Into The Dragon’s Lair
How tabletop role-playing changed my life
When I was 12, in the early nineties, I wandered into The Dragon’s Lair. Not the actual lair of a dragon, that would’ve been far too awesome a thing to happen in my otherwise drab and dreary little life. No, a fantasy gaming shop on Green Lane in Dagenham, the hinterlands of East London.
My mother, sister and I had moved into a council house in the area a few months before after moving around between temporary accommodations for a few years.
I was hugely into science fiction and fantasy and had been enticed inside by the posters, books, and miniatures in the window. Inside there were gaming tables and shelves stocked with more books, boxed sets, novels, miniatures, paints, and dice. All on the theme of science fiction and fantasy. It all spoke to me. No, it all shouted at me. My head whirled. I was home. Or close enough anyway.
The shop was owned and run by a young (old to my eyes at the time) long-haired high-energy guy named Martin and his partner Dawn. It was usually busy with many regulars hanging around. A distinctly male crowd, boys around my age up to a few ancient men in their thirties. There were no other women except for Dawn. That didn’t strike anyone as odd, the whole science and fantasy thing was a mithril-reinforced geeky guy stereotype.
I didn’t know anything about tabletop role-playing games at the time, I was first drawn to card games. There was the Star Trek The Next Generation Customizable Card Game, Spellfire (based on Dungeons & Dragons), and Magic the Gathering which was huge and is even huger now.
I wasn’t much interested in wargames like Warhammer either. Painting miniatures was an enjoyable pastime and the rule systems were interesting but the gameplay was more about strategy than story.
I cared more about story.
Without a narrative, I’m easily distracted and bored. This isn’t me putting Warhammer and other wargames down, they could still be lots of fun. But they were more focused on game mechanics.
I started reading some novels set in the various Dungeons & Dragons worlds. Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. Fantasy wasn’t new to me, I was already a big Tolkien geek and his work had laid the foundations and tropes of the modern fantasy genre. A lot of “high fantasy” is Tolkien remixed. The same elves, dwarves, halflings, and other races. A few nice twists and variations here and there, like Kenders or Drow.
So it wasn’t long before I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. I’d watched others and had been intrigued. It seemed complex and involved but that was fine. Complex and Involved were my middle names. I already had an overactive imagination and now I’d found the perfect playground to unleash it in. Whole new worlds opened up before me. This was the intellectual stimulation school couldn’t provide, so I’d been skipping. Instead, I spent my time in public libraries, stayed up late reading or coding, slept in during the day, and crawled into The Dragon’s Lair once school hours were over.
This was education. This was social interaction. This was freedom.
For those unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons, or role-playing games (RPG) in general, it’s playacting and make-believe with structure and rules. Players create characters with abilities and skills based on the game’s rules, recording statistics on a character sheet. They also come up with a personality, backstory, and motivation for their character, which they are then encouraged to act out. Affect an accent and mannerisms. Boastful, arrogant, jolly, withdrawn, brooding — it’s up to the player to decide how to play, grow and evolve their character.
Interaction between players is in character. The Dungeon Master (DM), or more generically in other RPGs. Gamemaster, acts as storyteller, referee, and arbiter of rules and disputes. Their word is final. DM plays every character in the world not played by the players. Anyone they encounter, friend or foe. The friendly innkeeper, the village idiot, or the unexpected highwayman. These are “non-player characters” or NPCs.
Gameplay is freeform.
Players decide where to go and what to do, the game only becoming turn-based for combat. The DM will have a broad idea of the narrative sweep, having prepared an adventure in advance with problems for the players to solve and a goal to reach, e.g. free the townsfolk from the tyranny of local brigands, find the king’s missing messenger, rescue the farmer’s son. Adventures could be purchased premade, made up by the DM or a hybrid.
Much of that would come from the DM’s imagination and even in premade adventures there would be large parts left unplanned as everything the players may decide to do could not be anticipated in advance. Nor should it be. Players shouldn’t feel they’re being railroaded along a preplanned narrative. They should feel their characters have agency and free will, existing in an open world full of possibilities. Even if they do occasionally need a subtle nudge in the right direction from the DM to move the adventure forward, usually via an NPC, e.g. the farmer coming up to them to ask if they’ve started looking for his son yet.
