Archive for March, 2025

D&D, Finally

I’m going to do something new this weekend that I hope will be fun. I’m going to play Dungeons & Dragons for the very first time. A group of women in town are meeting at the library Sunday afternoon for a one-shot campaign (so a short one that can finish in one sitting instead of an extended adventure that requires multiple sessions).

I’ve wanted to do this since I was in 8th grade and first learned about D&D. It sounded like what my friends used to do in elementary school when we ran around the neighborhood acting out various scenarios — we’re pioneers, space explorers, detectives, etc. — only more organized and set up so you couldn’t just claim you defeated someone else. I think the idea of sitting around a table with friends, doing something cooperative, also appealed to me. I tried playing regular board games but I don’t like competition. Something similar, but where it’s more about making up a story together, and it’s the whole group winning together rather than competing against each other seemed like a good compromise. Unfortunately, the friends I had at school who played lived in a different part of town.

Then we moved to a farm outside a small town in a very conservative area during the Satanic Panic when I was in high school. They had seminars about how all rock music was satanic and would lead you to the devil at churches in town, and they were convinced that D&D was worshipping satan and would lead to demonic possession. (These same people thought that yoga was satanic, said meditation was leaving yourself open for demons to take over, and later thought reading Harry Potter books would lead to kids practicing witchcraft.) If anyone in that town played D&D, I wouldn’t have heard of it, and I still would have had a transportation issue in meeting up with anyone.

In college, a lot of my friends played, but they were all pretty hardcore and weren’t at all open to dealing with a newbie. There was an ongoing game in the study lounge every weekend, but these guys had been playing the same characters since high school, and they were doing a really involved campaign. Some of them were into it enough that they wore costumes. They didn’t even like spectators. I got kicked out of the study lounge when I tried to watch.

As an adult, I ran into similar issues. There was a group at my old church that played regularly, but they’d been playing together since high school and didn’t have room for anyone else. Most people I hung out with either had enough scheduling issues that they didn’t want to try to get anything started, or they had a longstanding group. At conventions they sometimes did intro one-shot campaigns, but since I was at conventions as a speaker, I didn’t have time in my schedule to do anything like that. I seldom had more than an hour free at a time.

I get a bit jealous when I read about people’s gaming groups—the food they make, the funny things that come out of their games. Sometimes it sounds kind of like a lot of book groups I’ve known, so the game is secondary to getting together with friends to eat and talk, and I think maybe that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. In a way, writing fantasy novels is a kind of solo D&D, but without rules or dice to govern how things should go.

Someone started a Facebook group for women in this town who are looking to make friends, and most of the activities people have come up with haven’t appealed to me. It seems to be younger women who want to go to wineries or concerts. But then someone mentioned this, and I thought it would be fun. They do a D&D night once a month at a local brewpub, and there’s a gaming store downtown, so I figured there would be people in town who played, but I didn’t know how to find them, and I didn’t know if they’d be newbie-friendly. This group is mostly newcomers. I’ll probably be the grandma of the group, but at least I’ll have a chance to see what I think about it. It may be weird to me as a fantasy writer, dealing with someone else’s world and someone else steering the plot. At the very least, I’ll get to meet several other women in town, and maybe I’ll get even more of the jokes in that Dungeons & Dragons movie. Maybe I should rewatch that episode of Community to prepare myself. I also need to come up with a character. I wonder if I could base it on a character I’m brainstorming now and see if I come up with any ideas I can use.

movies

The Fantasy/SF Specturm

Last weekend I watched the new version of Dune, both parts 1 and 2. I read the book when I was a teenager, and I saw the 80s movie, but I didn’t get into the series. I never read any of the other books. I didn’t remember much, just the litany against fear, the stillsuits, and the hand in the box test. I don’t recall being too impressed by the 80s movie, but I rather liked this new one, especially part 2 (mostly the stuff about riding the sandworms).

I did feel like we were getting a circle of influences, though. It’s pretty obvious that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Dune when he created Star Wars. We had that corrupt galactic empire, the desert planet, the quasi-religious mystical order, the bad guy on life support, and the drug called spice. But these movies also seemed to be influenced by Star Wars in some of the imagery, especially the way the empire looked.

I think both Dune and Star Wars also fall into the category of epic fantasy in a science fiction setting. Although both stories take place in futuristic worlds with spaceships and high technology, the plots are more fantasy-oriented. You could move these stories to a more typical fantasy world without changing much about the plots. The stories revolve around things like prophecies, destiny, a chosen one, and that quasi-religious order with mystical powers. In Dune, one of the things that makes “spice” valuable is that it’s what allows faster-than-light navigation, but it mostly seems to be a McGuffin, a reason why people are in conflict on this planet, which opens the door for the prophesied Chosen One to show up. The story isn’t about faster-than-light navigation, it’s about the prophesies, visions, and a reluctant Chosen One coming into his power, which is more a fantasy story than a science fiction story.

It’s similar in Star Wars. The original movie is about a farmboy learning about his heritage and finding he has a supernatural power, then going to rescue a princess and using his power to defeat the bad guys — a classic fantasy plot. There’s never really much science fiction in Star Wars, and their attempts at doing science, like finding a scientific explanation for why some people are extra powerful in the Force, didn’t work. Even the entries in the saga that are less fantasy (the plot doesn’t depend on the Force) aren’t science fiction. Rogue One and Andor are more spy thriller in a science fiction setting, so would be space opera.

If you’re looking at it on a spectrum with fantasy at one end and science fiction at the other, you’d have something like Star Wars close to the fantasy end, then Dune pretty close to it. We move into space opera when it’s more about the society, the adventure, or the characters than about the science, but there aren’t any mystical or magical elements. That’s where things like Star Trek would fall. There’s no supernatural stuff or mysticism, like in space fantasy, but the actual science stuff is often pretty sketchy. You could move a lot of their core stories to a different setting and they might still work — make it about explorers on earth during the age of exploration. Then there’s science fiction that’s really about the science and technology where you can’t remove the science from the story and still have the plot work. These would be stories about exploring other worlds where they really have to deal with alien life forms and environments, not just humans with odd cultures or funny noses. Or stories about how the use of robots changes human society.

At least, that’s my classification method. I thought I liked science fiction when I became a Star Wars fan, and I do like some of it, but after years in a science fiction book group, I realized that what I like is more space-set fantasy and space opera. Hard science fiction mostly bores me, though I do like books that get into how an alien environment might work, especially if I like the characters.

Some people even distinguish between hard and soft fantasy, with hard fantasy having a more codified magical system with clear rules — magic as science — and soft fantasy being more about the mystical, with magical things just happening and no one’s entirely sure how it works. With soft fantasy, the magic is more part of the setting (like the futuristic world being the setting for space fantasy) while in hard fantasy the magic is a crucial element of the plot. I’m not entirely certain I buy that, but then I haven’t read a lot of the stuff that people call “hard” fantasy. For me it all comes down to whether I like the characters and enjoy spending time in that world. I don’t care about knowing the various rules of magic, other than that I do feel like some limitations are necessary to make the story interesting.

As for Dune, it may be time for a reread. I’m basing this assessment mostly on the recent movies since I don’t remember much about the book. I liked the book but didn’t get too into it. Maybe it’ll hit differently if I’m thinking of it as fantasy. And I’m sure I’ll have a different perspective on the book now than I did at sixteen.