I wanted to like Dungeons and Dragons, I really did. It was cool, lots of my friends played, it incorporated all the things I liked, or kind of liked, and I just never really got into it.
Part of the issue is that when I was in high school, I was never quite the right kind of nerd. I was on the library club, and Reach for the Top, but then I ended up on the yearbook, not the chess club, or math club. I did all the sciences except for biology (I cannot see through a stereoscopic microscope at all, even now with glasses), but not computing science. I missed out on the really formative hardcore nerd stuff.
At university, I joined the Gamesters of Triskelion, but everyone else already played and had characters and knew the games, and I didn’t. I also joined the women’s centre, and they didn’t really understand the appeal of nerds at all (not that the nerds really understood the feminists for their part). Within a few years, Dungeons and Dragons was waning, making way for computer games.
I bough this die recently, a kind of nostalgia for a youth I almost had.
So many of my friends are gaming nerds — I have a friend who’s run her own dungeon for more than 20 years — but I have never played D&D.