This week in EDL 290T, our class started a three-part Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The assigned groups were stable throughout the campaign. Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game that allows for players to create their own characters from a variety of classes, races, and backgrounds. A Dungeon Master, or DM, guides players through their journey as they work through the campaign with fighting, healing, and skill checks being parts of the gameplay. There’s room for improvisation, too, since players can talk among themselves and take a story totally off the rails if they want to.

In the first play session for our D&D group, we introduced ourselves and our characters. I was a druid, but the group also had a barbarian, a sorcerer, a wizard, and a warlock. We encountered a group of goblins and rolled our d20s for initiative to see who would be first into combat; this time, it was me. After killing off most of the goblin gang, our group got the last goblin to surrender and cleared out the supplies. The goblin, Rushwater, helped by giving us information on the goblin cave where the explorers we were following were taken and worked out a plan to help us get back our leader and get Rushwater the freedom he desired.

I liked how interactive the game was and had fun getting into character by playing someone I normally wouldn’t play. I also liked that the DM for my group was good at explaining the different times for dice-rolling, since this was my first time playing D&D so I didn’t know what I was doing. The one thing I didn’t like was that I had some trouble tracking what was happening, but by the end of the play session I felt up to speed on what we were doing as a group. The D&D campaign we were partaking in ties into leadership because leadership means being hands-on and being able to adapt to a rapidly evolving situation, which were both things we had to do to play our characters effectively in the first part of the campaign.

I have several friends that are big into fantasy and creating characters, so I think setting up a shorter campaign with those friends would be fun as long as I wasn’t the DM; I don’t feel comfortable running a campaign on my own just yet.