How the world’s most popular tabletop roleplaying game helped fulfill a frustrated actor’s teenage dream.
“Do you want to build a snow-Dain?“: Vessa stalks watches her crush Dain cast Simulacrum.
Not that anyone asked, but one of the minor highlights of my year was pulling off a romance arc in D&D.
Some people might find that pretty sus, considering that D&D is often associated with wish fulfillment and power fantasies. Whenever I talk about Vessa and Dain (her now-husband, formerly a player character and now a DMNPC piloted by a good friend), I find people usually ask something along the lines of “Isn’t it weird/awkward/unhealthy to be roleplaying romance?”
The answer is, well, that it can be, certainly…but no more so than acting in a film or a play or an Amazon Prime Original Series (#notsponsored ) would be. Because that’s all D&D is, really: acting, but with dice.
(Or, well, improv. But with dice.)
If you’ve been friends with me for a while now you probably know that I’d wanted to be an actor since my age was in the single-digits. I count not getting a part in Sir X Vallez ‘s production of “May Day Eve,” never playing the female lead in Dr. Joem Antonio’s “Newspaper Dance,” and botching my Éponine auditions for “Paris, 1832” among the top ten regrets in my life. Scroll down far enough on my (now very dormant) TikTok and you’ll find that before I was an EduToker I was filming duets and #vintageactingchallenges: so BADLY did I want to act.
And not just any acting either.
No, like any good Filipina girl raised on telenovelas and Starstruck/Star Circle Quest, I wanted to be a leading lady.
The writer as “Flora,” opposite “Howl’s Moving Castle (not Howl, just the Castle)” in a college production of “Arabian Nights: Level Asian.”
Unfortunately, to be a leading lady, you need to have a leading man to have chemistry with. Something that, as anyone who worked on my “Loveblind” music video might inform you, proved especially challenging for a girl who defaults to puns over pet names and crackheadery over compliments. Attempting anything remotely “romantic” used to send me into a tsundere panic attack, complete with raptor noises.
How it all began: Vessa and Dain and a tsundere panic attack.
I suppose I might have aged out if those issues, given time and experience, but the college theater org scene eventually became incompatible with my emerging mental health issues. I joined a rock band instead. I learned to write my own songs. I auditioned for acting gigs less and less until one day I stopped auditioning at all.
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 2020 because, well, #justpandemicthings. I loved everything about it–except maybe the ever-looming threat of permanent character death without respawns–but what attracted me the most was the roleplay. I ADORED developing characters, giving them funny voices, and watching them grow in the face of both wildly impossible and all-too-real scenarios.
The writer’s current character: Vessa Elskandriel (later, Elrune), The Shadowheart.
Most of all, I loved getting to roleplay alongside other people: partymates become family in the same way castmates do, playing off of one another’s energy in a relationship of mutual trust and creativity. The game itself helps with this: since “winning” D&D involves completing quests together, mechanics reward collaboration while nearly always penalizing selfish gameplay. As a result, many people become IRL friends with their D&D partymates, because of how much they actually get to know a lot about the real person by how they pretend to be their fictional counterpart.
(Two of my three best friends became my best friends because of how much time we spent in-game together. Shoutout to “Sphinx” and “Silantius:” y’all the best meatshields a squishy Scribes wizard could ask for.)
Suffice it to say, Dungeons and Dragons reawakened my love for acting, and basically filled the void I didn’t know “leaving” theater had left behind. And, as I kept playing the game, I learned to overcome a lot of the things I’d admittedly struggled with when I’d been in theater. The relatively lower stakes of a private game versus a public show meant I found it easier to get out of my own head. I also had more time to develop my character, and more “material” to work with in the form of the different questlines and various partymate hijinks. Aforementioned best friends, plus bestest-DM-ever “Rusty,” helped as well by holding character workshop sessions, where together we honed a system that eventually became the “Character Roleplay Guide” I still use.
That being said, the most important thing I learned about acting from D&D wasn’t how to be your character. Instead, it was how not to be them. The game’s own mechanics make explicit the divide between player knowledge and character knowledge, so much so that eventually I learned to compartmentalize my own instincts over my character’s. It was like I had partitioned my brain, and could run the Vessa (or Evie. Or Sinag.) OS independent of the Frankie one. Sure, sometimes there was “bleed,” but even that I learned to control, channeling my IRL emotions to help flesh out my character’s actions, decisions, or motivations. I could have an anxiety attack…or I could roleplay Vessa as fearfully entering the Undeath Dreadlord’s castle, expecting a threat at every corner and uncovering clues because of it.
