Things I enjoy about Dungeons & Dragons

May 31, 2026

I consider myself a newcomer to D&D, based on my age. As someone born in the mid-eighties with a tendency toward video games, board games, and fantasy, I ought to have learned about—and probably loved—Dungeons & Dragons as a kid in the nineties. But somehow it took the airing of Community’s Advanced Dungeon & Dragons episode in 2011 for the venerable tabletop roleplaying game to appear on my radar. Once it did, I was hooked.

The first challenge of D&D isn’t acquiring and reading all three (!) core rulebooks. It isn’t learning how to create your first character. It’s not building your own campaign, meticulously creating locations chock-full of multidimensional NPCs and limitless adventure. No. The first challenge is finding people to play with.

For the first few years after learning about D&D, I had no one to play with. I took to the web and discovered a couple of campaigns that were posting gameplay on YouTube—Acquisitions Incorporated and High Rollers (and there are many, many more, some of which are quite famous). This was fun but only made the urge to play worse. I realized that the only way I was going to get to play was to learn how to run a game—to become a Dungeon Master.^[1]

My first ever D&D game, to my surprise, went great. I homebrewed a short little adventure and roped some family into it. It was a very simple setup—starting in a tavern, a shady NPC, rumors of missing people, and a sudden emergency, as a distressed father couldn’t find his son. It was short and sweet and me and the players had a great time.

I rushed to plan another adventure for the next day. Running on the high of our first session, I felt the power coursing through my veins. I added more complications, more puzzles, more shady NPCs, tougher enemies. I had it all planned out. And that was the problem.

The next session (the plans for which still live on my computer in a folder called Adventure 2) was a bit of a train wreck. The party (of only two, mind you) split up,^[2] and the puzzles proved to be too difficult. I learned a hard-won lesson—never try to plan everything because your plans won’t survive contact with the players. D&D is a collaborative storytelling game—the duty of deciding what happens rests not only on the DM, but on all the players as well.

Years later I’d be able to join a D&D game as a player rather than the DM. It was so much fun. But those games were few and far between. I also continued DMing with different groups. All of these groups suffered the same problem—they would last about five sessions and then fizzle out. I longed for a rich, ongoing world where I could shepherd the players on a journey to forge their own stories. I wanted to see a character of my own progress through the many character levels.

Several years ago, I’d almost given up on this dream entirely. I was going through what I call a D&D drought, where I had no one to play with and no one to DM for.

Then, out of nowhere, I met someone on Discord, got invited to a group, and I’ve been playing D&D once or twice a week for a little over a year now! It has been a lot of fun getting to know our characters over the long term. Now that I’ve experienced a long-term D&D campaign (levels 1-10, but we’re still trucking along), the many pop-up campaigns that come and go, and even intentional one-shots, I have some thoughts about this wonderful, weird game.

The world’s most sophisticated game engine

D&D’s not-so-secret weapon is that it can produce any world that the DM and the players can imagine. You don’t have to wait for expansion packs or DLCs (although there is plenty of published material out there). You just invent a story out of nothing based on a set of rules for how you interact with the environment around you.

There is a book I’m fascinated with called The Top Ten Games You Can Play in Your Head by Yourself. It takes solo RPG to an extreme. It lacks a rules system, instead providing a series of story prompts, then putting the onus on the player to play the protagonist and the antagonist—by way of developing a persona in your mind that it calls the shadow self—and to make all decisions. To this day I don’t know whether the book is meant to be taken seriously or is simply parody. But I am enamored by the concept that you have everything you need on you at all times.

Don’t sleep on human imagination. Each of us is carrying around in our skull the most sophisticated neural network humanity has ever seen.

Unlike Top Ten, D&D doesn’t compel you to do everything from scratch by yourself. It offers lore and mechanics that ground the game in a fantasy world and gives players a solid foundation on which to create a collaborative story. While it can certainly be played alone—more of a hack, then by design—it shines as a vehicle for players to imagine worlds together.

No wrong way to play

Before I run the risk of making you think you need to be an expert storyteller to play D&D, let me dispel the notion that these collaborative stories need to be… good. They certainly can be. But what makes a good story and what makes a good D&D adventure are not the same things.

