Dungeons and Dragons: A Unique and Creative World
By: Matthew Rouker 2/12/24
Mr. Powell joined our school this year and, along with stepping into the coaching position for the Academic Super Bowl Science team, he runs the Dungeons and Dragons club.
The D&D club actually started back at Mr. Powell’s previous school. When he came to Edgewood, he brought the club with him. When he took on the D&D club at his old school, he knew practically nothing about the game. Since then, his knowledge on it has grown drastically.
For those who don’t know, D&D is a tabletop role-playing game which means that you can do pretty much anything inside of the fundamental rules of D&D. “What I struggled with for a long time is, there are obviously rules… but in terms of what you’re able to do and how strictly you want to abide by the rules, it’s one of the most open-ended games I’ve ever seen or been a part of.” When playing a game, or campaign, in D&D, there is one person who specifically designs the story and chooses what characters you run into on your way. This person is called the Dungeon Master, or DM. Their job is to come up with the objective of the campaign and the story you’ll follow to complete that objective. The objective of a campaign can be pretty much anything and where the campaign goes is up to the players and DM. “The reason why I’ve never DMed and why I think it’s impressive is that it is so much focused on player creativity. You never know which way a session is going to go… Sometimes you can have a session go exactly as you planned and everything kinda just lines up and sometimes stuff takes a completely different direction, you just have to make up stuff on the fly.” I think that encapsulates the entirety of D&D, one minor decision changes the entire course of events.
A lot of D&D gameplay is based on rolling dice, you roll dice to see whether or not you’ll successfully lie to a character, whether or not you’ll defeat a monster, or even whether or not you’ll escape from an enemy successfully. Along with dice rolling, stats and numbers are important for deciding the difficulty of a dice roll. High charisma would make deceiving another character easy, whereas a low strength rating would require you to roll higher to defeat a monster.
A lot of the appeal of D&D is in the fact that you can do anything you want, design whatever character you want, or come up with whatever story you want. When I visited the D&D club to interview Mr. Powell, I created my own character. It’s truly a unique experience and if you were intrigued by this article, I would suggest that you bring a couple of friends and check out the D&D club. They meet every Friday and it never hurts to give it a try. “The best thing that I think would help people get into (D&D) is just exposing yourself to D&D content and see if it appeals to you.”