Q&A with a Dungeon Master

Also: Dispatch from a swing state [❤️ Donate]( [View in Browser]( October 20, 2024  Dear Cog reader, Even though I'm a child of the '70s, I never understood the appeal of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.  Then I started talking to Ethan Gilsdorf.  Ethan teaches writing at GrubStreet, [LitArts RI]( and Lasell University. He's also the author of the award-winning memoir "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks" and a professional D&D Dungeon Master - something that meant nothing to me before he and I met. As I worked with him on [an essay about the 50th birthday of D&D]( Ethan explained to me that human beings have always been interested in magic and fairy tales because they allow us to imagine a different world and access a playful space. "Modern life - things like computers and bureaucracy - detaches us from core experiences," Ethan said. "People go hiking in the woods to escape all that. And fantasy allows us to do that, too." In other words, fantasy provides a reset for a lot of people - not just freaks and geeks.  You can read Ethan's full essay [here]( and more from our conversation below: Kate Neale Cooper: I watched [your TEDx talk about D&D]( which was really great. You mention this stereotype of a person who plays D&D, you called them dweebs, dorks. How fair do you think that stereotype is?  Ethan Gilsdorf: As someone who is passionate about D&D, I think that stereotype is unfair, but I also think a lot of stereotypes are unfair, right? Traditionally, our culture is - or at least has been - anti-imagination, anti-fantasy. Certain activities and hobbies in our culture - say, sports - fit into people's understanding of something that's okay to spend your time on. Others don't. D&D is this weird, arcane activity. D&D is playing make-believe, which is something that maybe you should have given up when you entered adolescence.  The fantasy genre was long seen as a very specialized, geeky passion. But in recent years it has become incredibly mainstream, thanks to movies, TV shows and books - "Lord of the Rings," "Game of Thrones," "Harry Potter," just to name some obvious ones. The popularity of these franchises had a tempering effect on the absurd idea that a fantasy world where there are wizards, magic, orcs and goblins might exist. All that now seems more acceptable. The stereotype is that D&D players are boys, not girls, which actually isn't really true anymore. My understanding is that it's now closer to 60% male, 40% female. A smaller but growing percentage of people who identify as LGBTQIA+ are attracted to the game, perhaps because the role-playing aspect gives people who are experimenting with or questioning or coming to understand their identity a safe place to explore that.  KNC: I don't remember much about D&D from my childhood, but I do remember it making headlines.  EG: In the 1980s, during the Satanic Panic, religious leaders were trying to make the case that D&D made kids go to the dark side, that it was encouraging Satanism. The irony is that most D&D storylines are about good and evil - and the players are trying to do the right thing. If you encounter a devil or a demon or someone bad, your goal is usually to defeat it. It's not to join forces with it or glorify it.  A story about triumphing over evil is one reason why the game is so popular. People want to feel like they are going to do the right thing, they want to feel like they're heroes. And D&D provides that framework, that narrative structure for those do-good stories to happen again and again.  Today, there's been a 180-degree flip on the Satanism narrative. People see D&D as educational and helpful. Kids are on their screens all the time. And here's this activity where kids are hanging out in the cafeteria or at an after-school club or at someone's house on a Friday night, and they're not looking at their phones. They're interacting with each other.  KNC: You touch on this in your TEDx talk. You identify specific skills you think D&D helps people develop. Can you talk about that a little more?  EG: Part of me worries that I'm secretly trying to justify all the millions of hours I've spent playing D&D over my lifetime! But seriously, it's very easy for people to justify why you join the military, or you play football, or you're on the debate team. You learn all these important skills, right? Take football: People say it's good for kids to be physically active, but also you learn about teamwork. You learn about collaboration. You learn about resilience, problem solving, and respecting differences. I think those same things - outside of physical activity - are true of D&D, too. I'm an elf wizard, she's a halfling rogue, they're a half-orc barbarian. Each player has unique skills and talents they bring to the game. I personally like to think that because D&D is more imaginative; it teaches other skills, too. D&D introduced me to curiosity about these imaginary worlds I created. I had to think about who lives there and what language they speak and what their history is and what the geography and meteorology are like. What makes them real, is all in the details. You can [read the full Q&A here](. Until soon, Kate Neale Cooper Editor, Cognoscenti Must Reads [D&D turns 50 this year. 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