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I could tell from my friend’s reaction that I had just said something he found extremely unusual. “You want to play a woman?” my college roommate Colin Donovan asked.

“Yes.” I really couldn’t figure out what his problem was. After all, Dungeons and Dragons was supposedly about role-playing.

“But that doesn’t make any sense at all.”

You see, to him, as a fantasy gaming veteran, half the fun is to pretend to be a gallant, heroic fighter – a lone warrior with a sword, roaming the countryside and rescuing beautiful maidens with long golden locks from frog creatures with skull necklaces. If you play a woman, then the goal of the game – for nerds to play men much more macho than themselves – sort of collapses.

There was no real way I could explain it to him. By this point he was convinced that I had some secret desire to be a woman in real life, and nothing I could say would change that. “I just like the way D&D women are drawn on the covers of Dragonlance books. They look cool,” I tried to explain.

It didn’t work. He was so irritated by my insistence that he found the perfect way to discourage me. “Fine, but since you want to do this, I’ll make it as realistic as possible. I will have to give you strength and endurance defects that will drive down the quality of the adventuring party and, once a month, I’ll give you PMS.”

“Well, that doesn’t make sense. If you get to play a supernaturally strong man, then why can’t I play a superhuman woman? Like Wonder Woman? If she gets cramps in the middle of a fight with Darkseid, it never shows. She just kicks Darkseid’s ass.”

“This is D&D. You don’t play superheroes. You play strong humans. And a strong female is still a minus in a group of strong men.”

Feeling I wasn’t getting anywhere, I changed tactics. “I don’t want to play a muscle-bound Teutonic moron. I’m an English major. Can I be someone Byronic, at least? Maybe a reluctant vampire?”

“No. I’m playing a Paladin and Paladin’s would never associate with vampires. Even reluctant ones. At every turn I’d have to try to kill you and the adventure would go nowhere. We’d just try to kill each other until one died.”

“Can you not play a Paladin, then? Play someone morally ambiguous, like a Robin Hood kind of guy?”

“No. I want to be a Paladin.”

“And I want to be an elf woman or a male vampire.”

“But who’s the Dungeon Master?”

“You are.”

“Exactly.”

Well, at that moment, Colin exhibited one of the main problems I have always had with Dungeons and Dragons since I was a kid. Aside from the time commitment involved in forming a little role-playing community, there is also the ever-present danger of tyrannical Dungeon Masters.

Seeing as how I’ve never actually played an extended campaign, my impression of the Dungeon Master is shrouded in mystery. However, my sense of the Master’s task is to maintain order and to direct the imagination of the players along the completion of an adventure with as few problems as possible. The DM usually plays all the characters that the players do not, like walking skeletons, Beholders, barmaids, and town governors, creating much of the conflict the gamers face. In a sense, the DM is God, and he is not always a benign God.

Basically, you don’t want the DM for an enemy, because, if he decides you aren’t fun to play with any more, he can kill you whenever he wants: “Horace, you are walking along a winding forest road and bunnies are playing at your feet when … whoops! You’ve just stepped on a land mine. That’s eighty damage points and, yes, you are dead. Sorry.”

“Don’t I get to roll the dice to see if the odds of luck favor me and I dodge the blast?” asks a horrified Horace.

“Not in the Red Zone. That’s a no-dodge-roll territory,” the DM replies, pulling an excuse out of him bum.

When I was in fifth grade, every boy in my class had the basic Dungeons and Dragons set, but very few had actually read all the directions. I bought it because it had a nice red box and a cool picture of a diesel swordsman facing off against a big red dragon, but I didn’t get beyond the first practice adventure. Every day during free period I could hear the resident Dungeon Master saying the wildest things to his players:

DM: You’re banished to the sixth dimension!

Player: Banished! What do you mean, banished?

DM: You misused the reality ring and you’re now trapped in a world of eternal flame.

Player: You can’t do this to me! I’m a level 43 hobbit with six pet allosaurs and a two-handed mace.

DM: I can do whatever I want! I’m the DM!

(This is how intellectually gifted grammar school children used to talk, during the early 1980s.)

A decade later, as an undergraduate in college, I finally had the experience of playing the game the real way. A really gifted, imaginative Dungeon Master led a role-playing session of a game called Toon (a cousin to D&D) where players pretend to be cartoon characters. The afternoon was tremendous fun, and the group of us who played worked our imaginations overtime. Instead of a woman, I played a duck with a split personality who could transform himself at any time into Frank Sinatra. It wasn't the greatest character in the world, but it wasn't bad for my first attempt.

At last, I was able to see the appeal of what had previously seemed like an unappealing session of dice-rolling and clashing egos. For a few brief hours, players get to do what movie actors do all the time - step out of their own personalities into a world of fantasy and wonder. Now that I've had an experience such as this, I understand what makes role-playing so addicting. I still haven't been pulled into serious play, because I have other hobbies that I'm committed to that demand most of my time. However, I am willing to try it in the future.  And when I do play again, I will do whatever I can not to get on the Dungeon Master's bad side.