(This takes “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” to a whole new level.)
Confession time: I was a leading lady once.
It was junior year of high school. I was cast as Belle in the school musical revue. At the time, I was reading the graphic novel “Cast,” where I learned about Stanislavsky’s Method Acting. I stupidly thought it was what “real” actors did, and so based on the scant information in the comic, I tried it.
The result? An embarassingly intense stage crush that outlived the end of the play’s run and that caused me to thoroughly humiliate myself multiple times, the way only a fifteen-year-old “in love” can. Come to think of it, the consequences of my stage crush possibly caused me to develop a subconscious fear of falling for my co-star that likely fueled my latent discomfort at acting out romance, even as I longed for romantic roles. It didn’t help that, as an awkward high schooler among other awkward high schoolers, I couldn’t exactly pull my co-star aside and have a serious discussion about how to tackle our onstage relationship dynamics.
The writer in her Junior Prom dress, explicitly inspired by said disastrous stage crush.
Here’s something people don’t know about D&D: we have SO MANY good roleplay safety tools. No one wants to go full method, after all, if full method means genuinely believing you are, say, a dragonborn totem barbarian with a -2 intelligence modifier who legitimately thinks she’s a dog. From separating the actor and the character to learning how to check in with a co-star, the D&D community offers tons of tools, ensuring that if there was any place for a frustrated leading lady to try acting out romance for the first time, D&D might be one of the safest. I never felt uncomfortable roleplaying Vessa through the various stages of falling in love, because there was a distinct boundary in both mine and my “co-actor’s” mind of where we ended and our characters began. This was largely due to the fact that, unlike in the case of my high-school leading man, I actually could and did pull Dain’s player aside to have multiple chats about our “onstage” dynamics. Armed with concrete rules of engagement, I never felt the need to “method” my way through any of our roleplay “scenes” to accomplish them successfully. Doing so would be impossible anyway: Vessa was and is not Frankie, so much so that I even found myself surprised by her thoughts and feelings, so different were they from my own.
In D&D we have another term for playing a character: piloting. It’s used less in the airplane sense and more in the mecha sense: we are one with our characters, but remain independent entities to them the entire time. Playing Vessa, I am watching what she does just as much as I am doing those things as her. It’s this detachment that has made it possible for me to play a romantic “lead” without having any romantic feelings of my own: I get excited and giddy for Vessa, instead of as her. I am just as much audience as I am actor.
And goodness, what a show I got to watch.
“Yes, and…”-ing the couple song into existence: how Rick Astley made it into Dungeons and Dragons.
From surviving vampire masquerades to defeating death (and the BBEG) with the world’s most romantic Rickroll, Vessa and Dain have been one heck of a love story. I’ve laughed, cried, raged, and facepalmed in equal measure. Most of all, though, I’ve learned what “chemistry” really takes: trust. The players who pilot Dain, both as a PC and in his current DMNPC status, trusted me to help them tell a good story, and that shared trust and respect meant that we felt safe to bring our creative (and batshit crazy) A-games to every roleplay.
The (fictional) world’s most romantic rickroll.
In a way, this romance was wish-fulfillment for me, but not in the way people might expect. Vessa and Dain are by no means my dream relationship, but bringing this couple to life has fulfilled a long-cherished wish of being able to work together with someone–a lot of someones, if you counted all the supportive “castmates” who joined in the fun–to tell a love story, and emerge on the other side mentally and emotionally safe and sound.
Ultimately, after all, that’s the appeal of the theater, and of D&D: creating something with other people, and basking in the wonder of it.
“I was going to break reality for you, give or take a few months.”: Dain is reunited with a resurrected Vessa, post-final battle.
So thanks, Dungeons and Dragons, for finally letting me be a leading lady!
Vessa and Dain, rolling natural 20s during their wedding dance battle.
Art by: JBPeony
Special Thanks To: DM Chi, Player “Null,” and the citizens of “Xadia.”
~actuallyFrankie
Actually, Frankie 