If you’ve lurked around the ground or fourth floors of the University Student Center late at night and heard students cheering, dice clacking or a medieval cover of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” playing, allow me to apologize – you’ve overheard the Dungeons & Dragons game I run on campus.
Since October, a handful of The Hatchet’s staff and I have gathered every week in the student center’s conference rooms and study spaces and when they’re booked, the basement of The Hatchet’s townhouse. What was supposed to be a single session or one-shot – think a standalone episode of a television series – has morphed into a monthslong saga, and the size of our group has grown from five to nine players total. I wanted friends, and I got them thanks to D&D.
For the uninitiated, D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game. You and your fellow players create characters – a cunning thief, a charismatic bard, a cool-headed wizard – before acting out a variety of scenarios and rolling dice to determine the outcome of your actions. The higher you roll, the better the chances of success are. All you need is a little luck to get a discount at a local shop or slay an ancient dragon, two common encounters in D&D’s medieval fantasy setting.
I haven’t dueled with a dragon, but the game has been key in an even greater quest – making friends in college. I didn’t know where to start, but I did know about D&D. So with my collection of multicolored polyhedral dice and guidebooks, I searched the land of Foggy Bottom for a group of people to roll with when I arrived on campus for my sophomore year in fall 2021. Since then, I’ve found D&D isn’t just about fantasy. For me, it’s been a tool to turn strangers into friends – and all it takes is a little initiative.
I started playing D&D with some friends in high school, and it wasn’t long before I stepped up to be our Dungeon Master to keep our adventures going. The Dungeon Master runs the game and orchestrates the story, and my parents’ dining room table soon became a stage to tell tales of brave and daring heroes from haunted houses to frost-covered caverns.
It takes quite a bit of work to tell these stories – being a Dungeon Master involves keeping the history of a world that exists largely in your imagination. I can tell my players the date on a made-up calendar. I can whet their appetites with fictional foods. And I can greet them as the townsfolk from the largest cities to the smallest hamlets. My Google Drive is bursting at the seams with documents full of details about this mystical world that have taken me days to put together.
But all that work is, was and always will be worth it. The five of us – Orr, Anuj, Garrett, Afek and yours truly – and the characters we created spent hundreds of hours together over the course of high school. In the game, we explored ancient ruins and collapsed mines. Once our four-hour sessions wrapped up, we talked over pizza, soda and chips about our classes, girlfriends and, in the early days of 2020, the emerging pandemic.
Our games came to an end that year, and our friendships withered without D&D to bring us together. After a full year of online classes, the only other person I knew when I first moved on campus sophomore year was my roommate.
In search of a new friend group, I started attending weekly meetings of the GW Tabletop Gaming Society that fall. I eventually offered to run my own D&D campaign for three of the society’s members who were then strangers. We’ll have our 26th meeting on Friday, a year and a half since we started playing D&D together. Our games and our friendship have continued despite the occasional case of COVID-19, many last-minute cancellations – usually mine – and a transition from in-person to virtual meetings.
When I became the opinions editor of the Hatchet last spring, I knew my fellow staff members more as email addresses or names on a Google Doc than as actual people. A few emails, Slack messages and texts later and our D&D group was off and running. Though we still halt for breaking news and late-night edits, we’ve gone from coworkers to confidantes over the course of 16 D&D sessions. All it took was me asking if anyone was interested.
Between two D&D campaigns, classes and The Hatchet, my workload as Dungeon Master hasn’t gotten any lighter. That’s okay – D&D has allowed me to share something I love with others who have quickly become my friends precisely because I shared that passion with them.
You may not have to consult a list of monsters to challenge your players during that week’s session, take notes in Google Docs or consult tomes of D&D-related information, but good friendships don’t come to those who wait – you have to put in the work.
Your soon-to-be friends are going to need a reason to stick with you and with each other, and you can almost certainly parlay your passion into something you can do with other people who can quickly become part of your life. So make plans, send out a when2meet and get a head count – that’s what I do.
It doesn’t take much to turn strangers into friends, just the right place and the right time. Whether they’re a group of adventurers looking for their first quest or acquaintances looking to get to know each other better, all they need is you to lead the charge.
Ethan Benn, a junior majoring in journalism and mass communication, is the opinions editor.
