Some dads stand in the rain bellowing encouragement to their kids on the pitch. Others sit quietly beside their children, fishing-rods in hand, together hoping for a catch. Come the weekend, whenever I can, I send my two boys into dark, dangerous places and make them fight bugbears, dark elves and evil sorcerers.
When it comes to father and son bonding activities, it’s no surprise that dads today should look to their own childhoods for inspiration. Yet given my father took me to a boxing club when I was nine, thinking he would toughen me up but succeeding only in giving me weekly anxiety attacks, I searched elsewhere for the answer. I didn’t have far to look.
I was 10 when I first played Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). A classmate at my junior school explained: it’s a bit like a board game but there’s no board. Instead, you and your friends play your way through stories in which you are the heroes, you fight the monsters, you make all the choices. Like Lord of the Rings, except you can be Frodo or Legolas or (even better) Aragorn. And, within parameters set by the Dungeon Master, a player who guides the story and sets the challenges, you can do whatever you like.
After a few sessions at the Friday-night D&D club at Bexleyheath library, south-east London, playing a human warrior embarrassingly named Dar Strongrip, I was hooked. For the first time in my life I realised a narrative could be mutable – no longer a road you followed but a tree you could climb, with numerous, gnarled branches you could clamber along to reach the top. Following years of feeling marginalised by my lack of interest in team sports and still too young to find cultural self-definition in music or movies, I’d finally found my tribe. Yes, we were treated like weirdos, and in America a fanatical group of concerned parents was attacking D&D for encouraging Satanism and suicide. Also, the Saturday-morning cartoon of the same name was mortifying to us all. But it was a tribe I was proud to be part of.
About a year ago, satisfied that no one would be accusing me of exposing my kids to Satanic ritual abuse, I was curious to see if I could bring my two boys, Louis, now 10, and Max, six, into the tribe, too. After finally quitting at the age of 17, I’d recently rediscovered the game with the release of its fifth-edition rules. And I’d resurrected my Friday club with a few of the friends I’d played with in the 80s, who I’ve stayed close to all my life. (Going on imaginary adventures with people creates an enduring sense of companionship, it seems.)
Though well below the recommended age rating of 12, the boys were already enthralled by my rule books, especially the Monster Manual, a colourful compendium of deadly fantastic beasts. They pored over the artworks and compared the Challenge Ratings of different creatures. The morning after each Friday club session, I was grilled for an update on the previous night’s dramas.
So, keeping play sessions short and scenarios simple, I became their Dungeon Master, easing them in to this world where you roll strangely shaped dice and your heroic alter-ego is represented by a series of statistics on a sheet of paper. I didn’t feel I was turning my kids into weirdos. Popular culture is much more accepting of D&D these days – it was integral to the plot of Stranger Things, for example. And besides, it has to be more socially constructive than letting them watch TV all day or, say, play Call of Duty online with sweary strangers. D&D involves pencils, paper, direct social interaction and dice. Plus, it’s bona fide educational: all three Rs in one fell swoop.
Of course, it’s also fun. Despite all the stats and maths, the real magic happens in your mind, and it wasn’t long before I was acting out the lurking monster, hunching my shoulders and squeezing my voice into a Gollum-esque croak, or playing the fool as a victimised goblin prone to fainting fits. Despite my limited acting skills, it went down well. “I love how someone you know and like creates the entire game for you. I love how you can do what you like. Anything can happen,” said Louis after a few sessions. His limber imagination, I observed with quiet pride, was now performing back flips of its own.
Unsurprisingly, fighting monsters fast proved his and Max’s favourite aspect, despite the occasional frustration at bad dice rolls. (Which I admittedly share myself.) But what really astonished me was the way they both easily grasped the relatively complex rule system — to the point where my eldest, having studied the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide during night after night of bedtime reading, began hacking the game, neatly writing out his own, homebrewed variants on D&D’s system.
Louis has even turned Dungeon Master for me, taking me on a bewildering, phantasmagorical journey into a zombie-populated netherworld, where he made me race against time as a necrotic infection threatened to consume my poor character. (I have chosen not to read anything into this.)
Then came the biggest surprise of all. Both boys wanted to create new characters, from a race of elves who can shapeshift into wolves. That wasn’t the surprising part. “We’re going to be twin sisters,” announced Louis. When I was his age, in 1984, it never once crossed my mind to play a non-male character. And even if it had, I imagine I would have resisted the idea for fear of being branded “girlish”. But here were my two boys – who never play with female action-figures or pretend to be women when they engage in their dress-up combat games – embracing the idea without even a hint of self-consciousness.
“Why sisters?” I inquired. Max merely shrugged and said airily, “I just think it goes with them.” Partly, I choose to treat this as a sign of a culture that’s more inclusive and accepting of diversity than it was 32 years ago. But also, I wonder if this role-playing game has encouraged my sons to be more empathetic than have any of their other play activities. It has, I believe, helped to open their minds.
Now, whenever we can find the time, Morroe the Lythari ranger (Louis) – aggressive, impulsive, hater of humans – and Raksha her warlock sister (Max) – the reasonable, diplomatic one – combat injustice (and monsters) together in The Forgotten Realms. It is gratifying to see how the drama of the game absorbs the boys, and it is a privilege to share such a fresh-aired imaginative arena with them.
It has enabled me to connect with them as no activity has before. We do other things together: cycling, playing catch, going to the cinema. But when we play, and the real world melts away for an hour or two, we sit around that table, face-to-face, as equals. They, I suspect, feel empowered by playing with a grownup. I, meanwhile, get to exercise my own inner child. It’s a fair trade-off. So, as pleasing as it is to see Dungeons & Dragons bubble back up into the zeitgeist, for me its return has a personal resonance. I’m not sure anything else allows you to so directly share mind-space with your kids. It’s exciting. As Louis says, anything can happen.