Chargers Roll For Initiative

By Dylan Xie December 10, 2025

On Wednesday afternoons, when many students are tired and eager to head home after a long day, a new adventure is just beginning around the corner of campus in Room F-4—the clatter of dice on the table top,  the murmur of voices around the table, the players plotting their next move. This is a typical afternoon at Leland’s Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) Club, a growing community of students eager to explore the limitless realms of make-believe. 

D&D is a flexible, table-top roleplaying boardgame created in 1974 by Gary Gygax, who established the rules of the game, and Dave Arneson, who added the concepts of a dungeon master and cooperative play. In the game, there are three types of classes: race, class and background. The elf, human, dwarf and many others fall under the race category. The wizard, fighter, rogue, cleric etc fall in the class category while soldiers, scholars and nobles are considered as backgrounds for the characters. Depending on the character one gets, their role and abilities in the game differ.  In the club however, they use simpler rules to make sure club members are able to learn more quickly about how to play the game.

Art by Eleanor Wang

The game went through a slump in the 1990s as it struggled to compete with the emergence of video game consoles and trading card games. But beginning in the early 2000s, the game experienced a resurgence due to new editions of the game fixing confusing rules and polishing mechanics. 

Furthermore, a feature in the TV show Stranger Things, where the main characters used D&D aspects to make sense of events happening in the show, helped influence the younger generation to indulge in the game. 

The constant addition of new aspects of the game by the dungeon master and players is what keeps it interesting and creative, according to the D&D club admins, Ethan Lee and Odin Oryn. 

“Some people strictly follow the rules for each character, while others ignore and add their own rules to prevent limitations in the storyline and to spice things up,” Senior Ethan Lee said. 

Compared to other board games and video consoles, D&D presents a continuous storyline, where players create a world with their imagination, which is constantly changing instead of a single objective that ends the game and holds no future consequences. 

“With most board games, each round is independent. With D&D, however, there is a continuous storyline where you can see the world and its characters develop throughout the different games,” Lee said. 

D&D prioritizes creativity and improvisation in its gameplay. Players play characters that they have created and work together with the help of the Dungeon Master to tell a story. The Dungeon Master dictates the storyline as the narrator, referee and world builder. Each player has a designated role that they choose before the storyline starts. 

“My favorite role is the overpowered warlock, and I just leveled it up and buffed it by dumping stat points into what would be good for that specific class,” Freshman Finn Rudat-Martikaien said. 

For the club members, their meetings every Wednesday are an opportunity to have fun and share jokes.  

“There are a lot of inside jokes within our meetings that you had to be there to understand. That’s what they are all about, creating humor with the group and friends. It’s also funny when the characters that are created, perform crazy shenanigans,” Lee said. 

Through these inside jokes, special moments are formed among the group.  

“My favorite moment in our sessions was when one of Ethan’s character’s, Billard, was carving his name into a wall during a heist but took too long and ended up getting caught,” Senior Odin Oryn said. 

The D&D club represents a place where students can hang out after school and have fun playing the game they love, forming unforgettable friendships and memories along the way. 

---

 About the Contributor

Dylan Xie is a sophomore at Leland High School and a staff writer for The Charger Account. In his spare time, he likes to play soccer, work out, and hang out with friends.