The new guard will tell you that playing D&D is like doing improv around a table with your friends. “The other stuff is so that we get to play, as far as I’m concerned.” “Play is a part of the experience of living on this planet,” said Siobhan Thompson, 37, a cast member of Dimension 20, a popular comedic D&D show on Dropout and YouTube. But that time commitment might not seem so intense when measured against the hours we spend on our phone, scrolling through Instagram or bingeing TV. A typical D&D session takes at least three hours, and that’s just one chapter of a campaign that can last for months, if not a year. My fellow players and I partook in “Curse of Strahd,” a fifth-edition fantasy-horror adventure that, in our case, began with a quest and ended on a cliffhanger, and since then I have not stopped wondering what might happen next.Ī four-hour game is not uncommon. This winter, I joined my very first D&D game at the Brooklyn Strategist, which describes itself as a “community board game store.” My character was a Level 2 paladin orc named Atlas (after my dog) who carried a great sword, had 19 charisma points and was able to conjure divine smite. From there, she found Dimension 20, watched “a lot of D&D content” and decided she wanted to play. “I think I liked one TikTok about D&D and then suddenly my entire For You page was posts about Dungeons & Dragons,” she said. Online forums like Reddit, Discord and Twitter created digital homes for role-playing game subcultures to cross-pollinate and thrive, and from there, pieces of insider gaming lingo worked their way into the meme vernacular.Īdd all of that to a nearly two-year stretch of our lives during which pandemic-induced isolation converged with a desperation for escapism, and there you have it: a potent spell to summon Dungeons & Dragons from the depths of our collective mother’s basement into its rightful place upstairs at the kitchen table.Įllen Remley, 31, who works in creative marketing, was lured into the game by way of TikTok. Video game streaming platforms such as YouTube and Twitch showed gaming voyeurs just how fun the world of tabletop games could be.
Gary Gygax, the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, were enormous Tolkien fans.)īut nothing proliferated the good word of D&D as effectively as the internet. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dave Arneson and E. Tolkien fan, and Tolkien novels are often cited as a gateway into D&D.
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Martin, author of the fantasy novel series upon which HBO’s “Game of Thrones” was based, is a noted J.R.R. The Duffer brothers, the creators of the hit Netflix show “Stranger Things ,” were influenced by tabletop role-playing games like D&D and Magic: The Gathering, the fantasy card game with its own rabid fan base. Enter a decade of Marvel films, including four directed by the Russo brothers, who grew up playing D&D. Marisha Ray, 33, a Los Angeles voice actor and cast member of “Critical Role,” one of the best known D&D livestreams, recalled a moment several years ago when she realized “the nerd kids” had become the entertainment industry.
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Since casting spells during a game could label you a devil worshiper, a nerd or something in between, Dungeons & Dragons was banished to the underground.Īs a universe of dedicated players expanded steadily in the shadows, the game popped up intermittently in the pop cultural consciousness: D&D was either alluded to or mentioned by name in TV shows including “That ’70s Show,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “Community” and in the series finales of both “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Freaks and Geeks.” Rivers Cuomo sings about the solace he found among his Dungeon Master’s Guide and 12-sided die in the Weezer song “In the Garage.” In “The Simpsons,” Homer tells his family that he played Dungeons & Dragons for three hours with a new group of friends - until he was slain by an elf.īut regardless of its pop culture appearances, the general public’s impression of the game had more or less remained the same: Dungeons & Dragons was for outcasts. Anything with even a remote whiff of the occult, from astrology to heavy metal, was suspect. The infamous tabletop role-playing game became a household name when “satanic panic” - a general fear of satanic ritual abuse that caught fire nationwide in the 1980s - began to take root in the suburbs. More than 50 million people worldwide have “interacted” with D&D since it was created in the mid-1970s, according to its publisher, and while that number also includes movies, video games, books, television and livestreams, it doesn’t factor in the number of people reached over TikTok. Everyone’s been playing Dungeons & Dragons without you: your co-workers, Anderson Cooper, Tiffany Haddish.