On my birthday I got to play a long session of Dungeons and Dragons with my favorite character, a fighter named Jason. I had an amazing time and Matt and Leanna planned some special things for me. Jason is now a level 17 fighter, he is the highest level of any of our characters, because I have played him the most. The reason I like him so much is not because of his abilities, but because of his character and story.
What I am starting to realize about D&D is that no matter how much you try to separate yourself from your character, you never can entirely. At this point I have been playing D&D for three years, in-game about eight years, and over that time I have played seven different characters. Some characters I freely admit are very like me in one characteristic or another, while other characters were deliberately built to be different from me. But the character I made to be most different from me has turned out to be most like me, which strikes me as strangely ironic.
Circumstantially, we’re not exactly the same. Starting with the basics, like the fact that he is a male character, and working our way outward to details like occupation (he is a former soldier.) He lost his parents, I lost two children. But both of us had to work through a process of grief, anger, pain, and forgiveness. For both of us, that took about a year and included a very significant meeting with the All-Maker (God.) Both of us have been struggling with personal identity and purpose, both of us have struggled with repressed, uncontrolled emotions which have come out in unhealthy ways (most notably, anger), and both of us have had significant moments where we were told to “keep fighting.” These moments have paralleled each other in real life and in the game. And now, finally, Jason has been given a new purpose, new weapon, and embraced the light to fight the shadows. Something that is very similar to what has happened in my life lately.
No matter how I try to separate myself from this particular character, no matter how different I feel like our lives are, somehow, some way, our story arcs end up being parallel. It sounds crazy to think that God cares about D&D, but I no longer believe this is a coincidence. I have been taught so much through this character. I can’t wait to find out what happens next in his story, but the real reason for that is that I am excited to find out what happens next in mine.
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