As a storyteller, the DM narrates and describes what the player’s characters see and hear. The DM sets the tone:
”As dusk falls and you near the village, you notice something amiss: There are no lights. All is quiet. You hear a rustle in the trees to your left… roll initiative.”
The last being an instruction to the players to roll dice to see who can respond first. The DM then tells the players what happens next. Sometimes only one character successfully notices something. The DM will take that player aside.
In the example above, was it a band of orcs waiting in ambush? A squirrel in the buses? Why are there no lights on at the village?
Suspense and intrigue…
This is how the story unfolds. This is how play proceeds.
Dice rolls, checked against rules and scores on the character sheet are used to resolve actions that depend on chance. Whether it’s to see if a player can bend the bars of a prison cell, haggle with a shopkeeper for a discount, or convince the local lord to hire them. The last two might just be achieved with good role-playing.
Combat has more detailed rules and involves more dice rolls to figure out whether a blow lands and how much damage it deals. Miniatures, maps, and other items may be employed to more precisely keep track of everything going on. Those are optional, unlike wargames the emphasis is on storytelling and flow of gameplay. Whole sessions can easily go by without any combat, just storytelling and role-playing.
It’s amateur dramatics.
Play usually goes on for a few hours. Sessions resume where they left off until the adventure is complete. Then onto the next adventure! Adventures can be part of a larger campaign that could run for months or even years. For many it becomes a regular social event, playing the same character for years, growing and gaining in strength and power. Characters start out as fresh-faced, wide-eyed, low-powered adventurers and go on a hero’s journey. From dealing with common ruffians to fighting mighty dragons in epic battles and shaping world events. Humble adventures to epic sagas. The players also go on a journey.
All that’s needed to play are rulebooks, pencils, paper, dice, and most importantly, an imagination!
More is required from the DM: planning, preparation, organisation and most of all, commitment. That’s a lot of time and energy. DM’ing can take a lot but doesn’t have to, especially for simple one-off adventures. It can also be immensely rewarding.
This all used to be fairly niche, the domain of geeks and nerds, but now with the popularity of shows like Stranger Things tabletop roleplaying has seen a resurgence. Stranger Things and the sitcom Community (episode Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) do an excellent job of showcasing all of the above well.
It wasn’t just Dungeons & Dragons, role-playing games came in many types with different rules, tones, and settings. There was the cyberpunk-themed Shadowrun, the Lovecraftian cosmic horror Call of Cthulhu, or the mature Vampire The Masquerade, emphasising loss of humanity and existential wrangling as central themes over heroics and combat.
I got to live many different lives through these games. Try on different personas. Solve problems. Learning valuable life skills along the way. Bargaining, diplomacy, teamwork, planning, organisation, leadership and more. Countless scenarios emphasising problem-solving through communication, collaboration, and teamwork. And of course how to get along with others.
Players in role-playing games don’t “win”, instead they are rewarded for novel thinking and driving the story forward by staying in character and working with the other players to overcome challenges. Or just by creating a fun experience through good role-play and storytelling, whether that results in dramatic tension, intrigue, or comic relief. Players aren’t competing with each other or with the DM. Everyone wins together by having a good time. As the cliche goes, the real treasure was the friends you made along the way. The main goal is to have fun!
The only thing a player can be penalised for is breaking the immersion for others. Being a “rules lawyer”, trying to hoard in-game rewards, going off on their own (horror movies are a good lesson here), or acting out of character/using information their character wouldn’t know in-game. Or just being a plain nuisance, e.g. attacking random townspeople for no reason. The DM’s word is final. It’s important that a DM is someone who can be fair, balanced, and flexible, who resists playing favourites. The DM is there to create and facilitate the world, stories, and rules. To make sure everyone has a good time. A good or bad DM can make or break the experience.
