The D&D Golden Age - The Need for Collaborative Storytelling

Growing up, I like many others considered myself a geek. In the early 2000s, this was the beginning of the Golden Age of Geekdom. Video games were no longer a certain predictor of latent psychopathy, our we saw serious academic discussion around Batman movies, and we saw more of our friends online than anywhere else. But there was always one step beyond, that upper level of geekdom that many of us were too scared to cross over into. Above us all stood the elder geeks, and the preserve of this particular echelon was Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons was more of a symbol than a game: an indicator of the geek elite. Sure, we knew it involved dice, and numbers, and somehow Satan (?), but it was something beyond our experience. Still though, throughout my life I felt that siren call to the table top, to discover what I was truly missing.

The first time I played a TTRPG (table top role-playing game), was when I was around 16. Me and a few friends were at our friend’s house, when he told us about a game he’d discovered called Scion. I’d never heard of it, but we all agreed to give it a go. We went through character creation, asking a thousand questions about what stat meant what and what points to put where, but after a while we had it all set up.

The next thing I knew, it was 4am, I was speeding away in a truck with the son of Poseidon, while another member of our party was escaping into the sewers from a 50-foot-tall zombie foetus which just burst out of our healer.

I wasn’t sure how we got there, but I knew this was the first of many, many games to come.

Looking back on that first session, none of us knew a thing about the rules. Dice rolls were more suggestions than concrete numbers, and we decided most results based on roleplay (my circle of friends back then were hardcore theatre kids). I’m sure any real TTRPG player would have been baffled by what we were doing, but we didn’t care. It was the most fun any of us had had, and we’ve played various campaigns, on and off, ever since.

That game tapped into something that we hadn’t experienced before. Back then, video games were our main point of reference. We were obsessed by franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and talked of all the choice and freedom these games allowed, but it wasn’t until we started Scion that we realised how many constraints those games enforced.

Rather than experiencing a story, with a certain set of boundaries, we were creating a story with no constraints, and we were creating it together.

Dungeons & Dragons, and other TTRPG games have seen a rise in popularity over the past few years. It’s no longer the preserve of the nerd elite, and this is the reason why. It brings people together and it lets us create.

We live in a time when so much of culture is given to us pre-packaged and approved for sale. It’s calculated by incomprehensible algorithms, dissected frame by frame with eye tracking studies and focus grouped to hell. What I mean is, our stories were never our own. Sure, we connected with them, we saw ourselves in the daring heroines and brooding anti-heroes, but always aware that it wasn’t ours. It was something we were permitted to enjoy.

TTRPGs have the exact opposite approach. They give you a box of toys, some papers and some numbers, and the rest is up to you. People were starving to be the true director of their stories: to create the stories they wanted to see, without having to wait for a studio to throw it out in front of us. You wanted a wild-west, arcane, zombie flick. Go ahead. Looking for a superhero story set in renaissance Italy. Sounds great. You want a gangster romance, Lovecraftian space opera? A little convoluted, but I like your style.

People have realised the joy that TTRPGs were made for. The absolute freedom of storytelling on our own terms, not the half-copy of something we really wanted that we were used to.

Through these stories, we achieved things we never dreamed we were capable of. The shyest members of our groups found their voice in their care-free bards. The inquisitive put their minds to work through their rogue investigators, discovering the secrets of an ancient cult. These games showed us sides of ourselves we hadn’t realised were there, and unlocked skills we never knew we had.

We’re living in a golden age right now, where the true joy of TTRPGs is being realised by more people than ever before. Still now, there are more people only just starting out on their journey, and I hope this blog can help those people take those first steps into a world beyond what they ever imagined. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or brand new, I hope you find something of value in these pages, and eventually share my belief that D&D really can change the world.