Once a week, about six students gather in the Trone Center’s student media suite and sit around a conference table for upwards of six hours, talking and laughing, at times locked in visibly tense exchanges but quite evidently enjoying themselves.
It may not look like much to the uninitiated passerby, but for members of the Tabletop Gaming Club, the game of Dungeons and Dragons they’re playing goes past appearances — it’s an immersive role-playing experience that places them in league against mythical monsters in fantastic imaginative worlds.
And even for those who don’t fashion themselves board game enthusiasts, the game’s appeal is easy to understand.
“It’s really just a bunch of people hanging out and having fun,” said club president Michael Mireb.
Since last year, the Tabletop Gaming Club has been providing Furman students the opportunity to play an array of board games that are a step beyond the kind of family-oriented fare that many grew up with.
So instead of buying up Boardwalk and Park Place, club members try their hand at building medieval cities and haggling over natural resources on a newly-discovered island. They defend space stations against alien invaders and re-enact horror movie tropes in a haunted house instead of revealing that, yes, once again it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick.
Class of 2013 graduates Earl Honeycutt and Courtney Strimpfel, now married, co-founded the Tabletop Gaming Club last year as a way to promote board gaming at Furman, persuading friends and acquaintances who shared their love of tabletop games to join.
For most of the club’s first year, members almost exclusively played Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D, the imaginative role-playing board game that, since its debut in 1974, has grown from an often-stigmatized example of geek culture to an almost mainstream pursuit embraced by such famous figures as Vin Diesel, Stephen Colbert, and Robin Williams.
This year, however, the club has been branching out, purchasing more than seven different games, most of which will probably be unfamiliar to the casual board gamer.
Among the new games are Gamma World (which club members describe as “D&D on crack” and “the stuff your dealer warned you about”), Space Alert (a game “simulating what would happen if you and your friends go on a spaceship and everything went horribly wrong”), and Betrayal at House on the Hill (“we don’t talk about Betrayal”).
But D&D remains the Tabletop Gaming Club’s core activity, with extended games played out in six-hour sessions that can stretch over an entire academic year.
For those who have never played, D&D can seem dauntingly complex, the game’s fantasy world immense, unfamiliar, and strange.
Games typically have around six players, and at the start, each player creates a character with special abilities and qualities who is theirs to control. For the rest of the game, players develop their characters’ personalities, relationships, and motivations as they explore the game’s fantasy world and battle monsters, search for treasure, or seek to achieve any number of other goals.
But players can’t do just anything they want. Their characters have limited abilities, and players must roll dice to determine whether or not they can perform actions, from attacking a monster to exploring a cave. Guiding the whole process is the Dungeon Master, a player without a character who makes sure that everyone stays on track and that the story moves towards a satisfying conclusion.
To keep track of the story they’re creating, players move miniatures, which are essentially small action figures, on a laminated grid featuring landmarks drawn with Vis-a-Vis marker. The game board itself is not all that visually impressive, merely a simulacrum for the fantasy world that the players are constructing in their collective imaginations.
At its core, then, the game is actually quite simple, a series of sessions that play out like episodes in a television series.
Mireb, who as club president usually plays as the Dungeon Master, said “coming up with a world and story that others can interact” with was what he loved most about the game. He said that he’d eventually like to develop a multidisciplinary D&D May Experience class since the game incorporates so many elements of theater, art, and creative writing.
Club members also said they loved the process of creating a character, playing with personas, and gradually coming to identify with their character as they moved through the story. Several members said that, in past games, they had even been moved to tears in response to their character’s fortunes.
“You have to get into [the character’s] mindset,” Mireb said.
While new players can’t join a game once it’s started, Mireb said the club has the resources to get more games going if other students want to play. The club is also planning to host a board gaming day, possibly over fall break, that will allow anyone to come and play the club’s growing collection of games.
Club member Andrew Atcher, whose lengthy beard gives him a wizardly appearance, said the club is open to anyone and that he most valued the sense of camaraderie that develops between the members.
“How improbable,” he said. “People who hang out and play games together become friends.”