Jason Miller is an average 13-year-old boy. He goes to Indianapolis Public School 59, plays basketball, Nintendo and golf and likes to work on the computer.

Isaac, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a senior at a small-town high school. He works part time, writes poetry, listens to music and is on the school's wrestling team.

Both of these kids have at least one thing in common: They both love Dungeons & Dragons.

"What's that?" you ask.

Maybe you've heard that it's a fantasy game that deals with demons and Satan. Or maybe you've heard on the news about kids who disappear for days because they've been playing the game too much. Or maybe you've read about players who can't distinguish between fantasy and reality.

According to Carl A. Raschke, the author of Painted Black, "D and D is really an elementary-level home study kit for black magic. . . . What distinguishes Dungeons and Dragons (from other games) is its open-endedness. No board exists, and there are no real rules in force. . . . The identity of the player and the character, even though they are formally separate, tend to merge."

While many people are critical of Dungeons & Dragons, there are those who support the game playing. Children's Express conducted a series of interviews to try to dispel some misconceptions and separate fact from fiction.

Jim Ward, creative director for TSR in Lake Geneva, Wis., which manufactures the game, described it as "a role- playing fantasy game. And what it has you do is imagine your character or a person that you make up in your head _ imagine him in this fantasy world with dragons and knights and castles. And you can pretty much put as much time as you want into the game. You can play an hour a month or one hour a week.

"But the fun of it is getting together with your friends and talking to them about the game and playing the game with your friends," Ward said.

There are no plastic pieces that a player moves around a game board. Instead, players learn to play the game from books, using maps made up of grids that depict places such as forests, castles and caves. The maps can be found either in modules (game books), or they can be created by a Dungeon Master, who is the player that runs the game.

The Dungeon Master takes the players' characters on an adventure. There is no overall goal of the game _ each character has his/her own goals, which each player tries to fulfill. For instance, a character may wish to gain riches or become more powerful. The player will then work toward that objective.

The characters are created by players with a little help of chance. A player rolls a die to decide the strength, dexterity, wisdom, charisma and intelligence of his or her character. The character, determined by the player, can be a dwarf, half- orc (a fiercely competitive creature), elf or human.

Individuals roll a die to find out how many gold pieces and hit points the character will have, determining how long the character will live.

The game has its own monetary system that players must learn to use. With the gold pieces that characters accumulate from the roll and their adventures, they can purchase objects such as armor, weapons and potions.

Players, in their quest for money and power, come across dangerous enemies. Their adversaries range from green slime to hobgoblins to dragons.

It's the endless possibilities of the game that keep so many people hooked. Players feel that the game is real life in its concepts and fantasy in its actual presentation.

People who play Dungeons & Dragons are a very diverse group. They're not just kids who are being corrupted by reading about demons in the monster manuals.

According to Jerry Hunter, the owner of Boardroom Games in Broad Ripple and a distributor of Dungeons & Dragons, the people who are the biggest fans of the game are between the ages of 18 and 28.

Hunter says players come from all walks of life, ranging from doctors and lawyers to truck drivers and postal workers. According to this local store owner, many of the people who play Dungeons & Dragons are Christians, and kids who play the game get involved at a very young age.

This mixture sometimes causes friction. Although the game deals with the supernatural, according to Ward, it has never dealt with satanism. The most powerful enemy that can be dealt with is a dragon, except in the rare case that the character advances to immortal status.

"You want to have bad guys in any game. You have to have someone to defeat, and the dragons are very powerful. . . . We have tried very hard to eliminate everything involved in satanism or that material. We would never put that in a game because that's not what our game is about. Our game is about having fun and definitely, that topic is not fun," said Ward.

Kids who play the game regularly support the idea that playing the game does not lead to violence.

"You'd have to be nuts in the first place (to become violent)," said Jason. "It's not gonna make you nuts. It could bring out the nuts in you by giving you ideas. But anything could give you ideas. You've gotta be a little crazy in the first place."

Jason stressed that there were a lot more things for a parent to worry about than whether their kids play Dungeons & Dragons too much.

"I think they should be more worried about people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol or something like that, more than they should worry about people who are addicted to Dungeons and Dragons," Jason said.

Isaac, on the other hand, suggested that Dungeons & Dragons encourages learning. He feels that kids have to read and comprehend in order to be able to play the game correctly. Isaac stressed how much it has helped him in school.

"I have to constantly use it in literature," Isaac said.

"In math, (D & D helps) 'cause you're always working with numbers and percentages. I don't like math, but in D and D it's kind of like you have to know."