Lee Gary finds community, creative and personal outlet in tabletop roleplaying game
This is an unpublished feature I wrote for a class in the spring of 2024.
The metallic monster oozes toward the ragtag group of adventurers with impossible speed, bludgeoning the nearest body it could reach with its silvery pseudopods. When it tries to grapple its victim to the ground, the hulking man finds the strength to throw off the sentient goo, but the battle has just begun.
“Everybody, roll initiative,” Lee Gary says.
Gary is the architect behind the attack. He’s also the reason that several individuals who may otherwise be strangers have flocked to The Gathering Place, a Chapel Hill bar for tabletop games, on a warm Thursday evening. They’ve come for Gary’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign, an interactive story that has spanned months.
Every week, they meet to continue the narrative that they craft in real time alongside Gary and each other, using fantastical characters and gruesome creatures and 20-sided dice that determine their success and failure. Rolling for initiative, for example, decides what order everyone will go in during turn-based combat. The higher the roll, the better your chances of attacking first. High rolls have other benefits, like dealing damage and passing skill checks.
Last week, the group fought a minotaur in a labyrinth that Gary designed in one of his composition notebooks. Now, they’re being dragged to death’s door by an amorphous life form that Gary controls in his role as dungeon master.
As the group’s cleric — a healer archetype — prepares to roll her die to see if her spell lands, Gary lands a quip with the practiced cadence of a bad pun.
“If you roll a one, it’ll be a clerical error,” he says, lightly nudging the player next to him as everyone groans good-naturedly.
While the cleric rolls better than a one, it still isn’t enough. She misses. The die is not in her favor, nor anyone else’s. Only Gary, behind a scaly green trifold that hides his notes, is rolling scores high enough to deal damage. The group is hopelessly outmatched.
Winter Woolman — a 10-year-old blond girl in a brightly tie-dyed shirt who controls a wizard named Acacia — has tried just about everything. She flips through the spell book on her electronic tablet with her dad, Aaron, peeking over her shoulder. They murmur, debating strategies, before settling on their latest effort.
“What plane of existence is this from?” she asks Gary.
He tells Woolman to roll a die for a history check, determining whether her character possesses that knowledge. She only rolls an 11.
“You don’t know,” Gary says.
“Fair enough,” Woolman says with a nod. She switches into character and says to the goo, “I don’t know where you’re going, but you’re banished.”
The die takes mercy on her. The spell is successful. A tear rips through the universes, sucking the monster through to an unknown land before sealing itself with a faint popping sound. The banishment will only last for one minute, and the group has no time to waste. They run away.
Some of the players won’t be back at The Gathering Place until the next Thursday to continue the adventure. Gary, however, will visit the venue at least twice in the following days to host more Dungeons & Dragons campaigns: one for more experienced players on Sunday and one for beginners on Wednesday. In between, he writes updates for his storylines, establishing plot beats and selecting monsters for his group to contend with and react to. This has resembled his routine for about seven years.
Dungeons & Dragons was invented in 1974 and has endured decades of obscurity and nerd-status. Although, the tabletop fantasy roleplaying game has been gaining pop culture traction thanks to featuring in the hit show “Stranger Things” and spreading to other series, movies and video games. Gary has noticed an increased interest in D&D in recent years, from newcomers as well as people who played in their youth and are looking to get back into the game.
Gary began playing in 1988 in the days when adults were concerned that the game was a ruse for Satanic worship. Gary’s parents didn’t see any harm, however, in letting their teenaged son spend all weekend at his friends’ houses fighting ogres and goblins armed with his imagination. After all, Gary’s older brother had played D&D several years prior to no detriment. Still, Gary and his friends didn’t share their so-called evil extracurricular with their peers.
“We weren’t ashamed of it,” Gary says. “We were proud, but we kept it quiet because we didn’t want to be hassled by the knucklehead quarterback from the football team.”
Nowadays, nerdiness is more in fashion, Gary says.
Venues like The Gathering Place cater to newbies and diehards alike, providing programming and selling handbooks. Before it opened in 2022, Gary says he walked in while the owners were still putting the bar together to offer his services as a dungeon master. Now he’s there multiple times a week, with no compensation beyond free non-alcoholic beer.
“I equate it with people who follow around a band,” Gary says. “It becomes half about the performance — whether the music or the game — and half about the community.”
