Section 1: Special Interests
Being autistic means that pretty frequently, I’ll get strongly attached to very particular things and feel a nearly unceasing compulsion to engage with them. For example, it might be a certain food that I crave constantly, or a quote from a movie I repeat ad nauseam (a behavior known as delayed echolalia), or maybe a certain tv show I can’t stop binging. Almost all of the time this obsession is temporary, and I’ll eventually move on after a few days or weeks. This is the state of hyperfixation, where I’m so focused on a particular thing that it becomes, for a time, the most important thing in my life. It’s a little like having a mosquito bite — not scratching it makes you feel insane, unable to focus on anything else; scratching relieves the itch temporarily, but soon enough it’s driving you crazy again. Then one day you’ll wake up and realize you don’t have the itch anymore, and your life goes back to normal.
Very occasionally, I’ll get really strongly fixated on something, and that fixation won’t go away for many years, or maybe ever; I will feel like it provides me a new perspective through which to see the world, and I never get truly bored of it the way I get eventually bored with my hyperfixations. Then, I realize I’ve developed a new special interest. Marked by a relentless hunger for information about a topic (and feeling the need to regurgitate that information to anyone who will listen, or not listen, or fall asleep while I’m talking), the euphoria that is felt when thinking of the topic, and the aforementioned long-term fascination, having a special interest is one of the core experiences shared among autistic individuals. I don’t feel I can conjure an adequate analogy to describe it. A special interest is beyond something I enjoy, it feels like it redefines my existence. If I’m talking with someone and my special interest gets brought up, I get these waves of excitement through my body and won’t want to talk about anything else. If I hear strangers even briefly mention it, the self-restraint it takes for me to not run over and info-dump is astronomical. I start to see everything as somehow relating to my special interest and I can find any reason to talk about it. It gives me a pure joy that only the experience of falling in love has been able to surpass.
Section 2: Intro to D&D
So now that I’ve explained that, I get to actually talk about my new special interest: Dungeons and Dragons! If you are already familiar with the game, I’m going to explain it anyway. Dungeons and Dragons is a table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) and is the defining example of the genre. Dungeons and Dragons is commonly abbreviated either as D&D or DnD. Gameplay is imagination-reliant and operates like this: Members of a play group establish characters, and adventure through a world that is controlled by a DM (Dungeon Master). The DM arbitrates the rules, guides the story, describes surroundings, acts as the non-player characters of the world, and calls for players to roll dice to perform difficult actions based on the scenario. The longer that characters adventure and the more challenges they overcome, the more experience points they gain; this “XP” accumulates to increase their character level and unlock new abilities for them. The game can be played to complete the story in a single session (called a one-shot), but more commonly groups will play sessions regularly with the same characters, progressing the story over months or years of real-time (called a campaign).
D&D has a long (and dramatic!) history: it has five major editions, the first of which was published in 1974 and very quickly exploded in popularity. Skipping ahead past a lot of social and company drama surrounding D&D’s original publisher, TSR, the game has been published by Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) since 1997. Although it is popular among veteran players to begrudge some of WoTC’s changes to D&D (especially in 4th edition), the game has more players now than ever, which I hope everyone can agree is a net positive. WoTC basically saved the game from the brink when they acquired TSR, whom were in dire financial straights and may yet have dragged the game down with the company. Under WoTC, D&D continued to be published and eventually picked up in sales, especially after getting a new edition in 2000 (The pivotal 3rd edition) as well as a mountain of well-received new expansions and content. Revivified, Dungeons and Dragons began bursting with commercial success once again through the 2000’s-2010’s, with the 5th edition (5e) coming out in 2014, and only continuing to boom in relevance and popularity since. This was especially helped by the development of digital aids for 5e such as DND Beyond, and the proliferation of 3rd-party tools like Roll20 and World Anvil; these innovations brought D&D online, making the game more accessible to anyone with an internet connection. A decade after 5e, the updated 2024 ruleset made the game more streamlined and comprehensible, intended to make introduction to the hobby easier. This brings us to the modern era: Dungeons and Dragons is super popular because it’s an appealing game for a lot of people, and it’s easier than ever to get into; you can access the basic rules for free, and play with people from all over the world via the internet. Entire blogs, forums and YouTube channels exist for players and DMs, and the game has been so heavily destigmatized (I didn’t even mention how D&D was targeted during the Satanic Panic) that it actually has a positive social connotation. It’s so popular, I think, because Dungeons and Dragons provides us something we value at our core — community and storytelling. We get to form bonds with a group of people all enjoying the same thing long-term, and bring a story to life in our minds. Plus, we get to exercise our fantasies of using magic spells, swinging massive swords, solving mysteries, vanquishing evil, and acting as characters we create, for no other reason than to have fun.
