Navigating (Part 2)

Dungeons and Dragons and the people who play it have taught me something. Taught is the wrong word, but reminded is also the wrong word. Re-discovered, illuminated the same truth in a different way, understood something that I have known as a child but not yet as an adult -- and onward.

The point of Dungeons and Dragons is certainly one thing and one thing only: to form a tight knit group and slay monsters. This is something we have to do whether we play D&D or not, and it is something we have to learn how to do. For this reason the DM has to be agnostic: he cannot be against the player, indeed he can even be for the player - as in rooting for the player, but he cannot give the player the win. You are not slaying a monster if you cannot be slain by the monster. This is what taking D&D seriously is about and it is serious.

Learning how to do it is hard, and therefore easy to not even try to do. You can play whole campaigns and never begin to think about it in these terms, and it is astonishingly easy -- almost embarrassingly so -- to analogize the way people understand D&D to the way they relate to collaboration in general. It is easy to read into the way they talk about what happened, and who did what, how they feel about being in the world, necessarily connected to other people. I wish it wasn't, or perhaps I should say, often I wish I weren't -

One thing I like about it, though. Two things, actually. The first is that there are people I would have dismissed outright for their political one-dimensionalism that I get to see in better contexts. They're snobby or pushy or blunt or sweet or goofy, you wouldn't know that. The second is the rule the DM made in this campaign that we can't make dirty jokes (I don't know why) and the weird way that has affected the humor. I do like dirty humor, and dark humor, and mean humor but I also like goofy humor, sweet humor.

There's a pervasive darkness in the real world, what it lacks in literal manifestation it makes up for in anxiety and terror. When I think of the people in the campaign I play -- the first I've ever played -- I wish them success in slaying their monsters, friends to help them do it, and a nice celebratory dinner with the same friends in a warm and welcoming pub afterward. They are unexpectedly sweet people, but it may be that the people you slay monsters with always turn out to be unexpectedly sweet.