'Dungeons & Dragons': A New Player Emerges

After moving to a new city last year, I found it hard to make new friends. Life can be hard when you don't have many people to hang out with or get into trouble with. It wasn't until I found a small comic shop that I realized that friends were easier to find than I thought.

I've been interested in Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) ever since I played Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for the PlayStation 2. The imagination required to become a new person with your roleplaying or the creativity needed to build a world from scratch always drew my attention. Sadly, I didn't live near any comic shops or mall outlets that readily carried or played tabletop games. My captivation of paper-and-pen games faded into the background as video games became more mainstream.

My interest in D&D had peaked again a year ago with the release of Stranger Things. The first season is centered around terminology and ideas from D&D, helping it become popular again. The only thing I had left to do was find a local shop or person that could help me find my passion for tabletop RPGs.

Luckily for me, a new comic shop opened up in my area a few months earlier. I went in to buy a guidebook or a beginning player's manual that would allow me to play a game on my own, but within minutes of talking to the owner, I was invited to play D&D that night. That was almost seven months ago, and I've played almost every Wednesday night since.

Before I started playing D&D, I was extremely self-conscious and timid. I never went out of my way to talk to somebody that I'd never met, and I always kept to myself. Finding a like-minded group of friends has forced me to break out of my social shell and share my creativity with other people. It feels great being able to become another person for a few hours every week and escape the burden of work and stress.

If you want to find new friends with similar passions as your own or if you want to learn how to become more comfortable in a public setting, try going down to your local comic shop and see what kind of games they are playing that week. Who knows, you just might enjoy it.