by Brian Vandenbroek

Created on: May 05, 2008

Every teenage boy goes through the same phase. You get interested in Dungeons and Dragons. You play the game with friends. Then you start getting the questions. What is Dungeons and Dragons? How do you play? When I played, I almost spent more time explaining the game than I did playing it.

So, for those of you who aren't familiar with D&D as the game is called, here goes. Basically, Dungeons and Dragons is a game of let's pretend. You and your friends go on adventures set in a world of sword and sorcery, It's a fantasy world full of elves, magic users, dragons and monsters. The concept is not entirely unlike "Lord of the Rings."

You start by creating the character you're going to play. You choose from a list populated by fighters, elves, dwarves, thieves, clerics and so on. Once you know what kind of character you're playing you roll dice to randomly generate his or her vital statistics. This way you know how strong your character is, how proficient they are with weapons or magic spells and how much damage they can withstand before getting killed.

When you've got your characters set up, one of you runs the game and the others play. The person running the game (referred to as the Dungeon Master) describes what's going on. He tells you what your characters are doing, what they see and hear, if there are any monsters approaching and so on. The players decide how their character responds to the situations described by the Dungeon Master. Do we want to fight the monster, disarm the trap and get the treasure, whatever.

The adventures you go on are like stories. They can be about anything your Dungeon Master can create. Go rescue the princess from the tower. Go to the haunted castle to retrieve a relic. Whatever the adventure, the object of playing is to make your characters stronger, better able to handle trouble. They become stronger by acquiring experience points handed out at the end of the adventure. You acquire experience points by fighting monsters, successfully completing the adventure, playing a good game and so on.

At its core, D&D is all about getting together with your friends to have some fun and do a little storytelling. It's an interactive version of telling stories around the campfire. Playing D&D is more fun than just vegetating in front of the television set. It gets you involved in the story, your decisions shaping the way the story turns out. At any rate, that's basically what the game is and why I think it's fun.

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