'Something mystical happens when you give yourself permission to play pretend,' writes game designer Kate Welch
is a game designer, Dungeon Master, and the first female game designer on Dungeons and Dragon’s fifth editionbecame aware of Dungeons & Dragons at the same instant that I was made to believe that D&D was maybe not for me. In 2003, I was working in a coffee shop in a small North Carolina town.
Growing up as a self-ascribed “nerdy girl,” I often felt invisible and excluded for my interests , and was exceptionally lonely as a result. So I know how those boys in the coffee shop felt. I’d been a devoted Star Wars role-player in online chat rooms since I was 13. It wasn’t a hobby you shared with folks. It was something you hid.Heavy Metal
magazine vibe to it—a publication I appreciate as an adult, but one that I suspect was not aimed to appeal to young women and girls. At the time, it seemed to me that D&D was almost certainly about wielding huge swords , killing dragons , and carrying bare-breasted damsels over your shoulder . I was fine with my story-driven Star Wars chat room dramas, thank you very much.
It was only years later, around 2010, that I saw Acquisitions Incorporated on the main stage at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. For the uninitiated, Acquisitions Incorporated is a D&D party that stars the creators of thewebcomic and whoever they can talk into sharing a stage with them while they play hilarious games of D&D. These five dorky, lovable dudes played D&D in front of a packed theater and brought the house down.
What I’ve found is that something mystical happens when you give yourself permission to play pretend. Being vulnerable and creative is a big part of it—you must trust and be trusted with what feels like subjective foolishness. But when you add these elements of collective imagination and improvisation, you create a strange alchemy that inscribes pathways in your brain, tangible as the memories of real life, even though it lives solely in the minds of a select few.
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