How Dungeons & Dragons Helps Me (and Others) During the Pandemic

Or: How a couple of friends and some dice can help keep up your mental health.

We are coming up on one year of lockdown. The country, and the world, for that matter, have been (mostly) isolating from social contact for eleven months as of the writing of this article. As has become increasingly apparent, everyone’s mental health has suffered.

So, to help keep our spirits up, we all turn to a variety of different things to hold onto whatever hope we can. We create small bubbles of people that we can see in person to gain some semblance of social contact. We keep up with each other over the phone, messenger, and Zoom. Social media is a boon for many of us.

And, importantly, we do things that help us feel normal. So many of the normal things we do are difficult or impossible — my annual ritual of delivering cookies and candy on Christmas day was canceled this year for obvious reasons. So, we grab onto anything we can.

Online gaming has surged as a result. Among Us has become the breakout hit of the pandemic. It’s a simple game that is cheap and easy to pick up. It is normally played with a group of people, preferably friends, and is a good way to socialize and share a few fun hours with people you can’t see normally right now.

Board games are also experiencing a renaissance. This includes everything from traditional games like chess, which is experiencing a boom due to the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit, to more esoteric options that are increasingly popular and commonly funded via Kickstarter. Many of these games are available online, which allows you to play them with friends you haven’t seen in months.

But for me, the game that I most look forward to is Dungeons & Dragons — commonly known as D&D.

A quick caveat: I want to acknowledge for all of my nerdier readers that there are many, many different tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. For example, the game system I play every week is called GURPS, and it is an entirely different system than D&D. That said, I will be using D&D as the shorthand for all of this, in no small part to the surge in popularity it’s experienced (which I will get into more later).

I have been a nerd for the vast majority of my life, ever since I discovered how much I loved video games. I first encountered D&D in middle school, and I haven’t looked back since. I had my first serious group in college, then played game after game with a variety of different friends and acquaintances throughout college and after.

I also began dabbling in other systems, which all had their fun pros and cons. There were different ways of rolling dice and calculating stats, different character classes, and different settings — from medieval fantasy to modern to futuristic, and everything in between. I came to understand that you could do pretty much anything you wanted in a tabletop RPG — you just had to find the right system.

Part of the joy of D&D is that you could be whatever you wanted. I could play a charismatic Bard, charming my way through encounters. I could play a fierce Fighter, hacking and slashing my way through enemies. I could play a powerful Wizard, hurling fireballs indiscriminately.

That said, I really liked Clerics. I got shoehorned into playing one because the party needed a healer, only to find that I liked it. I’ve played several Clerics throughout my D&D career. They’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoy it. I digress.

That experience, playing something you’re not, can be liberating. I am not a social butterfly, so playing a charismatic character can be a fun expression of a lesser-used part of me. I am not particularly strong and have never been in a fight, so being a brawler can be a cathartic stress release in a hack-and-slash game.

You can also use D&D to express more dominant parts of your personality. I gravitate towards helping people — my ultimate career wound up being in the nonprofit field — so a Cleric seems, in retrospect, like a fantastic choice for me.

However, you can’t really play D&D in a void. You (usually) need other people to play with. Therein lies the social aspect of D&D. You and your friends (adventuring party) have to work together, using the synergies of your different classes, to overcome obstacles and puzzles.

The typical four-person D&D party is a physical class (like a Fighter or Barbarian), a healer (like a Cleric or Druid), a magic-user (like a Sorcerer or Wizard), and a ranged or utility character (like a Ranger, Rogue, or Bard). It is generally useful to have at least one character who has high charisma to be the party “face,” and having someone to detect and disarm traps is incredibly handy.

This is not by any means a requirement for party composition. You can build a party with four Bards if you really want to and make it work (probably). You can be a long-suffering Cleric in a group of fireball-happy Sorcerers if you like herding highly-destructive cats.

This kind-of technical description of party mechanics is, to me and many others, what makes D&D fun and fulfilling. The point of the game is not to murder countless waves of goblins and collect loot (although you can do that if you want). For me, the point of the game is the interactions with my party members. The relationships we form with each other as the game progresses is a large part of what makes it fun.

