WaPo Opinion: For Dungeons & Dragons, the magic is in the memories

https://archive.is/PjtWt
1970s: A miracle from my brother
Anderson Cooper is a journalist and anchors “Anderson Cooper 360” on CNN.
Fletcher, my elven thief, was dear to my heart. He wore a red cape and, in my mind, bore a close resemblance to D’Artagnan from “The Three Musketeers.” Fletcher and his fellow adventurers would slay monsters and collect treasure. Ever the magnanimous hero, he hosted a party for the townspeople using his windfall of gold.
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1980s: A mythology of the mind
Lev Grossman is the author of “The Bright Sword” and the “Magicians” trilogy.
We started hearing rumors about it when I was in fourth grade. Nobody knew exactly what Dungeons & Dragons was except that it wasn’t quite a normal game; it was something weird and arcane and important, like sex or calculus. An older boy who’d played it showed me, furtively, a map hand-drawn in ballpoint pen on graph paper. I struggled to grasp the concept. Was it a board game? Like Sorry? But the pieces could go, like, in any direction? And there’s more than one board? “In D&D,” the boy said sagely, “there are many maps.”
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1990s: A good dungeon master is a good collaborator
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor, writer, director and the founder of HitRecord.
It was something like 1994. I was 13. My friend Nick was coming over later, and I was getting ready. We had agreed that I would be dungeon master that day. I was behaving a bit like a screenwriter outlining a movie and a bit like a kindergartner playing pretend. I paced around my room, absorbed in thought, a pad of graph paper and pencils ready at hand somewhere on the carpeted floor. And then, I had an idea.
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2000s: A community of my own
Matthew Mercer is a voice actor and co-founder of Critical Role, where he serves as chief creative officer and game master for the company’s flagship show, “Critical Role.”
One by one, they stopped coming to play. Folks who had never tried it canceled at the last minute, feeling awkward about joining something they didn’t understand. Experienced players who were looking forward to making characters and building a story together struggled to explain to their partners why they needed to spend hours away with their “work friends” to play make-believe. The D&D campaign I had poured myself into fizzled to nothing. I wasn’t angry at my friends, but I was worried about the death of this passion that had meant so much to me.
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2010s: A character’s journey — and my own
Ally Beardsley is a comedian and actor in the Dropout series “Dimension 20.”
I was an aspiring comedian in Los Angeles and had just landed a salaried job at the comedy website CollegeHumor. My co-worker and friend Brennan Lee Mulligan was looking for six comedians to create a show that would be like an at-home game of D&D. Why not? “Dimension 20” became a weird punctuation to my day.
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