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When Imagination Was Enough A Memoir of Dice and Dragons
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There was a time, before open-world video games devoured hundreds of hours and lit every pixel with photorealistic fire, when the most vivid worlds I knew were built with dice, pencils, and the flicker of candlelight on graph paper.

Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t a game in the way most people think of games now. There were no controllers, no cutscenes, no orchestral scores. What we had was a table. A few friends. A sheet of paper. And a voice — the Dungeon Master’s — conjuring mountains, catacombs, and ancient sleeping dragons with nothing more than words.

I remember one session where I tried to steal a gem from under a dragon’s claw. That’s it — no graphics engine, no rumble feedback. Just:
DM: “You enter a dark cavern. A dragon sleeps on a pile of gold.”
Me: “I sneak around to grab a gem.”
DM: “Roll a Stealth check.”
And in that roll — in that breathless pause as the die clattered across the table — there was more tension than any boss fight I've faced in a AAA title.

Everyone who played D&D, without exception, knows this main book.

Playing D&D meant buying into something deeper. It required the willing suspension of disbelief — not just accepting that I was a rogue named Kael from the Dagger Coast, but feeling it. Believing it. Laughing, hurting, risking everything as him. And everyone around the table believed too. Together, we dreamed the world into being.

It was mental investment of the highest order. Before each game, we’d spend hours creating backstories, debating alignment ethics, sketching out maps of cities that had never existed. The Dungeon Master would craft entire political systems just so a town’s mayor could offer us a quest. We weren’t just playing — we were co-authoring a living myth.

I’ve played the modern games. The ones with 400-hour campaigns and facial textures so sharp you can count the pores. They’re stunning. But they don’t ask much of me. They don't need me to close my eyes and imagine. They render everything. Leave nothing uncertain. And in doing so, something essential is lost.

In D&D, the magic lives in the gaps. The things unsaid. The silent glance between party members before storming the fortress. The drunken bard singing off-key after a narrow escape. The death of a character who was never real — except they were, weren’t they?

We believed. That was the spell.

To this day, no cutscene has made me weep the way Kael’s sacrifice did.

Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t just a game. It was a shared hallucination — tender, absurd, heroic. And in an age obsessed with rendering reality in 4K, I still find myself missing the blurry edges of those old adventures.

Because back then, all we needed to see a dragon… was to agree there was one.

And roll for initiative.

The die were loaded with potential, tactile, and powerful enough to haunt me into my 50s.
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