With only 7 meetings under its belt, the club has drawn in 16 members.
“I just wanted to make a community of people that just sit around a table and have fun,” Frank DeSilva, the club’s president, says. “It’s good to socialize and get away from the monotony of school.”
DnD is a fantasy tabletop game where players create their own characters, each with a class that influences their abilities and skills in-game, for a campaign that takes place in a fantasy setting. It can require maps, figurines, and more to develop the world, as well as rules and add-ons to make the game run smoothly.
DeSilva planned out these aspects in preparation for the club’s campaigns.
“DnD is literally creating a story. You make the plot as you go, carving a story from scratch. You’re not watching your favorite TV show; you’re literally inside of it. You can be as spectacular or as mundane as you want because it’s your character’s story,” he said.
DeSilva shouted out Jacob Cotton, the club’s sponsor and an English teacher at GBHS, his parents, and David Lowrey, the school’s ITV and dual enrollment English teacher, for their inspiration and help in making the DnD Club what it is.
A typical club meeting runs for about two hours. Members arrive, recap the events of their campaign, and proceed to play to the end of the session. Presently, there are a variety of campaigns running, with the one DeSilva hosts having 6 players.
These campaigns are still largely starting out.
“Like most other stories, it starts slow,” DeSilva says. “I wanted it to feel more organic, hence the long time to get to the plot.”
DeSilva recognizes that DnD has become more normal culturally, but he’s also aware of the way the game is perceived by a lot of people.
“Games wouldn’t be fun if they were always serious, people would be boring if you never had special interests, friendships would be bleak if you never had jokes other people didn’t get,” he says.
“‘Weird’ and ‘cringe’ are names that only apply when people don’t understand why something is fun. So next time you see something weird or cringe, try thinking about doing it, and see if you’re being too critical.”