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

On Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:34:14 -0600, dozens wrote:

ah, I was thinking about posting this one as well when I saw you already
did. It's altogether not that much different from a few other articles I
posted lately, but I find it interesting that it's the Washington Post
that decided to run it.

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.
 
[...]
 
 
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.”
 
[...]
 
 
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.
 
[...]
 
 
 
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.
 
[...]
 
 
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.
 
[...]

ah, I was just about to post that one as well, when I saw you already did.