“My name is Decker Rockel and I’m in the D&D club here.
“So D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game, which means you sit around a table and you roleplay as a character that you create. It involves a lot of dice rolling, so a lot of randomness. You have a DM, who is the Dungeon Master, who basically just runs the game so that you can actually play it. Most of the time it’s just a fantasy-based world, so you’ll have like- I don’t know- a wizard or a sorcerer. And here’s the thing about following the storyline. It is incredibly hard to get players to do what you want. So you have to base the storyline around what they are doing when you are a DM. You can guide them but they can get annoyed if you guide them so much.
“I mean, I love playing the game. Right now I’m DMing a game, but I really love playing the game because it’s fun to get immersed in a fantasy world and follow the story of the DM. Right now though, I’m DMing so what’s fun about that is getting to create the world and all the story and everything.
“My group currently is me, as the DM, then Warren, Colin, Zaire, and Rory. I think that’s it but more people can always show up. All of them have their own characters they play as.
“So, it kind of depends on what you prefer when making a character. There is a site called D&D Beyond that people can use, but the thing about that site is that I don’t use it because you have to pay for almost everything regarding creating a character. Instead, what I do is the old-fashioned way. I just print out a piece of paper–because you can print out these character sheets–and then I just fill it out. It involves a lot of dice rolling and numbers and calculating things. It’s a lot more complicated, but gives a lot more freedom than D&D Beyond does.
“I would definitely recommend D&D to people. It’s really fun so, I mean, if you just want to have fun and roleplay as a fantasy character and get into combat and stuff, I would recommend it. And if you like storytelling then DMing would also probably be a good pick.
“To be a DM, time commitments kind of depend. Planning can either take no time, where you’re just like ‘oh this is what I’m going to do’ or it can take a really long time. I spent probably about eight hours total planning out everything, and it’s still not a lot. But I planned the main story for my campaign and I have a bunch of characters. I’m going to try and take notes in sessions because so far I haven’t really done a good job at that. That way I don’t have to do it when I get home. The first session I had, not a whole lot happened, but I can imagine other sessions having a lot of notes to take so that might be time consuming. Also I think it would be good to plan the next session. I don’t have every session planned out. It’s just after every session, I’m going to be like ‘this is what I want to do for the next one.’ It’s not overly time consuming if you don’t want it to be.
“My favorite D&D moment, it was two years ago, and what happened was–it was the first, or actually maybe the second session–we went into the sewers. My character–Gary Goblin was his name–he decided to- there were these evil sewer monsters, so he kind of walked back and then threw a fireball in this gas filled sewer. Everyone blew up, including everyone in the party. Everyone got knocked out so we all just died in the first or second session. It was really funny.