For Gary, that community stretches across the United States, from people he’s connected with virtually to local adventurers in the Triangle, such as Cassie Peele and Jasper Sterling. The couple has played in Gary’s Thursday and Sunday campaigns for several months. They have a one-on-one game with each other that has lasted a handful of years, but were itching to expand their circle.
“I do think there’s something particularly magical about sitting around a table with other people,” Sterling says. “The air feels different. You enter this space of — whatever person I am and life I have before I sit down is totally irrelevant. I’m completely immersed.”
So, twice a week they drive the 30 minutes from Durham to play under Gary in sessions that last about two hours each.
“I like roleplaying,” Sterling says, “but almost more than that, I like watching Cassie roleplay. In real life, she’s incredibly shy. Then she plays these characters who are so talkative. It’s really exciting to watch her become so animated and involved.”
Like Peele, Gary is something of an introvert. He says that most members of the community are, but that social interaction is like food: You can’t live without it. Although players can struggle with getting whatthey need, their fellow D&D fans act as a resource.
Gary once had a 15-year-old boy interested in playing whose father had just died. Despite his longing for connection, the boy was concerned about his family’s financial situation. While some do pour money into their D&D hobby, buying the guides and artisan dice, it’s easy to keep things cheap. Gary freely shares his materials; the boy never paid for anything.
“The community is always a safe place,” Gary says. “As someone who struggles a lot with anxiety and depression — a lot of gamers do — it’s a place where we feel understood.”
Gary gestures to his glass filled with the amber liquid of non-alcoholic beer.
“I don’t drink anymore,” he says, “But I used to drink heavily. This is a way to help me get out of that. I’ve lost a lot of people to suicide. Ten over the last 12 years. Part of that was people not having healthy outlets.”
Dungeons & Dragons is an important outlet for Gary. It links a vital sense of community to a long-time passion of his: writing. He describes the practice as therapeutic.
“I’ve always been a writer,” he says. “By education and profession, I’m a molecular biologist, but I’ve always been a writer. It bugs me if I don’t write.”
Gary handwrites all the content for his campaigns in composition notebooks, dedicating a notebook to each night. When he runs out of space, he cracks open a new book. His six-year campaign for Shadowrun, another tabletop roleplaying game, is on its fifth notebook. Gary numbers every page to make an accurate table of contents, where he organizes chunks with chapter names. To the chagrin of some of his players, Gary writes exclusively in script.
“Who wrote this, Benjamin Franklin?” they sometimes complain.
“It’s called cursive, millennial,” Gary shoots back.
Regardless of any teasing, he has his players autograph the notebooks to immortalize their time together. Sometimes, before a campaign, Gary soaks blank sheets of paper in tea to give it an aged look and writes letters to players before sealing it with wax. It’s a special way of giving players background information as their journey begins. He strives to give his players a unique experience, writing in a voice that’s distinctly his own.
A typical D&D campaign may begin with the dungeon master placing their players in a tavern with a heroes-for-hire sign. Gary, however, likes to start with something jarring. A favorite campaign of his was played with a group he nicknamed “the Monkletonians” because they all knew each other from The Crunkleton, a Chapel Hill bar, and monks are a character class in the game. He began their adventure with them waking up in chains, held by barbarians at a wedding where they were set to be sacrificed.
“I’m proud when I come up with these moments,” Gary says, “which, unfortunately usually happens at 1 a.m. when I should be asleep.”
Gary says that some of his players have told him to put his stories in book format, but it’s hard to take the praise. Jasper Sterling also notes his writing skills.
“Lee is wonderful,” Sterling says, “He crafts these complicated stories that have great foreshadowing and story beats — which is hard to do in these huge games where you need to include everyone. He’s definitely one of my favorite people I’ve played with.”
“I haven’t played under any other dungeon masters beside Jasper,” Cassie Peele says.
“It’s okay, you can say he’s better than me,” Sterling says, and the couple laughs.
Gary has received several tokens of appreciation from his players, from a Darth Vader toaster to an engraved cigar box — aiding his one vice — to a 3D-printed tower he rolls dice through. The gift he always brings to his sessions, however, is the green trifold that protects his manuscripts. Tucked away in a wooden booth at The Gathering Place, between the retro arcade games and nook of card games for sale, the trusty trifold stands as a beacon to anyone captured by the allure of Dungeons & Dragons, as Gary was over 30 years ago.
Pull up a chair. Borrow some dice.
Roll for initiative.