By Chris Acuff

Who could guess that setting aside time with your friends once a week to tell a story together is a good thing? 

This, I think, is obvious. And of course this idea is not set for D&D only, but any collaborative TTRPG or board game night. I could write about how the process of playing a character other than yourself can re-wire your brain for empathy, or how it is a useful way to socialize children and help them understand math, statistics, and problem solving, but instead I want to tell a story. 

My wife is a doctor, which is a cool, prestigious job, that in America at least, requires you to sell your mind and body and soul to years of difficult study and work with absolutely grueling hours before you can reap any real monetary reward. It is a system designed to grind the best years of a kind hearted person’s life out of them into value for a corrupt medical structure that is bad for both patients and physicians. Part of that process is medical school. 

From an outside perspective, medical school seems designed to break down the humanity of students to build them into the kind of person who will be ok working years of 12 hour shifts in the American residency program. It is not just academically difficult, which it should be, but it is often unnecessarily unkind. I saw it wear on my wife, who has a naturally sunny disposition, like the weathering of a stone in a sandstorm. 

We started the game with a few of her fellow medical students in her second year. I did not know any of the others at first, I just showed up and said roll initiative. That didn’t matter, they got to know me through the game. I showed kindness by 3D printing minis they designed and painted them. I opened my home up for the game, we shared food and drinks. All of these things sound familiar to people who play, but we should recognize them for what they are- building community. The group became our community, our only real one allowed to us in the time required from the school. 

Getting together for D&D in my mind is better than most activities for this, because everyone chats before and after, eats together, and sits down to tell a story together. I feel as though I am likely preaching to the choir here while I’m writing this, but I think it is important to put into words what this does for when we explain the game to other people. The people in that game, who I did not know before it started, became my best friends in that town. They were in our wedding at the end of medical school. And, perhaps more than anything else, I saw them retain their humanity during those intense years just by coming together to play a silly game. 

And, by the end of it, they had killed Stradh too.