A queer settler communications pro finds connection in another world

Who

I’m a 37-year-old bi/queer settler, writer and communications pro living with two roommates (one human and one bunny) in an apartment in Toronto. 

What

A friend’s online Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game.

Why  

I was looking for something to do during the first wave of the pandemic that would help stave off boredom and depression. I’d been interested in trying D&D for a while; it’s an old school role-playing game where a group of people create characters and stories that play out based on what you collectively imagine. I’ve played role-playing video games for years and have talked to friends who have already played D&D, but I’d never been invited to join a group, and it’s a difficult hobby to start if you don’t have someone to guide you.

Then my friend Stephen asked if I was interested in joining a D&D group he was creating. He wanted to use the pandemic to introduce new people to the game and figured if he needed an outlet to help him get through the scariness of COVID-19, others probably did, too. His hunch was right; within a week, our group, “D&D for n00bs,” was born.

Stephen is our Dungeon Master (a specific and not-at-all-kinky term for the person who plans the campaigns and runs each session), and the remaining five of us formed a ragtag group of newbies, learning what a “nat 20” is and how to make the best use of our characters’ unique skills and traits. This is a game that involves a fair amount of reading and strategy. Ultimately, D&D is for people who are willing to surrender to imagination and play.

Making connections

It’s fun, and so funny! When we’re not spending our role-playing time trying to advance the story, we spend it trying to make each other laugh. Stephen plays all the characters in our world that we come across, and he often uses silly accents and verbal quirks to add lightness to our session. When I asked him why he does this, he told me he’s read that people feel closest during shared moments of laughter, so when he started his own D&D group he decided humour would be a big part of it.

The game is also inherently collaborative. After years of playing head-to-head–style games, it’s a welcome change to play one that necessitates working together. Having a weekly opportunity to gather with a group as equally invested in the game as I am was especially nice during a summer of racial justice demonstrations and arguments over masks and infection rates.

I’ve become very connected to the character I’ve built, Ellora. She’s a Tiefling warlock, meaning she is descended from demons and agreed to become bound to a patron in exchange for access to magic (yes, I know how outrageous that sounds, but isn’t it COOL?). I’ve also become close with the other players. Every week, we set aside whatever is happening in the real world to slip into our characters and work out their problems instead of our own. The challenges our characters face are often too big for any one of us to solve alone, so we work together to defeat the evil sorcerer or discover the truth about a nefarious plot. When we discovered one character’s mother had been taken captive by a powerful and dangerous faction, we all tried to free her from their grip. When another character found out that assassins were hired to come after them, we combined forces to stop them and protect our ally. 

Stephen says he likes D&D because it’s collaborative storytelling at its best. He took a world someone else had created, asked us each create a backstory for our characters, and together we create the story we play. It’s a world we’ve built together.

Role play is a very natural thing to do. We all play pretend as kids, but the older you get, the harder it becomes to find an opportunity to play in this way. I love that D&D offers me a new chance to pretend and use my imagination.

How queer is it?

D&D can be anything you want it to be. For our all-queer group, that means the game we play each week is incredibly queer. The pre-created world we work with is one where queerness is completely normalized: From characters we meet in our travels to a medieval drag competition called the “Iron Runway” (which one of our group competed in). 

The game offers a blank slate for players to create whatever world they want. For example, there is a feature called Bladesong that uses a specific song to give players better speed and agility when using a sword—not very queer at first glance. But one of our group members, Will, chose to use Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” as the Bladesong every time he enabled it, turning the skill into a moment of queer power and joy, with the added advantage of taking care of any baddies we come across. 

D&D offers a chance to explore who we are through our characters. Many of my group’s storylines bring up themes of coming to terms with family—both family we’re born into and family we’ve chosen. In this way we get to explore our own familial relationships and how they serve us—or don’t.

Our game’s queerness has been such a welcome part of the past year, and this group has become my only access to queer community during the pandemic: My queer soccer league got cancelled, there was no Pride, dating got more complicated than usual and all of my favourite queer spaces got locked down. Playing with this group is my queer lifeline, and I’m so grateful for it.

“Our game’s queerness has been such a welcome part of the past year, and this group has become my only access to queer community during the pandemic.”

Playing D&D allows us to find power in places we can’t always in real life. Once, a character in the game erupted in a display of incel-style toxic masculinity and we got to stop him in his tracks. We can be any class, gender or personality we want. Another group member created a gender-fluid, half-elf Bard named Chari$ma Check, who is the most charismatic character in the group, constantly talking us out of trouble and winning over even the prickliest opponents. The game allows us to create and step into a world that can be anything we can imagine and reminds us that another world is possible.

Surprise!

As with many early-COVID-19 transitions, there were some initial tech issues to work out. We always knew we would use an online tool called Roll20 for the logistics of the game (so. many. dice rolls.), but it took a while to figure out how we wanted to interact with each other during the sessions. We experimented with a few different methods and settled on Facebook video chat, which allows us to get into the role-playing aspect and also catch up with each other. We still deal with sluggish internet connections now and then, but overall we’ve settled into a nice routine.

When we first started playing, I worried I would need to dust off my long-abandoned improv skills and often felt like I wasn’t playing “right.” But as we all settled into the game, I realized that there is no wrong way to play D&D. It really is all about play, and there are a million ways to do it.

More than anything, I was surprised by the intimacy I found—both with my characters and with my fellow players. Since beginning our game last May, my group has seen moves, roommate troubles, cancer diagnoses, career changes, caregiving challenges and, yes, COVID-19. We’ve started taking time at the beginning of each session to catch up and talk about our lives. Having a standing meeting in the midst of the pandemic has been a great anchor in a tough time. Finding this group of people and growing close to each other has been one of the greatest silver linings of this tough year, even though some of us have never met in person. I look forward to a time (post-pandemic) when we get to change that.

Have you found an imaginative way to create community in these physically-distanced times? Email us your story idea here.