There are a million ways to play D&D. Much as someone might romanticize the idea of collaborative storytelling, it’s important to remember that the story might just be wandering through a dungeon, killing baddies. It might be played on a large battle map. Or it might be theater-of-the-mind role-playing with political intrigue. The most fun adventures contain a bit of both and everything in between. D&D is essentially pretend with rules. There are rules, but the rules are built to bend without breaking. The dungeon master has the final say on what’s allowed and can always prioritize fun over rules if they so choose. Sometimes a player will try to perform a stunt so ridiculous, so absurd, and so on brand for their character that you as the DM can’t help but let it succeed—rules be damned.

When I think of a D&D campaign, I think about the long-running kind where you take one character from level 1 to level 20 over months and years. That’s the kind of campaign I always wanted to play in. But that doesn’t have to be every D&D campaign. Not everything has to be an open world epic. Many people love one-shots—an adventure that is meant to be played over one (or a handful) of sessions and then completed. The characters aren’t planned to be used in the long term. These can be fun breaks from your main campaign. Or you can use them with groups that can’t get together often but still want to play.

Many groups will have a main campaign that they play when everyone can be present and then a side campaign that they play in situations where they don’t have a quorum but still want to play. You can make D&D work for you no matter what situation you are in.

Lore

You get the lore of the various D&D locations and settings, many of which go back to the origins of the game and serve to connect players and their stories through time. But there’s more. Any group of people that are friends for long enough will establish lore between them—shared memories and inside jokes that bond them together. You get this effect in two ways with D&D.

Unlike most tabletop games, a D&D game is ongoing, played over multiple sessions that can go for weeks, months, or years. Your character survives each session (well hopefully) and becomes stronger and more experienced the longer you play. Your bond in-game with the other player characters grows and it isn’t long before you’ve established lore in your group.

My ranger, Tristan, with his excellent perception skills, for example, has a tendency to roll nat twenties^[3] when scoping out what turns out to be an empty room. It’s something of an inside joke now. A rogue in our group, Winger, can’t resist opening doors and she nearly got us all killed when we were but low-level amateurs. You see? We have lore now. When Tristan steps into a presumably empty room or Winger stops in front of a door, we chuckle in amusement because we know what is coming.

The lore reaches out of the game world and into the real one. One of our players is known for her frustration with what she calls D&D physics—the sometimes absurd situations that are possible because of the rules that govern movement and action within the game world. Another group I played in would spend half a gaming session eating meals in-game. This was a reflection of the players more than the characters and so became part of the shared lore between us.

This might be my favorite aspect of the game. The more you play, the richer the lore becomes—in character and out. The game quickly becomes your own. It starts as a book (or three!) you bought, written by someone else, and becomes a thing you and your friends created, transforming the original beyond what the authors could have ever imagined.

Or, you know, maybe you just crawled through a dungeon killing baddies.

A game for all types

Despite the fact that I publish my thoughts on a publicly accessible website and use my real name all over the web, I consider myself a somewhat shy introvert. Or perhaps it’s precisely because I’m an introvert that I prefer to express myself through the solitary act of writing. I don’t know. But because of this personality trait, I like small groups and structured activities. I like knowing when it’s my turn to speak, to act. I don’t need to worry about coming up with something interesting to say and finding a moment to enter a conversation. A limited number of people doing predictable things—this I like.

Don’t get me wrong. Once I warm up to a group I will certainly open up and be comfortable jumping in, blabbing nonstop, acting silly. But I like that D&D supports both styles. It’s a game for introverts and extraverts. If someone doesn’t feel comfortable doing a lot of talking or navigating in-game social situations, they can stand by and be ready to whack on things when combat breaks out. An extravert with an animated personality might revel in doing a one-man performance of King Kong so as to distract a group of monkeys guarding a wizard’s tower while the rest of the party sneaks past them (yes, this occurred in a game and that session stands as one of the most entertaining ones I’ve ever played). D&D offers a structured way to be social. A social game that’s friendly to the socially awkward.

