Things I enjoy about Dungeons & Dragons

I consider myself a newcomer to D&D, based on my age. As someone born in the mid-eighties with a tendency toward video games, board games, and fantasy, I ought to have learned about—and probably loved—Dungeons & Dragons as a kid in the nineties. But somehow it took the airing of Community’s Advanced Dungeon & Dragons episode in 2011 for the venerable tabletop roleplaying game to appear on my radar. Once it did, I was hooked. The first challenge of D&D isn’t acquiring and reading all three (!) core rulebooks. It isn’t learning how to create your first character. It’s not building your own campaign, meticulously creating locations chock-full of multidimensional NPCs and limitless adventure. No. The first challenge is finding people to play with. For the first few years after learning about D&D, I had no one to play with. I took to the web and discovered a couple of campaigns that were posting gameplay on YouTube—Acquisitions Incorporated and High Rollers (and there are many, many more,…