Section 3: Personal Backstory
Incoming cliché alert! Much of my childhood I spent absorbed in books. Fiction, especially the adventures of unlikely heroes, always appealed to me. Seeing these characters I related to do incredible things that surprised even themselves satisfied my need to be inspired with purpose and importance, when it felt like many people in real life rejected me. I always loved stories with huge branching arcs and a cast of constant characters, usually with fantasy or sci-fi elements, and when I wasn’t reading them, I was creating them. Building story settings out of LEGO, journeying my characters through spectacular scenes — it was so much fun to embody the personalities of all these made-up people and work my imagination. I was role-playing and didn’t even know it! When I was younger, I tended to gravitate toward people who were weird and creative like myself. But going into teenagerdom already very depressed and only growing worse, my creative fire dwindled to embers. I didn’t treat my imagination with the care and attention it required, and I grew apathetic. I focused more on consumption, intaking the creative works of others which brought me comfort or let me dissociate and distract myself from reality. I spent my time with people who were as bland as I myself had become, and I stopped seeing myself as creative. It wasn’t until recently, in my 20’s, when I found those imaginative embers again. I sparked them, fed them, and now I tend them. It’s difficult, learning to be creative again when I’ve abandoned that part of myself for so long. It’s a kind of vulnerability that is really terrifying for me, since I had learned not to be vulnerable at all. I believe being creative means being vulnerable with yourself, which can actually be a lot more difficult than being so with others.
Section 4: Good D&D
That’s why D&D is so appealing to me now. It allows me to practice creative vulnerability with myself, and with other creative people. It being based in the genres I am already attached to establishes a feeling of safety, so I can have this vulnerability and also the comfort of familiarity. I can pull on my greatest literary inspirations and write a backstory for a character — then act as that character in a safe setting, behaving the way I think she would based on her attitude and the experiences she’s had in life. And being able to continue writing my character’s story at the game table as I role-play with the rest of the adventuring party inspires me further, getting to weave our stories together and build something collaborative, acting as a team both in the game and in real life. Getting to fully embody another personality, not out of escapism, but as a way of embracing who I actually am creatively, I think is very liberating and empowering.
As with most special interests, this passion just seemed to sprout very suddenly. With a little reflection, though, I can see how the fibers of it have been present in my mind for a long time. Many of my interests have pointed me in the direction of D&D, from The Hobbit to Skyrim to Wildermyth. The biggest divergence is that these other interests are lonesome — at least, I always enjoyed them in isolation. As I have said, D&D is inherently social, which introduces the feeling of community that I’ve often lacked (And craved). I get to do something nerdy with people as weird as me, without shame or embarrassment. But this is all assuming that the group I play with has the same ideals in mind, which isn’t guaranteed; This leads me to the the next section, which is:
Section 5: Bad D&D
There’s a phrase about psychotherapy which goes, “Bad therapy is worse than no therapy.” More broadly applied, “A lack of productivity is preferable over counterproductivity.” Therapy which is “bad” could, at best, leave you feeling like it is a waste of time and money; and at worst, it could make you feel terrible, and teach you bad techniques that take years to unlearn. Either way, bad therapy will make someone very resistant to trying therapy again in the future. I bring this up because that phrase is also used for D&D. If you have a really bad experience, it could turn you away from the game forever. All that healthy vulnerability I just talked about in the previous section could be met with a metaphorical sucker-punch at the wrong game table, and when someone, especially someone with anxiety, gets that response when they’re just starting out, it’s going to ruin D&D for them. I’ll let you in on something: this isn’t the first time I’ve been interested in D&D. When I was in that aforementioned depressed teenage slump, I figured that doing something that was more tactile and creative than playing video games (in real life with other people no less) would be a good way to help bring me up. So I went to my local game store to buy a set of polyhedral dice and join the Adventurers League (AL).
