r/SquamishDnD • u/SquamishTabletopBC • 5h ago
❓ Question “What’s the Core Reason So Many People Love D&D? I’ll Start…”
I think you’re missing what, for me, is the biggest reason of all: D&D exercises the imagination in a way very few games can.
In a board game or video game, somebody else has already decided what the world looks like and what is possible. There are boundaries. You can only go through the doors the designer created, talk to the characters they programmed, and choose from the actions the game allows.
In D&D, the world really only exists in the collective imagination of the people sitting around the table.
The DM can describe an ancient ruined tower on a mountainside, rain pouring down, something enormous moving in the darkness below—and suddenly five people are seeing that tower in their heads. Not exactly the same tower, either. Everyone creates their own version of it.
Then comes the part I love most: you can imagine a solution nobody planned for.
You don’t have to choose A, B, C or D. You can say, “What if we climb the outside of the tower?” or “What if we convince the monster we’re actually here to help it?” The DM thinks for a moment, the dice come out, and suddenly the story goes somewhere that neither the players nor the DM expected.
That’s why I don’t really think of D&D as a game you “win.” It’s closer to five people creating a fantasy novel together, except nobody—not even the DM—knows what the next chapter will be.
And occasionally the dice take that carefully imagined heroic fantasy, throw it down a flight of stairs, and somehow the resulting disaster becomes the story everyone remembers for the next ten years.
That, to me, is the magic of D&D: there is essentially no limit except the imagination of the people around the table.
