#extralife2020

Your five adventurers put the gate of the Lower City behind you, diving into the shantytown sprawl that envelopes the road within sight of the walls. The smell of manure, refuse, and many unwashed bodies rises around you, along with a riot of colour and sound. As you shoulder your way forward, vendors hawking street food and various trinkets bawl at you cheerfully, but you can see that at the crossroads ahead of you there's a pair of tough-looking individuals standing casually to one side of the road, people parting to give them a little respectful space. One of them notices you noticing him, looks beyond you, over your shoulder, and gives a shrill little whistle before taking a pace or two into the roadway and standing there waiting for you. The shacks here spread out around the main road with a maze of side streets and alleys, so it's up to you whether you want to head directly for him, or turn off the road . . .

The underlying skeleton of Dungeons & Dragons is a system of rules and mechanics that tell players which die to roll if they're attempting an action and what bonus to add to the result, but what animates the game are the players' decisions about what their characters would say or do. (The Dungeon Master, me, acts like an omniscient narrator, describing the setting and determining how other characters respond to the player characters.) Confronted by an informal toll-booth, will the players seek a way around through the maze of shantytown sidestreets, concoct a ruse, resort to violence, or —? One of the slogans on my game-mastering inspiration board is

It's not my job to solve your problems. It's my job to solve your solutions.

Success or failure hangs on the players' inventiveness! As it played out during the memorable game I ran over two nights in August, the quiet tiefling sorcerer Pyra Chaos surprised everyone by charming the way through this encounter with a combination of good Charisma rolls and shameless sex appeal.

The seed of this particular game was planted when I saw a tweet from a small games shop promoting #Extralife, a charity movement in the gaming community that's been raising money for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals since 2008. (The humble $125 USD that our game raised for SickKids Toronto became part of over $16 million raised globally by Extralife in 2020.) I decided to join with a D&D game, and five friends, none of whom knew each other, answered my call for players. I wrote a "two-shot" adventure (a self-contained story arc meant to be played over two game sessions) in which a ragtag band of adventurers needed to transport a mysterious package from the lawless coastal city of Baldur's Gate upriver to the temple city of Elturel. The party's conflict and eventual victory played out in the classic fantasy trope of the Escort Mission (link to TV Tropes—you've been warned!), but our collective achievement "above the table" was in tying ourselves together in a shared story-making experience.

This particular slice of 2020 really opened my eyes to the technological framework that makes this kind of movement possible even during a pandemic, from that first tweet by Die Hard Dice to the videoconferencing tools, game apps, and webpages that I used to run the game virtually.

When really pressed, our ability to innovate, learn, and adapt to the unfamiliar conventions of new practices is the bedrock of personal and social resilience. Writing for The Atlantic, Uri Friedman argues that the pandemic is revealing resilience as a national power alongside military and economic forces; in 2021 I want to write and think more about resilience as a personal and/or communal quality. Here's Friedman, quoting Michele Grossman (Deakin University, Melbourne):

"Resilience is not the absence of vulnerability." It is, instead, "the ability to manage existing or new vulnerabilities in ways that do not allow them to overwhelm us to the point where we just fold."

The old adage about standing together or falling alone is shallow but true. So, what makes certain friendships, families, or church communities resilient?

Social play does, for a start. The adventure that emerges from the interplay of five players doing creative and potentially unexpected things is an event that exists in the communal relationship between the six of us. None of the players in this game knew each other previously—I was the only common denominator—and it's a remarkable testament to the power of play that people from different backgrounds, time zones, and communities could create joy for each other. Who we are is shaped by what we remember and, especially, who we remember it with. In my article on "The Expanse" this past spring I wrote although "our communities are shrunk to nuclei under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, . . . survival worth having is our collective task." One of the things that makes us resilient, that makes survival worth having, is our ability to (re)connect through meaningful play. That's something I want to remember from 2020.

Wading Pools Reopening