A DM must be a good storyteller. Someone who can hold the interest and attention of the players. Like someone telling a story around a fire. Putting on voices, creating suspense and drama. Moving and surprising people. Making them see, think, and feel. Immersing them in the story. The players should forget they are sitting around a table. They should be transported. It should be easy. Good storytelling is as old as humanity.
Martin was such a person. He could do characters, voices, and sound effects. He could lower his voice to suggest threat and suspense or he could gesticulate, shout, and scream to make you see the orc you’d just hit between the eyes with an arrow. He described the world and its goings-on. We saw it in our minds. We added to it with our voices. Co-creation. Collaborative storytelling. Collective hallucination. Collective lucid dreaming.
One time for Halloween, Martin ran a special after-hours candlelit session using the Ravenloft horror setting. Our party had been enveloped by mists in the previous session and were transported to a realm where vampires, werewolves, and zombies lurked. Martin spoke to us in hushed tones so we had to lean in close. It was dark and chilly in the shop. There was ominous music playing in the background. Our characters were walking through a graveyard. Deathly silence. We were tense… Then suddenly there was a blood-curdling scream from the back of the shop that made us jump! Martin had had a friend hiding back there the whole time to do that at the right moment.
Martin understood dramatic tension and pacing. He could be funny, commanding, menacing, or melancholy.
He was the best I’ve seen at this. Then and since.
Martin ran a complex campaign involving 50 or so regulars. Running a session each day of the week for separate parties all off on their own separate adventures yet inhabiting the same world. Each party got a piece of the overall mystery that was unfolding in the world. Players were cautioned not to discuss and spoil what they had learned in-game with players from other parties at the shop. After a few months, an event was organised in-game where all the characters would come together at an inn to share what they had each learned. This was an after-hours live-action role-playing event where the shop served as that inn. We wandered around in character, role-playing and chatting to each other. Make-believe on a larger scale. Essentially live live-action role-playing, or LARP, rather than around a table. It was epic!
For Martin to juggle all this and run such a complex and ongoing campaign while keeping all the story points compartmentalised must have required a great deal of planning and energy. He was our Kevin Feige of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On top of that, he wrangled all the real-life people with their personality quirks and egos. He thrived on it. He lived for it. He would have made an excellent coach or manager in a different environment. He understood people.
I learned a lot from Martin. He was a role model. I was glad to have one in real life, all my others were fictional or historical. I also didn’t really have parents. There was my mother, the kind of parent you end up parenting yourself.
Martin filled a need for many of us. An adult on our wavelength that we could trust and also have fun with.
My main character was a wizard. I usually played wizards. I was drawn to the arcane studious types. Intellect over brawn or subterfuge to solve problems. Tinkering with the mysteries of the universe. But then Gandalf had been my favourite character in The Lord of the Rings. Or the mage Raistlin in the Dragonlance books, a troubled and maligned outsider.
As for real life interaction, outside of the games I made many friends at the shop. There was plenty of time to stand around and chat. It was a hangout. I think many were likely somewhere on the autism spectrum like me. It was also an entirely white crowd aside from me but race didn’t seem to matter. At least no one made me aware of being brown or remarked on it, unlike at school where racism was fairly common. Or to put it another way, when your world is full of elves, orcs, dwarves, cyborgs, and aliens, a brown human is hardly worth commenting on. Everyone was too preoccupied with fantastical worlds and their own weirdness to really care. Besides, I was my own thing. I didn’t grow up with any ethnic or cultural “starter kit”, and so had no sense of belonging anywhere outside of the places I chose to be. And this was where I’d chosen to be.
Curiously all the characters I played were white. I didn’t think about that at the time. It was just a default. My world was white. Something I’d internalised by only being around white people, possibly reinforced by a few months with white foster parents when I was seven. The game settings were a pseudo-medieval Europe but there was plenty of material allowing the creation non-white “exotic” characters from far-off invented lands. Except I didn’t want to be exotic, in-game or out-of-game. I was different enough already. And it didn’t matter anyway, no one batted an eye at me for playing a character who was white. I’m sure they didn’t even think about it. It didn’t matter. Sort of like all the non-white elves, dwarves, and humans in The Rings of Power. Does it matter? No. Can it be explained? Yes. Anything can be explained.
