NeoGrognard

So I’ll admit it. Back in Junior High (or Intermediate School, as it was called in NYC) I played D&D in the basement of my parent’s house. For the time it wasn’t that bad. It was a large space. I had my own table. The basement wasn’t finished, so it sort of seemed like a real dungeon, at least to my early teen-age mind.

That’s right; I lived the stereotype of playing D&D in my parent’s basement.

While those days are long gone for me personally, in many ways the same is not true for D&D and RPGs in general. Even to some of the most devoted RPG gamers, our hobby is something to hide—something to keep buried deep in that basement.  Heck, I know people in the gaming industry who work on RPGs but do not play them. Why? I think it is a mixture of embarrassment and frustration at the fan base…which sometimes leads to more embarrassment. Let me explain.

Here’s a strange little bit of D&D trivia. When My Chemical Romance was hitting it big (back in the Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge days), I had heard that singer Gerard Way was really in to D&D. I contacted the band via their website, and got an almost immediate response. Over the next year, I stayed in contact with Gerard. Sent him D&D books so he could run games on the Warped Tour and tried to get the D&D brand team to bite. In the end they thought he was “too edgy.” I think they thought he was “too cool.”

I’m very open about my RPG passion. Catch me walking down the streets or hanging out at my favorite bar in Renton or Seattle, I will typically be wearing a geek shirt (often a D&D shirt), chatting with friends about the development and business of D&D or maybe minis painting. Heck, when I do Karaoke I’ll often start with Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” adding my own preamble before it starts of “If I’m going to Hell, I’m going to Hell playing Dungeons & Dragons.” This often catches people a little off guard. There is an unspoken assumption that either you keep your love of RPGs closeted, or you are some costumed tool with little social skills that people can walk all over. Trust me; I’m not that latter guy. I don’t follow the normal conventions. But at the same time I’ve gotten countless people out of their shell. After a few moments of conversation, most confide that they played RPGs or wanted to learn how to play RPGs. To be honest this is happening more and more recently. In fact a bunch of my students (typically a gaggle of video-game-playing elitists) are begging me to run a group of D&D games so they all get to play. I’ll be starting that in the next two weeks.

Let me backpedal a bit on the costumed tool comment. I’m not saying that if you LARP or enjoy the immersion aspects of RPG that you are a tool. But there is an undercurrent of immersion that has a bad tendency not to respect the personal space of those around them. In many ways the RPGer will start playing the stupid high-schoolish in/out games that force many of us to basement our hobby. It’s an understandable reaction on a base level, but one that doesn’t do our hobby or our cause any favors. And this negative sort of behavior goes for our uncostumed brethren as well. Often too many gamers, wounded early in life by so-called cool kids picking on them because of their passion, will transfer that disrespect on those who honestly just want to play the game…or worse still, industry professionals that work hard to produce the games that they hope people want. Most of this happens on the internet. That’s were that frustration I was talking about comes from. It’s a dysfunctional cycle of shit that we have to stop in order to move forward. Hell, the comic book guys have been able to do it for the most part, we can too.

While computer games, card games, and board games have become cool (I’m always surprised at how many hipsters are playing Dominion now) RPGs are still in the basement. Our embarrassment over the dysfunction or our lack of desire to explain for the nth-teen time that we do not play or work on computer games cause us to bury RPGs deeper in that basement. As the saying goes, out of sight out of mind. The problem is D&D has roughly 98% brand recognition in the U.S., and that recognition is often flawed. People will remember their misconceptions of the game and will never learn what it is actually like. If we hide it, they never can.

In the end, do you like playing RPGs? Do you want to share your passion with more people? Then go out and do it. While at Wizards of the Coast I saw the release of three “editions” of D&D. We are about to see a fourth. (I know, I know! 3.5 was not an edition, and the Essentials line is not 4.5 and all other sorts of corporate pipedreams, but bear with me. I did put it in quotations.) Each release saw some amount of press activity and that press activity was summed up by the statement, “D&D not dead yet!” Why? Because they’re in between the times we cloister ourselves away from the public. Hide our hobby, and let no one experience these fantastic games with us.

Let’s stop doing that. Let’s go out and teach people the fun of RPGs. Let’s shamble out of our self-imposed basement. Maybe then, we can actually see 3.5 million D&D players and even more RPG players.