Adapted from Jocelyn’s newsletter, originally sent August 14, 2026.
The Trapper Keeper with unicorns on the front went everywhere except school.
Character sheets? Check.
Dice? Check.
Player's Handbook? Check.
The kids I played D&D with went to different schools. If there were players at my school, I never found them. And that was okay, because Back in the Way Back of the 80s, girls didn’t admit they played D&D.
I kept better track of my D&D Trapper Keeper than I did the one I used for actual schoolwork.
Our DM wanted to win.
I didn't know that as a kid. I thought that was just the game.
He wasn't running a story. He was running a competition: us on one side of the table, him on the other.
"Using cleric magic doesn’t work.”
“Don’t I get to roll?”
“Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t work.”
“What about fire?”
“Nope. Doesn’t do anything.”
We spent one entire day on a single monster trying to figure out how to kill it.
A whole Saturday.
It had nothing to do with any story we were telling and everything to do with a puzzle that had no solution, because the damn thing was never built to have one.
I loved it anyway.
That's the part that still gets me.
I sat at that table for years, kept leaving hungry, and had absolutely no idea what I was hungry for.
Then it was the mid-nineties and I was at university, years after I'd quit playing D&D, and somebody introduced me to MUSHing. Multi-user shared hallucination.
Basically: text on a Unix server, and the server was quietly living on university hardware because a student working in the computer lab secretly put it there.
Most of us didn't own computers. We went to the lab.
And there were students in Chicago and Sydney and a dorm across the state, all of us typing at each other in real time describing what our characters did next.
Nobody was trying to beat me.
That was the revelation.
Somebody would write something, and I'd write the next thing, and then they would take it somewhere I hadn't expected, so I'd follow them there. Nobody knew exactly what was going to happen.
And suddenly it was four in the morning, I had a class at nine, and I did not care.
That's where I learned what it meant to write for someone besides myself.
Not in a workshop.
At a beige terminal in a fluorescent room, with a stranger's paragraph sitting on the screen waiting for mine.
(It's also where I found Vampire: The Masquerade, post Lestat and pre sparkle, but that's a story for another day.)
And I keep thinking about twelve-year-old me.
Today, a twelve-year-old girl can walk into a convention and, somewhere among all those tables, she might find her people.
I had one DM and no idea there was another option.
Which is probably why I write about the people who show up for us when it counts. The people we meet in weird little corners of the world or the internet when we need them. The people who stay. The people who help us fight the monsters instead of making sure we lose.
I found mine late. I'm still writing about them.
Jocelyn
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