Another way in which the environment and games were good was how they helped outsiders, the more “individuated”, feel safer in their oddness and differences. We were all geeks and weirdos. The absence of girls and women was something no one remarked on but in retrospect is glaring. I think most of the boys there, including me, were nervous around girls. We were at that confusing age where hormones inconvenienced our otherwise orderly existence of contemplating stat modifiers for reducing the damage from a red dragon’s fiery breath.
This was our place. Our sanctuary. We could shut the outside world out. A bunch of oddballs hanging out together. We could all be outcasts together. Everyone needs somewhere to go. The Dragon’s Lair was our place.
At one point the shop had moved a few doors down the road into larger premises. I helped with that move. It felt good. I was poor and rarely spent money in the shop. Many of the other regulars were in a similar position. I did wonder how Martin made enough to keep it running. Even with my scant knowledge of business and finance, I couldn’t see a lot of money being spent in the shop and wondered how it stayed afloat.
Martin poured so much of himself into his games and the huge complex campaign he ran. I’m not sure he ever knew how much it meant to everyone. He provided a valuable service to the community, especially to the young boys in a deprived area devoid of opportunities. Other kids roamed the streets but these kids weren’t like that. They would likely have stayed home playing video games if it hadn’t been for The Dragon’s Lair. They would have missed out on social interaction. Martin gave us all somewhere to go. Somewhere safe. Somewhere we could dream. He did it out of a passion for storytelling. There was never a hard sell to buy anything. The games he ran were free. Most of us only bought one rulebook and some dice.
At one point when I’d missed so much school my mother and I had to go to a local court. The shop was brought up, even though I didn’t go there during school hours. The presiding officials said something about taking action to close it down, which I knew was just a threat to scare me back into regular school attendance. I remember feeling rage at those cold and uncaring bureaucrats. They did not understand. They did not want to understand.
There was also the incident with my headmaster when I’d put my interest in D&D on a “what would you like to do when you grow up” form. I was called in front of the headmaster along with my mother. He dramatically explained how these games were a way for the devil to enter the world, how he’d seen iron fenders hurled at ministers and several other nonsense stories to scare me. My mother looked baffled. He suggested she take me to a Hindu holy man to undergo an exorcism of sorts. We promptly forgot about the whole thing and never spoke of it again. He’s dead now. Probably an iron fender.
On reflection, he would’ve made a good DM.
The Dragon’s Lair saved lives. It saved mine. Home and school were utterly crap and depressing. The Dragon’s Lair was the only place I could truly be my weird and wonderful self. Or any other self I wanted to be.
I made some good friends there too. One of them helped me get a Saturday job washing pots which led me to meeting my best friend. He also introduced me to heavy metal via Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden mixtapes. With him and other friends, I talked about life, the universe and everything. We hung out in the shop and outside too. These were my “wonder years.”
Around the age of 15, I started to move on. I was increasingly going into Central London. By the time I was 17 I was working part-time in town and had stopped going to The Dragon’s Lair altogether. I’d drifted away. I didn’t spend any time in the local area anymore.
The shop eventually closed. I don’t know why but I suspect finances were a factor. Or maybe Martin had other reasons. I’m sad I didn’t stick around and lost touch. I did keep in touch with some of the friends I’d made there for a while and we occasionally played D&D and other games at their homes. But my life was changing and I was going off in new directions.
In my early twenties, through a friend from The Dragon’s Lair, I found myself regularly going to a goth/alternative nightclub that was unlike any nightclub I’d gone to before. In retrospect I see similar neurotypes as those from The Dragon’s Lair. Another place for oddballs and misfits. I’ve always managed to find those.