AL is hosted at local fixtures such as game stores or libraries, and you just bring in your character sheet (the papers that hold your character’s stats and allow them to be used in a structured game) and play with random players and a random DM. After the session, you can come back to the same group, or play with a different group, and your character’s advancements in the game remain, instead of being erased when you change groups. It’s the plug-n-play of D&D: anywhere your character can join a story, you hop into the group and might never see the other members of that party after the session. It sounds like it would be a low-stakes, flexible environment to learn D&D in, but not for me.
It ought to be said that Dungeons and Dragons has A LOT of rules, and when you’re just starting out it can be overwhelming. The mechanics of gameplay aside from character role-play involve a lot of quick math. You play with 7 different dice, rolling each one in different circumstances (though mostly you’ll be rolling the 20-sided die, a.k.a. d20). To do anything consequential in the game, you’ll roll at least one die, then add or subtract specific numbers from one or more boxes on your character sheet, sometimes rolling twice and picking only one result if the DM calls for it, and then FINALLY your character completes the action. Math has never come easy to me, and at that age I was much worse at it than I am now. At every AL game I went to, I had players frustrated at me for slowing down the game. Some kindly helped me with the math, but the pressure of knowing my turn was taking twice as long as anyone else’s but was a lot less helpful really wore me down. The other players rotated a lot, so for someone who struggles with large groups and especially with strangers, that in itself was draining. (Not to mention, the DM hadn’t brushed his teeth seemingly in years, and the muck and stench was so powerful that the Monster Manual would classify it as a CR 4 Ooze.)
This is what really did me in though: one time after a combat encounter, I asked if anyone wanted to take a short rest; and if they didn’t, then I would like to rest by myself. They all very quickly shut me down, without being gentle at all. I was still very new, and didn’t yet know that rests always involved all party members. But at the time, I was a level 1 ranger and had low max hitpoints, and I had just taken a significant portion of them in damage. I wanted a chance to heal up and face the next encounter with a bit more resilience, but it wasn’t good for the rest of the party so we moved on, with me very embarrassed. (In my opinion, a D&D table should never make anyone feel embarrassed for not knowing something about the game!) My character died in the next combat, and so I sat for the next hour or so of the session, not able to contribute, and very frustrated that the party hadn’t acquiesced to a short rest so I could regain some hitpoints. That pretty much ruined D&D for me. I played a couple of one-shots after that with a different DM, and did have fun, but I felt that I couldn’t be as vulnerable, and so that spark of joy and creativity didn’t really exist. The main problem here was I wasn’t playing at the right table, and everybody MUST to find the right table to make their heroic fantasy dreams come true. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but everyone should be having a good time when they play D&D.
Section 6: What I’m Doing Different This Time
So I’ve very recently joined a campaign that is expected to run for the next 2-3 years. The question arose: how could I make sure that the group was right for me before committing? As with most things in life, the keys to success are knowledge and communication. Firstly, I have the valuable knowledge of what I don’t want from the game. I don’t want to feel stupid, or embarrassed, or hesitant about authenticity. I don’t want to play with a rotating cast of characters, or a group who won’t take the game seriously. I don’t want a DM who has a real-life poisonous breath weapon. I do want a consistent party to build relationships with, both on- and above-board. I want to get lost in the world, to feel like I am my character, like I’m there doing all the things that are so awesome but impossible/too dangerous to do in real life, like cutting deals with demons or hurling magic fire at bandits. I want to feel like my character has room for growth and development, and then to act that out in an unabashed and pure-hearted way. I want to keep researching game mechanics/lore and learn everything I can, and I want to keep D&D as a hobby for the rest of my life. By assessing my true goals with the game, I can make sure any table I try to play with aligns with my style; And to make it an even better experience, I’m pushing myself to be vulnerable even when it’s awkward or challenging. Armed with that knowledge, the next step is to communicate and ask questions, before joining the party. What is the DM’s narrative style? What themes will the story contain? What kinds of players are they looking for? What is the ratio of role-play to combat to exploration? The more questions I ask, the more I’m able to determine whether or not I would be compatible with the adventure; the more clear and forthcoming everyone involved is, the more fun we’re all going to have. This, I found, is the key to finding a good group, and a good group is the key to enjoying D&D. Oh, and I bought some really pretty dice! I expect for my journey with D&D to continue being a lot of fun, and I hope whatever creative hobbies you have do the same for you, dear reader!
Ciao,
Grace
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