Patrons of the Burling Library may be more used to reading stories from its tall stacks of printed material, not watching them unfold in real time. However, a new library-sponsored Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) group is changing that.
In D&D, a tabletop role-playing game, one player narrates a fantasy world while others act as characters within that story. Ellsi Mertens, library access services assistant, and Max Schafer, digital library services specialist, serve as co-Game Masters in the Burling group.
“I write a lot in my free time, never anything very long, lots of short stories. But I had undiagnosed ADHD, and I found that the easier way to tell a story was to do it collaboratively in that kind of setting, and it’s how I got a lot of the like stuff out of my head,” said Mertens. “I was obsessed with this kind of role-playing game and this sort of thing, because it let me have that release to be able to tell a story.”
For Schafer, D&D is distinct from other forms of storytelling. “It eats up a lot more energy than I think regular writing probably does,” he said. “In addition to telling a story, you’re also trying to work through the different ways that players can make that go wrong, for the better and for the worse sometimes.”
Schafer and Mertens ran three sessions for students, which lasted three hours each, as a pilot program to see if it would be worth continuing long-term. Most students who attended had little experience with the game, but Schafer said that student feedback indicated it was a success.
“It is actually good programming. It gets people into the library. If I’m going to be boring about it, I think it is good publicity, and it is kind of a stereotypical thing for a library to do,” said Mertens.
Mertens said their partner also runs her own D&D group at her workplace, Drake Community Library.
“It always sounded like she had fun,” Mertens said. “It was a good part of her job, so I’m glad to have that too.”
Mertens and Schafer both emphasized the importance of safety and inclusivity throughout the sessions. “You don’t want to be uncomfortable in a D&D game,” said Schafer. “And then ensuring that everyone has a voice as well was pretty important.”
Each session was a one-shot, meaning that the arc of the story was contained within one session, instead of lasting multiple weeks. “I think we knew that our time was short, so we made sure that character creation, which is one of the fun parts about Dungeons & Dragons, was a focal point and interesting and exciting as much as the gameplay,” Schafer said.
“A lot of time was spent on making the characters and learning some of the rules, and also learning how much of the roles a person actually needed to learn,” Mertens said. “I didn’t teach people everything. I just went with things when rules were broken, because I was like, it’s not fun to run it otherwise.”
The third session, however, had many returning attendees which forced Mertens and Schafer to improvise and return back to the basics. Mertens said that this was because in D&D, you cannot often redo a story plot.
“I made a dungeon — the forgotten fourth pillar of tabletop gaming that everything originated from, that has been dropped in recent versions. I decided, okay, it’s called ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’ we’re doing a dungeon crawl, and I found some old rules and ran them through that,” they said. “It was so fun, and I can’t believe I’ve never used those rules before, and now I need to use them more often.”
D&D has been a part of both Schafer and Mertens’ lives for a long time. For Schafer, it started in high school. “Fifteen years ago, there was a group that tried to play, but we spent so long on character creation that we did nothing in the actual play portion of it. It was like an all night, sleepover kind of thing,” Schafer said. “But then in college, a couple of friends and I had more time to do the poking around that you want to do before you play a game, and it just kind of followed me.”
When Mertens was around 13, their aunt, a fellow D&D fan, sent them some dice and crocheted stuffed animals.
“I thought it was the coolest thing in the world,” said Mertens. “Since then, every single one of my major friend groups, up until I was out of college, was based around, oh, this is the group that I play D&D with. So it defined a lot of my social life, for most of my life.”
The co-Game Masters have not yet finalized their plan for the group’s future, but they both said they want it to continue.
“I see this event sort of splitting in two directions,” said Schafer. “One, we have a campaign regular group that plays, and then maybe once a semester, twice a semester, once a year, whatever, we have another welcoming group of like, let’s all do a one-shot. Everyone makes new characters. We’re all going to play the same adventure, little celebratory kind of thing.”