Many years later, in my mid-thirties, while busy with work, I finally decided to run my own game. Be a Dungeon Master. The D&D rules had been updated and simplified for the 5th Edition and were easier and more accessible for new players. I assembled a group of friends, some completely new to role-playing. They got the idea quickly. I’d been nervous about running my own game in the past, most of that coming from a lack of confidence. I didn’t feel that anymore, I was dealing with far more complex people issues in my work life. I’d have friends over at my place every week and run a simple premade adventure, starting in a town and leading into a dungeon. The players surprised me several times, including when deciding to hurl a pig from a butcher’s shop they were standing outside at some ruffians. I had to quickly make up some rules for the damage caused by a porcine projectile. But that’s what the game is about — spontaneity and improvisation!
Martin was there with me in spirit. The Obi-Wan to my Luke. The Gandalf to my Frodo.
Eventually I couldn’t balance work pressures and the preparation needed for each game session. I managed to get to the end of the adventure and wrapped it up but didn’t then segue into further adventures. In hindsight, dealing with the real world problems of consultancies who’d run off with millions in taxpayer money seems less important now than running a good fun game for my friends. But then my work/life priorities were a bit muddled there for a while.
Then later, just before the pandemic hit, there was a game run by a work friend. Once a month, a private room in a pub. A mix of senior civil servants and contractors. We could have been kids. We could have been any age. Odd looks from the staff as they occasionally entered to take food and drink orders when we were in character or rolling dice.
Role-playing has been recurrent if not consistent throughout my life. In another sense, I’ve never stopped role-playing. My view of many of the new environments I’ve ended up in, work or travel, has often put me in mind of “rolling a new character.” Whether it’s boardroom theatre, being on either side of an interview panel or giving a talk to the New Zealand government, I was role-playing a character.
We all do that a bit but the experiences I’d gained from fantasy role-playing had let me try out many more personas than others may get to. Adopt and dry run myself through scenarios that most don’t have a chance to. Placating an incensed dragon, convincing a vampiric prince to allow me passage through his domain, or brokering a peace treaty between warring factions. Not so different from some of my later work situations.
I went through a sort of meteoric rise in my work life. I’d started late but was like a tightly coiled spring suddenly released. I quickly moved from one unfamiliar environment to another, at each stage feeling an extreme imposter syndrome yet also a sense I’d been there before. But how? When? Consciously or not I was drawing on experiences gained through role-playing to buoy me through these new situations. The Dragon’s Lair had prepared me well. Especially when I ended up dealing with some real life dragons.
And I also became a fairly decent storyteller.
Then there’s neurodivergence. The autism. The masking. All that role-playing. All those personas and performances. I’d had a head start. I was a pro.
Recently I was out with some old friends I’d made years back at the goth club. They were also into tabletop role-playing. Their 11-year-old daughter Amy got very excited by the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Kit we saw while browsing through a comic book and gaming store. Being a good uncle, I bought it for her. That’s around the age I’d started. Passing on the baton. Later, sitting down and having lunch, Amy on her phone excitedly squeaks “I’m messaging my friends Lily and Isabel about Dungeons & Dragons!.”
We’ve come a long way.
I’m glad to see D&D and tabletop roleplaying in general is even more popular now. It’s more accessible. More importantly, the players are more diverse. It’s no longer just geeky guys. Anyone can enjoy role-playing games regardless of age, sex, race or gender. Anyone can be whoever and whatever they want to be. The only limit is their imagination. And we all need more play and storytelling in our lives.
Tabletop role-playing changed my life. I wouldn’t be who I am now without it. And I am a better and more developed person for it.
I also wouldn’t be who I am without The Dragon’s Lair or Martin.
Martin: You were an inspiration and a role model. I looked up to you. You did something incredibly valuable for the community out of pure passion, love and enjoyment. You took us all on a journey to other worlds. You gave us somewhere to go. That needs to be recognised and celebrated. Even if you were only trying to run a shop and have a good time. You made a big difference in people’s lives. Certainly in mine.
Wherever you are, I hope you are doing well. Thank you for the good times. Thank you for everything.
So that’s it, my ode to The Dragon’s Lair and Martin. The best DM in the world.
Oh, and this year is D&D’s 50th anniversary. Its appeal is enduring and growing.
Thank you for reading.
*rolls dice*
20! Critical hit!
