How the Pandemic Got People Immersed in the Magic of DND Again

(ferstoock/Freepik)

Dungeons and Dragons. The Game is now familiar to many of all ages, whether you remember it from not being allowed to play it in the 80’s because there was a scare about the demonic characters to the fame it garnered from Stranger Things when the children play it in the Prologue to the first season’s episode.

 Even more attention was paid to the tabletop game in 2020, with Discord, a popular social media app that works for Mac, Windows and Linux as well as phones allowing people to Videochat and voice call to play the tabletop game or even use voice chat and screen share websites like Roll20, which allow players to play a game of DND, with virtual pieces, and dice. 

According to GameDaily.Biz, Wizards of the Coast, the original company that came up with Dungeons and Dragons, had a huge boom in sales in 2020, making the number of players now around 50 million worldwide and giving them seven consecutive years of growth in revenue, which isn’t bad for a Tabletop game almost fifty years old.

The CEO of the company, Chris Cocks told interviewers at GameDaily,“ On a personal level, it’s one of the biggest thrills of my career,” “It’s not often you get to work on something that was special to you as a child and be able to not only work on it but fundamentally reinvent and energize it for a whole new generation of fans.”

He told them he had been playing since he was ten years old and now gets to spread that same excitement and adventure with his fourteen-year-old son and his friends, proving that whether you play with Online resources or a physical set, just about anyone age five to a hundred could probably enjoy the imaginative roleplaying game or RPG.

Because of how games can bring people together in social settings, it really did push DND to the forefront when there were border closures and mass quarantines worldwide, with the help of live streams that meant people could play wherever, and the company’s own online platform, DND Beyond, which entirely makes the game accessible digitally, so long as you have access to a computer connected to the internet and an email address.

Cocks was excited about this development with the game’s popularity since it focused on the social side of the game.

 “During quarantine and social distancing, D&D helped to bring people together, to bridge the uncanny divide that Zoom calls can cause and allow a group of friends and family to feel present and together facing fun, fantastical challenges even if they couldn’t be physically in the same location,” He said. “Speaking from personal experience, playing D&D was my primary way to connect with friends.”

Dog boy, credit to SpaceBattles Forum and Wizard Coast

Even from my experience, when I started playing just before the pandemic hit, the game is pretty easygoing and fun to play. You can choose any class of world-dwelling creature or human, from Dog boys who are essentially intelligent bipedal dogs, with incredible hearing and smell, used for warfare like soldiers, to a human, somehow in the world due to the introduction.

Some Resource books, like Savage Worlds: Rifts, have the player’s character somehow transported to the world by a strange phenomenon of weather caused by magical ley lines that open portals, dragging being through years ago to find everything different in the world.

Most Dungeon Masters will use book scenarios, but some will even come up with their own based on the world or an adventure completely of their own imagination, then ask questions about what your character wants to do. 

Their skills in this world depend on what creature or class they are and the number of points you can use for skills for your character’s statistics.

  Pre-made characters are available,  like a standard Coalition Dog boy if you want to jump straight in and play, or you can make your own.

Many scenario books which are made widely available by Wizard Coast and many others to make the game accessible, but you can buy physical books too, if you want.

Premades like a standard Coalition Dog boy can be used to jump straight in and play, or you can make your own; then you need to know what your character's stats are, and you can roll for added fun with dice, which, either digital or physical, mean different things in-game.

Image Credit: DND Basics

Rolling a d6, or six-sided die randomly to determine your character’s Health or Constitution, Intelligence, Strength, Charisma, Dexterity with weapons and basic skills, Charisma for convincing the most stubborn shopkeeper, and Wisdom to know when it is better not fighting that huge Orc ahead, is pretty fun.

Alignment is probably the most well-known. Even if someone doesn’t play DND, it has probably been mentioned in some way and is the best way to describe even a television character.

They are as follows: 

Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good Lawful Neutral, Neutral Chaotic Neutral Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil, and they influence how your character might react to a situation.

A Lawful good Paladin might love to help a shopkeep catch a thief, but a chaotic Evil Dogboy might just end up chasing the thief, attacking them and taking the loot for themselves, even telling the shopkeeper they caught the thief just to get the money credits for the job. 

Neutrals are interesting as they don’t exactly hate the rules and controlling Governments of Authority or any kind of belief that would make them above evil or restricted to a conscious belief that they must obey certain morals or a higher-ranked commander, like a Paladin might be compelled to do. 

You can make your character as unique as you like, such as spending earned credits on painting their armour eggplant purple or getting them a fancy vehicle to make their character really fun.

I once had a character who, when the player couldn’t come to a decision on whether to ambush attack a boss or open a locked door, would either break down said door or make sarcastic comments as if he could speak to the ones I was playing DND with. 

So, really, the sky is the limit for DND and how it can connect people, especially now more than it ever did.

Have you ever played it or thought about trying it?