It is this point that has made D&D really popular during COVID. Facilitated by technology like Zoom, people can meet for a few hours and escape the plague-ridden world to a fantasy escapism where encounters are straightforward. Every puzzle has a solution and there is gold and treasure at the end of the dungeon. At the end of the adventure, you vanquish the evil menace and are the ultimate heroes.

And again, you get to see people regularly, even if it’s only over Zoom. Humans are social creatures, and we require regular social interaction to keep up our mental health. We are also cooperative creatures, as the entirety of human society is built on the notion that no individual is as strong as all of us working together.

Weekly D&D sessions feed both of these needs. For a few hours, we get social interaction with people we like and care about, and we use that time to work together towards a common goal. We can play characters against our type to try something new, or we can play characters that feed our strengths so we can feel good about ourselves.

The world that the Dungeon Master and the players build together can be as simple or as complicated as you want. If your group wants to travel the countryside vanquishing monsters, you can do that. If your group wants to be a ragtag group of rebels navigating the sociopolitical complications of a civil war, recruiting dubious allies, and crafting battle strategies, you can do that too.

My current game is set in an alternate Victorian London where we are attempting to determine who is spreading the Black Death so we can stop them. In this game, we have encountered Dracula, one of our players is playing an immortal being who represents the Spirit of Britain, and another player is blind but can see through the help of her raven companion.

We meet every Sunday for four hours over Zoom. Our players are currently located in four different metro areas across the country, and in between sessions we keep things going in a private Facebook group.

This particular game is the third game set in our current world, with the first game being set in the 1920s and the second in the 1930s. Across our games, we’ve encountered Nazis, Wakandans, hellhounds, vampires, goddesses, and a set of orbs that allow you to move through space and time. Magic is real, if rare, immortal beings exist, and none of this is apparent to the general public. As far as the typical citizen of our world is concerned, everything is the same as the world we currently inhabit.

Oh, except we changed history by stopping the Tulsa riots and a group of black citizens in America have established their own state. And one of our player characters in the 1920s game became the first Chinese-American mayor of Chicago during the 1930s game offscreen.

We have been building this world for several years and have been using technology to bring people in from other parts of the country since the first game. For us, we were able to transition to Zoom pretty seamlessly. It’s been a boon to all of us, since for several of us, the weekly game is the most we see of other people all week.

And, for all of us, we get to express our joys and frustrations through our characters and their interactions with each other and the world we play in. Many of our players also play in or run other games as well, all with a variety of escapist plots. A couple of our group members take part in a futuristic space game, a la Firefly. One member is running a one-shot game set in the 1930s that features New York mobsters and aliens.

And, as the pandemic changes how we play, so too is D&D changing to adapt. Thanks to the popularity of the YouTube channel Critical Role, a D&D game organized by several voice actors and broadcast online, and the release of 5th Edition, a well-balanced and very accessible version, D&D has been experiencing a surge in interest since the mid-2010s.

Thanks to this wave of interest, there are a whole host of worldbuilding tools and digital game systems that have sprung up in recent years that allow you to build maps and move pieces around a digital board. These systems roll dice for you, add your stats, and keep track of your hit points. You can see where the enemies are on the board and position your fireball just so to hit that group of goblins while avoiding the Barbarian.

These tools, which were already well-developed before the pandemic and have only grown since, are enabling more and more people to enjoy D&D. And, by making it more accessible and available online, it is facilitating socialization and cooperation in a world ravaged by plague.

D&D is helping us feel more connected to each other while bringing a whole host of the mental health benefits that come from that connection. Regular socializing helps sharpen our minds and reduce depression and anxiety while helping make us happier. On top of that, D&D already offers mental health benefits, and D&D therapy is a thing that exists.

While D&D was once relegated to the realms of nerds in a basement, it is now 2021, and being a nerd is cool now. More and more people are trying D&D and finding out how fun and fulfilling it can be. And, during a pandemic, they are discovering that the sense of connection and camaraderie that comes from weekly game sessions is a refreshing break from the doom and gloom of the world outside.

So, if you’ve heard a bit about D&D and have been curious to try, now is a great time to start. In addition to having fun, you may also find that your mental health gets a boost as well. And, honestly, I think we could all use a bit of happiness right now.