Beyond that, D&D is accessible and inclusive. You can make a character who looks like you—or step into the shoes of someone not like you at all. As a disabled player and DM, I’ve found D&D to be an accessible game to play. I struggle with certain types of board games—and many video games—especially anything that requires holding cards. D&D is an easy game to adapt. Both in terms of access—tons of ways both physical and digital for accessing character sheets, spell descriptions, dice, etc—and content. You can build a campaign around completely different styles of play, different themes. You can emphasize problem-solving over combat or combat over social roleplaying. The Dungeon Master can build adventures tailor-made to the group of people they are playing with. This isn’t some sort of accessibility feature of the game. It’s just how the game works. It’s made to work for the people playing it.

In the modern age it is famously difficult to make and keep friends as an adult. This is something many people struggle with. D&D is great at giving you something fun and casual to do with your friends that you can do on a schedule and it technically doesn’t have to ever end!

Fun away from the game table

I’ve just sung the praises of D&D as a social game, but there’s plenty to do in between sessions, on your own. I’ve already mentioned that there are three core rule books. That’s a lot of material. If you want, you can read all about the different classes and species in D&D. You can focus on a particular character build and think about what spells and feats might go well together. You could even create characters that you aren’t playing with right now just for funzies.

How much or how little you want to do here is totally up to you. I like that someone can roll up a random character and almost immediately start playing with little prep. Or they can spend days combing through all the various specs and features to build a highly specific type of character.

Not to mention if you’re the dungeon master. In that case you’re almost required to do some amount of prep work in between sessions (I say “almost” because it’s totally possible to improv a game from nothing if you feel comfortable enough). Some people will spend weeks or even years preparing a campaign. Or five minutes. Like I said, there are a million ways to play this game.

Some people are going to dive in and an sweat all the details. Or they’ll focus on the creative side, writing rich character backstories or making character art.

My DM has acquired tons of third-party content and added almost all of it in D&D Beyond, the official digital character sheet app for D&D.^[4] I love leveling up my ranger because there are so many spells to choose from. I enjoy sifting though them and finding good combinations. For example, I recently acquired a magic dagger which gives me blindsight out to 30 feet. So naturally I started looking for ways to give myself an advantage. An excellent spell for this is Fog Cloud. Usually, you nor your enemies would be able to see in such an environment. But now I can throw a fog cloud on a group of enemies, dash in, and suddenly I’m the only one who can see anything—slice and dice time. Hopefully by the time you’re reading this I will have been able to try out this tactic. This is an aspect of the game I enjoy—looking for new abilities or items my character could use.

If you can’t wait until your next session, there is plenty to tide you over in the meantime.

Things and collectibles

This hobby is full of physical things to buy and collect, if that’s your thing. There is no shortage of specialty dice, dice trays, game tables, notebooks, figurines, apparel, and pretty much any physical item you can think of. People use third-party character sheets, trick out their character sheet holders, and invest in all sorts of accessories. This is all totally optional, of course, but yet another way to get enjoyment out of the game.

The TTRPG explosion

I don’t have hard data in front of me, but I would imagine the appearance of D&D on TV shows like Community, and especially Stranger Things, brought in a ton of new players. Not just to D&D, but to tabletop roleplaying games in general. In fact, this entire article could be about any of the popular TTRPGs out there. D&D just happens to be the one most people are familiar with. I suspect the big YouTube-based productions in this space helped as well. Anecdotally, it feels like we are in the TTRPG heyday.

A cool side effect of all this is that there’s never been a better time to get paid for offering products and services in this space. Artist commissions, published modules, 3d printed figures, dice, accessories, professional DMing, mobile and web apps—all of these are potential money makers.

My own digital character sheet app, Minimal Character Sheet, has seen an uptick in user signups. My app is totally free and any existing free features always will be. That said, it would be a dream job of mine to work on TTRPG-related products and services of my own full-time. Maybe one day!

Roll for initiative

If you’ve never played and any of this sounds at all interesting, then I encourage you to give D&D a try. As I write this, I just finished an adventure that took three or four sessions to complete resulting in a pile of gold, a level-up for Tristan, and a new house on a new world (my party is now wondering if we are going to be paying real estate taxes for the new place and our place on the other world).

What a time to be alive.