graduating, much hasn’t changed. I still play absolutely not weekly with many of my friends from high school, as well as playing campaigns with new friends who I’ve met along the way. DnD is fundamental to my being, so I’m always going to have more thoughts and experiences to share, but in order to actually finish something, I’ll close it out here.

Clearly, DnD has been integral to my life, my investment in it is a core part of my socialization, self-concept, and it has inspired many peripheral hobbies, activities, and interests of mine. I care about DnD today, just as much as I did when I was a Sophomore in high-school and am extremely content with my lasting relationship with it. I have much more to write about DnD, I could do individual project/blog posts on my hexagonal terrain, extensive DM notes, etc. For now, check out the DnD Project page, most of my thoughts, if you believe it, went there.