Dungeon Diaries

Let’s be honest. Adolescence can be a crappy time for any kid, but I feel like it could have been easier if I had played D&D.
I just left my weekly D&D game, and the only backstabbing going on involved a bastard sword and a strategically placed minion. With no rest and only a handful of healing surges between the six of us, we took on an endless stream of orcs, a body-pierced shadar-kai warlock, and a weeble-like Captain Bad-Ass who had the maddening ability to keep popping up every time we knocked him down. Multiple times in the two hours, everyone made choices that put their PCs in danger all so they could save someone else — including the NPC who got us into this mess!
D&D isn’t about sabotage or sacrificing your friends to make yourself look good. This sure isn’t middle school! Who do I contact to make D&D as much a requirement as PE and Health?
I would have had real friendships — not the on-again-off-again, tumultuous, celebrity-like relationships 10-year-old girls are prone to. Maybe I would have been focused on things like the best defense against a bugbear or figuring out how to defuse a trap rather than cigarettes, dressing like Madonna, and Brenden Wendle’s hair. And after facing villains like hellcats, frostworms, and chimeras, maybe I wouldn’t have been so terrified of that mysterious camp in the Poconos my parents used to threaten my brother and I with.
I’ve met D&D-playing kids at conventions or around the office, where they show up with their books and pockets full of minis and regale us with their tales of Dungeon Mastering. (They often take turns because everyone wants to DM!) I marvel at their ability to rattle off stats straight from the Monster Manual and argue with R&D over the virtues of a beholder versus a zombie. I listen enraptured to the epic backstories they give their characters and how they wax poetically about them like one of my friends does when she meets the latest man of her dreams. He’s big and he’s strong and he can swing a masterwork greatsword with only two fingers. They were crawling in dungeons before they crawled in living rooms.
And it’s cool to be smart! Not true in my day. In an effort to be accepted by the dumb, shoplifting, ripped-jeans-not-because-it-was-cool-but-because-their-jeans-were-really-ripped crowd, I failed a vocabulary test on purpose because it wasn’t cool to have an A in English. The next day, Mom’s green Cordoba was in the parking lot, and she and I were in the principal’s office where it was determined that I did in fact know what conceited meant, and clearly I was trying to act out. Did I need attention? Were things OK at home? Was I eating?
I also knew what mortified meant and not because I was quizzed on it. My mom used the word at least twelve times on our way home from school. She made a deal. “Every week you don’t fail a test, stay away from those girls, and quit pretending you’re riddled with this pre-teen angst crap, I’ll take you to K-Mart and buy you two new books.”
Wow! Two new books every week? Can Judy Blume and Francine Pascal even write that fast?
So why the stroll down memory lane? Because I stumbled across my childhood diary the other day. My 3″x4″, green, vinyl-covered book with the words, “One Year Diary” etched in gold across the cover. Here I wrote down all my innermost thoughts. I was barely a decade old and apparently had multiple-personality disorder, because most of my entries are scribbled out with the words “No I didn’t!” or “Gross! Not true!” scrawled across the pages.
I love Brenden Wendle!
I hate Brenden Wendle!
I hope my parents don’t make me go to the Poconos!
The inside front cover has the words “Property Of,” which I filled out in my nine-year-old script, SHELLY! If that weren’t clear enough I wrote “Not you Mike!!!! Or Mike’s friends!!!! And then, as if foreshadowing my future life as a part-time sorceress, I added, “Read it and be cursed with bad luck!”
I do not look back on this time with any sense of nostalgia. If I look back at all, it’s more with a sense that I’m about to break out in hives and need to throw my face in a paper bag to regulate my breathing. Flipping through some of my diary entries, I realize much of what I anguished over could have been avoided if I had had the benefit of a D&D group twenty years ago.
Yeah, I’ve heard the tales of woe from the kids who did grow up playing D&D — getting beat up in gym class and called names like freak and nerd and Orc Face. But guess what? I was called names, too. Like “Brenden Wendle Lover” (TLA!) and “Smelly Shelly” (OMG!) and “Turtle Head” (WTH?). At least if I was part of a D&D group, I’d have had the benefit of returning to a group of friends I knew would have had my back. And my turtle head.
So, in the spirit of the season, I’d like to give thanks to D&D for imparting these important life lessons. For some of you, it may not be too late. Go on without me! Save yourselves! Back to middle school we go!
To read the rest, please visit Dragon Magazine.