Q&A with a Dungeon Master

Editor's Note: An excerpt of this interview appeared in Cognoscenti's weekly Sunday newsletter of ideas and opinions. To become a subscriber, sign up here.

Ethan Gilsdorf is a regular Cog contributor. He’s the author of the award-winning memoir, “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks” and his essays have been selected for textbooks and anthologies. He teaches writing at GrubStreet and LitArtsRI and is on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University. But he’s also a professional Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) Dungeon Master who teaches people how to play D&D (you can get more info on his next class here), which meant nothing to me until I started working with him on an essay about the 50th birthday of D&D.

Even though I’m a child of the ‘70s, I never understood the appeal of role-playing fantasy games like D&D. Ethan helped me see the light. “Human beings have always had this interest in magic and fairy tales,” Ethan explained as we chatted over Zoom. “I think sometimes the idea of the real world is too much. It's mundane and boring and wasn't the world better when we believed that there were gnomes and fairies in our backyard, at the edge of the forest?”

Why as adults, he wondered, do we have to give up on those ideas? Why can't we still live in that playful space where we can imagine different outcomes? That is, after all, where innovation and creative ideas come from. 

“Modern life — things like computers and bureaucracy — detaches us from core experiences. 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. 

Here’s more of our conversation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. – Kate Neale Cooper

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 internet has had a huge impact on the way people think about fantasy because everyone plays video games now. These games may or may not be fantasy themed or involve role-playing, but the idea that you could spend time as an adult playing a game lends a legitimacy to gaming itself, that you can learn from gaming, that gaming might be a worthwhile activity.

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 play football, or join 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 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.

D&D offers a million ways to go down rabbit holes to learn more about these topics. For me that meant checking out books in the library about castles and siege warfare, or medieval history, or folk tales, or architecture. The game sparked an intellectual curiosity to learn more about the real world.

KNC: What makes the D&D experience so different from any other game? 

EG: The Dungeon Master, who's the referee but also the master storyteller, gives characters choices and presents them with situations and asks them questions. The Dungeon Master says, “You see this, you notice that this is happening. What do you do?” The players decide how to act. All of that is verbal. There’s no game board. We might have pieces of paper in front of us that help us keep track of our character’s traits and inventory of items. But primarily, the game is all happening up here [points to his brain]. I think that's what's important. These days, you can buy all kinds of D&D accessories and gadgets and digital toys if you want to, but I feel very strongly that the game is, at its core, best when it's just people sitting around a table imagining the world, the story together. That's what's amazing about D&D, and that's the thing that hasn't changed in 50 years.

KNC: So how does a game of D&D end? There’s really no way to win, right?

EG: Right. You don’t “win” like in Monopoly or chess or Settlers of Catan. There’s no single winner. But you can “win” in the sense that you could decide as a group to finish this quest that we're on. Imagine the Dungeon Master says, your quest is to retrieve this magical sword that was hidden in this tomb. If you get the sword and bring it back to the town square and put it into the fountain, it will lift the town’s curse and healing and great things will happen. That's your mission, and if as a group you are able to complete this mission, you could say that's a win, but the game doesn't really have an ultimate outcome. The story continues to the next adventure.

For me, the win is if we've had a really fun time together. We've amused ourselves, we've had some emotional, exciting moments. Along the way, we’ve made these little sparks of connection. We've done something that has stakes and has meaning. Those are D&D’s wins. Your goal is to work together to solve a problem, not defeat each other — a totally different game experience. We've had some laughs, we've told a really interesting story. That’s a pretty great metaphor for life, too.

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