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.