Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is known for its extensive rules and devoted players. The game is a tabletop role-playing game in which a set of players choose characters, called adventurers, and form an adventuring party together. One person, called a dungeon master (DM), narrates the story and runs the game. I had limited knowledge about the game, and many misperceptions, until recently, when my coworker, a long-time D&D player, described her character to me with such depth and passion that it felt like she was talking about an intimate friend of hers. She had played this character for years in a D&D campaign with her friends, and at that point, the character truly did have a life of her own. When I realized the game was not just about spell-casting wizards and fire-breathing dragons, but about characters with complex choices within a multiverse of worlds, I became curious to know more. I reached out to the D&D club on campus, and I learned that there are multiple groups actively playing different campaigns—that is, long-term stories using the same characters adventuring together—on campus. The club is the space where all these separate groups convene to share their common interests, and where new players can join in. So, I ended up going to one group’s D&D session on a Friday evening. Gabe Glassic, a junior on campus, was the DM for this group. He graciously allowed me to ask an endless series of questions and sit in on their session. Ozzie Pagan, a junior on campus and president of the D&D club, was also present for the interview. Ozzie is the DM for a different group on campus, but he was familiar with Gabe’s campaign. Gabe warned me that they often played for several hours, sometimes going from six until midnight. I arrived at Olin at 5 pm with a long list of questions and some notes about the rules of D&D. I tried to do research beforehand to at least get some of the terminology down, but I really had no idea what I was walking into. Gabe and Ozzie already had the table set up. Jolly medieval music thumped from a speaker propped up on top of the chalkboard. Gabe sat at the head of the table with a DM’s screen—a folded piece of cardboard stood up on its edge—spanning across, protecting the DM’s special knowledge of the campaign from the players’ view. A fruit bowl sat in the center of the table, filled with many-sided dice. Behind the DM screen, there was a laptop, a notepad, and even more dice. A hardcover game book with the words Curse of Strahd caught my eye. On the cover, a vampire king sat menacingly on a throne. Gabe has played D&D since he was in middle school, and Ozzie since early on in high school. They are both dedicated DMs who started out their D&D careers in the role of the narrator and referee of the game. Being a DM requires thinking quickly and creatively as the players react to the world. It also involves balancing multiple storylines at once. Some DMs narrate a game based on a book with an outline of the world, and others take on the huge project of creating their own world and the stories within it. The DMs must be fair-minded and cannot be biased toward certain outcomes in the game. But while it may seem like the DM holds all the power, this is not at all the case. One of the most challenging parts of this role is that the DM must allow their players the freedom to explore the world on their own—that is, the action of the players is far beyond the DM’s realm of control. Ozzie created his own world, a task requiring extensive work. “I can’t really stick to a book,” he says. “I have a hard time multi-tasking in that way, paying attention to the book and then orating it to the players.” Instead, he prefers the creative freedom afforded by making his own world. Describing his campaign, he says, “The players are a group of adventurers going to a country where adventurers have been banned for a long time. They are forging what adventuring is going to be like in this area for these outsiders, and along the way, they are encountering rival groups like a National Adventuring Guild, which does not like them, and people generally have an aversion to them because adventurers have been outlawed.” Gabe has also developed worlds of his own before, and he has multiple unfinished maps that he works on. He says, “The amount of creativity required to do that. You’re making a whole world from scratch. There’s lots of factors to consider.” He believes the DM must find balance in their efforts to build a campaign and not let themselves become too bogged down by minor details. Sometimes creativity is improvised, rather than fine-tuned. “What a lot of DMs do nowadays is buy a book, and it has the whole story.” Gabe held up Curse of Strahd, a D&D book rated as one of the best stories. However, using a book “doesn’t completely destroy all creativity, because I could read something and just change it depending on who my group is or what I see fit,” he explained. Book or no book, the DM must stay engaged and ready for his player to take the story in a new direction. The labor required for a D&D game to run smoothly varies. Some D&D players create their own maps of the world, paint their own miniatures, and write fictional narratives of their world. T his method of playing remains quite popular—it is all part of what Ozzie described as the “hobby” aspects of the game. Many players also prefer the digitized form of the game, both for the convenience it offers and for the unique ways the online platform can engage the players. Gabe says he has stayed in contact with friends from high school via the online D&D platforms. Also, it allows the DM and the players to access an online map of their world, share images, and to have an animated version of their character. When I observed the session, even though all the players had their laptops or phones, the digitized platform seemed merely supplemental to the game.“ You don’t really need all of this equipment,” Gabe says, “I’ve played sessions with nothing. All you need is dice, paper, and your imagination.” “I still tend to use maps and physical miniatures,” says Ozzie. He enjoyed the artistic side of D&D, making maps and painting miniatures. Regardless of whether the game is partially digitized or has a physical map, it quickly becomes enthralling. Gabe has played for 19 hours straight, and Ozzie once played Saturday and Sunday, only pausing to sleep. The real action of the game happened in the atmosphere of the room: the diverse NPC voices narrated by the DM, the dynamics that arose among the players, and the convergence of choice and probability unfolding. I half-expected I would have had enough of observing after twenty minutes or so, but I ended up staying for multiple hours awaiting the character’s next moves. The imagination of the group brings the game alive. Throughout the game, the players mediate between the “real world” and the game. They informed their characters from their own life experiences, but their characters also informed them as people. One player says his religious upbringing informed the character he played. Ozzie shares that before D&D he was introverted and struggled to voice himself, but playing the game allowed him to build social confidence and the ability to direct people. The group seemed to be taking part in two worlds at once—the one inside the Olin classroom and the other in the village of Barovia, where Curse of Strahd is set. At one point, we all became hungry and got dinner from Lower Wismer, as if calling a half-time break, and then resumed playing the game like it never happened. The group happily allowed me to sit in on their game, although my presence might have hindered their full immersion into the game. After I left, they played for many more hours. The world of Barovia, run by the all-powerful Count Strahd Von Zarovich, lies dormant until Friday at 6 pm when the party named “Four of a Kind” comes together to breathe life back into the world. When I asked what role creativity plays in the game, Gabe stated, “The game itself is creativity; we are just finding a way to channel it.” If you are interested in learning more about D&D, reach out to dungeonsdragonsclub@ursinus.edu.
Copyright © 2026 | The Grizzly