Dungeons and Dragons club comes to Wake Forest

Freshmen+Kevin+Jewell+and+James+Vasilko+play+Dungeons+and+Dragons.

Freshmen Kevin Jewell and James Vasilko play Dungeons and Dragons.

Joshua Short, Reporter

Recently, Freshman AJ Larimer founded a new school club, the Dungeons and Dragons Club. Dungeons and Dragons is a popular fantasy role-playing tabletop game in which players play as a specific character and embark on a campaign. The game is said to challenge the player’s critical thinking and strategic knowledge as they are faced with various situations and quandaries.

Larimer always enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons and was excited to introduce this club.

“I’d been playing for about three years,” Larimer said. “I created the club because I wanted people to enjoy similar interests with me, and I wanted to build people’s creativity and teamwork.”

Larimer had some complications in the beginning.

“It took me over a week to find an advisor for the club, but I finally found Mr. Olund, who would advise the club and let us use the media center,” Larimer said.

Randy Olund is a media specialist and was welcome to assist Larimer with creating the club.

“AJ approached me about a month ago, and wondered if I would be the advisor for a club he wanted to start; we filled out an application for the administration, and it was approved.”

The current six members of the club had their first meeting Feb. 1, and they meet every Friday afterschool from 2:15 to roughly 3:45 p.m.

“Only a few people have joined, which as I see it, is kind of good, because less people means more for me to plan,” Larimer said.

Since the introduction of the Dungeons and Dragons Club, there has been a negative understanding about the club amongst some students in the school. Larimer says he didn’t expect otherwise.

“People really like it, or at least the members do,” Larimer said. “When I first heard it on the announcements most people laughed, but that’s what I expected.”

Some of the students who have joined include freshman James Vasilko.

“I actually wanted to build on my teamwork skills,” said Valsilko when speaking about why he joined.

The club has had four meets so far, and all is well according to the members.

“At first, I expected it to be some super nerdy game, but it was actually really fun,” a freshman member said. “I had heard a lot of people were just not really happy with it and making fun of it a lot.”

This member joined in support of his friend who created the club. To him, the game is fun, stirs creativity and doesn’t deserve the negative stigma applied to it.

“Within the school, there is probably your lucky few who know it and say ‘Yeah, it’s fun,’ but might not play it as much. Then there are other people who are the followers of the big people who usually run all the popular groups and say that it’s really stupid,” the member said. “Then there are the people of those groups who don’t really know what it is, but have heard others say it’s stupid, so they say it’s stupid, but it’s not stupid.”