As I begin to write this, I can say with the utmost confidence that a campaign I’ve been running for over 18 months is barreling towards an ending. I’m not sure if it’s the ending the players will want– hell, I’m not sure if it’s an ending I want, but it certainly is getting there. As I write this, I have ran 94 sessions, the first of which began on April 10, 2018. There were ups and downs, emotionally draining days and ones where none of us could stop laughing; there were times when someone was miserable and wanted to be anywhere else, but for those 4-6 hours on what was probably a Tuesday or Saturday night, we all tuned out the world and told a story together.
Because that’s what D&D is, isn’t it? The amount of calculations and interactive details you can get in a video game today won’t be topped with a few dice. No amount of words I can conjure will give as vivid an image as the rendering of wounds from the latest AAA game. But the one thing D&D does, that no video game can, is tell a story. Games have limits. Worlds have limits. Writers must eventually stop writing a script, and send it for editing. But when you run a game of D&D for a few friends in a campaign of your own design, those limits don’t exist. Instead, what you have, wholly unique to the tabletop genre of gaming, is cooperative storytelling. And it can be weird, but when it’s good with a few friends– it’s so very, very good.