20/09/2021, 20:34 - 21:38.
To talk about my favourite hobby is to talk about what I believe is the most romantic love story in the history of humanity, which is the story of how my boyfriend and I started dating. With that said, buckle up my dear reader, because this entry is going to be a long one.
From the very first moment I heard about what Dungeons & Dragons was I found myself magically drawn to it. The premise for the game is simple, even though the rules can be oftentimes complex: D&D is a role-playing game in which you use all of your imagination and wits to play as a hero who goes on the most dangerous, creative and fun adventures that the Dungeon Master, the conductor of the game, can possibly come up with. However, you need at the very least two people in order to play, and I was never the best at partaking in social interaction during highschool. That’s the reason why the first time I played Dungeons & Dragons was in 2020, when I was already in college.
Before studying English, as you may already know, I studied a double degree in Mathematics and Computer Engineering for two years. During my first year there I finally made some friends, and one of them was an avid D&D player who was planning to run as a Dungeon Master a huge battle royale campaign: everyone fighting against everyone. He set the date to start the campaign, and I was delighted to be invited to the game, even though the pandemic came through and everything had to be done via video call on Discord.
My first game was amazing, and it is objective to say that my role-playing was brilliant. My character, Denoa, a half-elf cleric, mercilessly stabbed her ally in the back and then used a cantrip to fool two players’ characters into thinking she was their god and made them run away. Sadly, my friend who was DM-ing the game couldn’t keep running it, and so that was the first and last episode of the campaign. Still, this was only the beginning of my D&D adventures, as the player whose character I had killed invited me and my friend to be a part of a small campaign he had recently started running.
My new group consisted of our new Dungeon Master, my friend from college, two people I hadn’t met before and one that I had: he was one of the players whose characters had run away from my Denoa. His new character, Alucard the human rogue, and mine, Opus the elven bard, soon became an iconic duo in our small party of five. Something curious about building a character in D&D is that, consciously or not, and even though you could create any kind of character you wished for, you always tend to create characters that are fantastical versions of yourself, and that’s why Opus and Alucard immediately hit it off. The two characters, as well as the two of us, were constantly getting in trouble and bickering over ridiculous things, and everyone loved it.
The campaign went amazingly well at first, but soon we found out that our DM wasn’t the best at his job. As a Dungeon Master not only do you have to know the rules of D&D, but you also have to know that breaking them in the right way makes the game more fun. A strict DM who doesn’t allow their players to explore, be creative and have fun will never be a good DM, especially if they don’t listen to their players when they receive criticism. This is exactly what happened with our DM: he became restrictive, he wouldn’t allow us to follow the rules if he didn’t like what we intended to do, and he even started to break the rules to kill our characters in the cruelest ways possible. We all had enough of him after one of his last games, in which he tried to wipe our characters’ memories and send them back to the very start of the campaign, which we had been playing for over three months. Role-playing games can be very intense, and that day I wasn’t the only player to go through a full-blown panic attack during the session.
After that happened, everyone made up excuses to eventually leave the game, but we still loved our characters and wanted to keep playing, so one of the players in the group, whose character had been killed, decided to become our new Dungeon Master so that we could keep playing. From then on, everything about D&D was again fun and exciting. However, this wasn’t the only change that the campaign went under, because the power of shipping (yes my dear reader, the act of one wanting/supporting two characters to be involved in a romantic relationship) is too strong.
The last game we played with our awful DM we had an additional friend over as the audience, and after the game was finally over she said the words “Hey guys, don’t you, like, ship Opus and Alucard very very much? Because I’m shipping them a lot.” That was the moment everyone admitted we all had been shipping the two characters since day one, but of course, how could I have admitted that before? After all, during those months I had developed certain strong feelings towards Alucard’s player and his beautiful teal eyes, but now I knew that everyone, including him, thought that our characters should be romantically involved, so I admitted I shipped them too. Just our characters, of course, not us, why would it be us?
And so, our improved campaign began, and just as fanservice (just that, of course) we started to role-play Opus and Alucard as slowly falling in love with each other. Their first kiss was a charming scene: they had been fighting over heaven-knows-what, and in a suddenly tender moment in the middle of the fight Opus took off Alucard’s face covering and tenderly kissed him, and everyone cheered for them. I remember that moment vividly, as I was trembling so badly in embarrassment that I feared my shaky words would betray me as I role-played the scene. But, well, Opalucard was now real! We even got group t-shirts to commemorate it, I have two of them.
The session following that one was just as cheesy. It was Sunday, 27 September, 2020, and our characters had arrived at a new city, which conveniently was holding a carnival fair. There were no monsters nor evil warlocks to fight in this chapter of our campaign, and so our characters had a day off to have some fun. This meant of course, and especially after their first kiss, that Opus and Alucard had the opportunity to go on their first date and have some romantic moments during a ferris wheel ride. That day the game ended with even more tenderness, to the point that I had to turn off my camera, “because of WiFi issues,” when in reality I was tightly hugging my pillow and blushing way too much to let anyone see my face.
That night I couldn’t hold it in any longer. Alucard’s player and I had been chatting every day and every night for the last few weeks, talking about our D&D games and deepening our bond, and so were we that night at 1:06 AM on Monday, 28 September, when I finally decided to confess my feelings towards him. Honestly, the bastard took the longest minute in history to answer to the text I had shakily typed and sent, but since then we’ve been together as the most adorable couple in existence, and I could never play Dungeons & Dragons without him ever again.
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