In the past few months my friends have gotten me involved in Dungeons and Dragons, the tabletop RPG. And while I've played many video game RPG's and read my fair share of fantasy and science fiction novels, I've never actually had to build out a character from the ground-up, let alone really role play. And so here is a short summation of the joys and pains of playing D&D.

1. Rolling the Natural 20

For those of you who have not played this game before, most challenges are overcome by roll a 20-sided die. When you roll a 20 on the die, that is considered the best possible outcome of the challenge, in other words, you succeed in the best possible way. Which leads us to...

2. Rolling the Natural 1

Rolling a 1 on the 20-sided die is the worst possible outcome and there's nothing to be done about it. You're trying to sneak up on the goblin encampment and you accidentally stab yourself while trying to quietly kill a goblin sentry, that's the power of 1 on the 20-sided die. Catastrophe ensues.

3. "Roll for Initiative"

The universal (at least in the D&D universe) sign for "a lot is about to happen in a short amount of time" is "roll for initiative". Usually this means combat is about to start, or in some other circumstances so many actions are being taken up by the party that time has to be split down into the minute frame of six seconds just to figure out exactly what goes down and how. Often this is the most exciting, and sometimes terrifying, words spoken by the Dungeon Master.

4."What do you do?"

Player agency is the primary force for exploring the narrative created by the Dungeon Master (DM), and sometimes things are fairly straight-forward, but more often it's not. What the player characters do in the world the DM has made matters and will affect their characters and how the world interacts with their characters. And so there is quite a bit of weight in the words "What do you do?", but there's also a lot of space for good humor too.

5. Creating a Character

Character creation in D&D can be a long and arduous process, but also a wonderfully exciting experience. There's so much to decide and choose from down to your race, class, background, motivations, personality traits, flaws, ideals and all that goes into a character that you can actually role play. The process can be quite intimidating and oftentimes people come together to have a session just for the sole purpose of making their characters for the adventure they're about to embark on. Character creation is both a joy and a pain in the D&D world.

6. Also, this...

We're all sort of playing D&D, right? ...right?