Reporter Taylor Stumbaugh explorers the world of Dungeons and Dragons at Lane Library.
It's 5 p.m. at Oxford's Lane Library, there's a tornado watch in effect in Butler County, and I'm waiting to play Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).
The Dungeon Master, 19-year-old Logan Murray, runs the game and has been talking me through the rules as we wait for teens to show up for the monthly club meeting.
Unlike a traditional board game, D&D involves seven different dice that are extremely fun to stack, a more than 300-page book of rules and (sometimes) no board.
Teen librarian Akiko Urayama said the library puts on a D&D campaign of sorts, but it's hard for the Dungeon Master to keep one storyline because of the continuous flow of participants.
The D&D events are open to the public, but players need to stay in their own age range. Youth ages require registration in advance and range from eight to 11, teens are 12 to 18 and adults are 19 and up.
"I don't like to make teens register," Urayama said. "I want them to be able to say hey, let's go together and it's friends and just pop in kind of thing."
Before the start time rolled around, Urayama warned me that the turnout can be unpredictable, especially during the summer, and the tornado warning really wouldn't help bring people out.
That was proven true after 30 minutes of waiting for more kids to show up, and only one 12-year-old and his aunt, there to be his ride, attended.
Urayama created the club three years ago, with every year gaining more success. She said the usual turnout for teens is five to 10 per session.
D&D stretches back decades, but a lot of the game's current success comes from the COVID-19 lockdown. People weren't allowed to leave their houses, so the in-person game played around a table switched to online meet-ups. At first people used Zoom or Skype, it then quickly morphed into its own virtual gaming scene.
According to reporting by The Conversation and New York Times, a majority of the game's popularity comes from mainstream access. It was featured on shows like "The Big Bang Theory" and "Stranger Things," helping it lose some of its stigma.
A larger factor, though, is it's growth in online gaming culture from Twitch to YouTube — both popular places for teens to learn.
I had no idea how to play, but when Logan asked the group if we wanted to join in to reach the minimum number of players, I obliged, and so did the aunt, Kati Taylor. The three of us locked in and I started creating my character: Toadster.
Before the game, I chatted with Taylor while her nephew Gabe prepared his character sheet. Unlike myself, she's not a novice. Taylor has been part of a campaign since 2019 and helped introduce Gabe to the game.
"I want him to have fun," Taylor added before we joined the game, "plus it teaches math."
Gabe added from the table that he started playing because of its popularity in the gaming world and the people around him.
"I started out watching little D&D skits on YouTube and it seemed like a really cool thing," he said. "For me it just kind of clicks and works."
He's not the only one. Dicebreaker, a news outlet for boardgames, conducted a survey that showed an 85% interest increase since 2020 in D&D.
Through the D&D games at the library, players have the opportunity to level up and work on their character development.
I started out as a copper dragonborn bard, of course. After about 15 minutes of setting everything up, Logan set the scene for us. He said the guards sent for us to figure out a string of robberies happening around town. Our mission was to solve who was robbing the stores and why.
Taylor jumped right in saying we should head toward the tannery, one of the businesses robbed, and question them. Once we reached the door, Gabe veered off from the group to climb into the back window. He rolled a 19 for performance, allowing him to reach the second-story window with ease.
The game continued on like this as we traveled from shop to shop using our words and imagination to move the plot along. Our final destination was a farmers market where a carnival was set up the previous week. We followed our lead to a stand selling stolen items: corn and wooden figures.
The time reached 6:55 p.m. and we still didn't know the culprit, out of time and ideas we asked the Dungeon Master who did it. It turned out to be animatronic metal dolls hidden inside the wooden figures.
With only three people and two hours, we managed to create a whole world and solve a mystery. Other campaigns can go on for decades with three times the amount of people. Taylor mentioned during the game that her friend joined a campaign five years ago that had been running for 15 years before he joined.
Lane library isn't just a place for renting books and D&D. It holds family story times, Tuesday afternoon movies, art workshops for kids and more.
"The library is a safe place for many kids and parents, and if they wanted to learn something, they turn to libraries," Urayama said, "So that's why I wanted to allow them to turn to us and especially this game, if you don't have grownups around you that plays D&D, it's kind of intimidating. [And] it's been very popular so I wanted kids to be able to come and play in a safe spot."
The Library's final teen D&D campaign of the summer is Aug. 6 from 5-7 p.m. The library will host a youth session Aug. 10 from 3-4:30 p.m. and an adult session Aug. 11 from 1:30-4:30 p.m.
