Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who
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CONTENTS
I Am Not a Wizard
1 You’re All at a Tavern
2 Little Wars
3 Grognards
4 Druids with Phaser Guns
5 Strength of Character
6 Temple of the Frog
7 The Breaking of the Fellowship
8 Why We Play
9 Arneson vs. Gygax
10 The Satanic Panic
11 Death or Glory
12 Resurrection
13 The Inn at World’s Edge
14 D&D Next
15 The Song of Marv and Harry
16 Pilgrimage
Acknowledgments
About David M. Ewalt
Notes
Index
For Kara
I AM NOT A WIZARD
Before we begin, I’d like to take a moment to address the hard-core fantasy role-playing gamers in the audience. If you’ve ever painted a lead mini, tried to wear the Head of Vecna, or know what happens if you flip a flumph on its back, please continue. Otherwise, feel free to skip straight to the first chapter.
Okay. Now that we’ve gotten rid of the muggles, there are a few points I want to cover.
First of all, at various points in this tome I quote specific elements of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, including game mechanics, spell effects, and monster descriptions. Unless otherwise noted, these citations refer to version 3.5 of the D&D rules. I default to those books because they’re what I use with my friends, and I like them. Gamers who wish to argue the superiority of their own favored edition are advised to write a letter detailing their position, put it in an envelope, and then stick it where the Sunburst spell1 don’t shine.
Second, when describing in-game action, you may note that I sometimes break initiative order or skip over a player’s turn. This is a conscious decision made to emphasize the drama in an encounter and not get lost in excruciating detail. Rest assured that everything described in-game actually happened in-game, and if I leave out the time Bob the Halfling fired his crossbow and missed, it’s because nobody cares.
Finally, while I am confident that even the most grizzled of grognards can learn something from this volume, keep in mind it is largely intended to explain the phenomenon of D&D to a mainstream audience. If you seek a detailed history or obscure arcana, you have just failed your Gather Information check. Fortunately, there is a wealth of scholarship available on the subject, and you’ll find a list of some of the best sources in the back of this book.
In short: Read this like you’d play in a friendly campaign. Don’t be a rules lawyer, and don’t argue with the DM.
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1. “Sunburst causes a globe of searing radiance to explode silently from a point you select. All creatures in the globe are blinded and take 6d6 points of damage.” Player’s Handbook, p. 289. See how I did that?
1
YOU’RE ALL AT A TAVERN
The day I met Abel, Jhaden, and Ganubi, we got arrested for brawling in a bar.
In our defense, we were fighting for a righteous cause. One of the regulars was six beers past tipsy when he started running his mouth and spouting the worst kind of reactionary politics. Abel and I found it offensive and told him to shut up; Jhaden isn’t much for talk, so he hit the guy with a stool. Rhetorical became physical, and the four of us lined up on the same side of the dispute.
The cops must have been nearby, because the next thing I knew they were throwing us in the back of a wagon. We stewed in a cell overnight before Jhaden was able to use some kind of family connection to get us released. I don’t know what happened to the drunk guy.
A thing like that will bond a group of young men pretty quickly, and soon we were spending most of our time together—sharing a couple of rooms in a cheap boardinghouse, working together on whatever freelance gigs we could find. The jobs weren’t always on the books, but we felt like we were doing good work.
Jhaden was strong as a bull, Ganubi a natural charmer, Abel educated and clever. We got in our share of fights, but I had worked in a hospital, and when anyone got hurt, I’d do my best to patch them up.
I’d like to think I did my part in combat, too—shooting searing rays of light out of my fingers, stunning enemies with thunderclaps of sonic energy. Sometimes I’d summon a giant badger from the celestial planes and command it to do my bidding. Few things end a fight quicker than a magical weasel chewing on your opponent’s leg.
I am not a wizard, but I play one every Tuesday night. To be nerdy about it—and trust me, there is no other way to approach this—I am a divine spell caster, a lawful neutral twelfth-level cleric. In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, that makes me a pretty major badass.
Dungeons & Dragons—D&D, to the initiated—is a game played at a table, usually by around half a dozen participants. It’s sold in stores and has specific rules, like Monopoly or Scrabble, but is otherwise radically different. D&D is a role-playing game, one where participants control characters in a world that exists largely in their collective imagination.
Even if you’ve never played D&D, you’ve probably heard of it, and when I admitted I’m a player, your subconscious mind probably filed me under “Nerds, Hopeless”—unless you happen to be one of us. Role-playing games don’t have a great reputation. In movies and TV shows, D&D serves as a signal of outsider status. It’s how you know a character’s a hopeless geek: A rule book and a bunch of weird-shaped dice is to nerds what a black hat is to the villain in a cowboy movie.
Most people know D&D only as some strange thing the math club did in the corner of the high school cafeteria, or the hobby of the creepy goth kid down the street. Even worse, they have the vague sense it’s deviant or satanic—don’t D&D players run around in the woods and worship demons, or commit suicide when they lose a game?
Admitting you play Dungeons & Dragons is only slightly less stigmatizing than confessing cruelty to animals or that you wet the bed. It is not to be done in polite company.
But I am immune to your scorn. I know magic.
Jhaden, Abel, Ganubi, and I are freedom fighters. The shared politics that brought us together in that bar are more profound than liberal or conservative; we’re all proponents of an active approach to humanity’s problems. We want to organize the workers of the world and to strike out against those who would hold us in bondage.
In contrast, our opponents fear change. They don’t want to upset their comfortable bourgeois lives or take risks that might overturn the political order. Time is on our side, they say—real progress occurs slowly, over generations. They think we should wait and things will work themselves out.
It’s so cowardly and stupid. You can’t wait out vampires.
Let’s start with a brief overview, for the uninitiated: Dungeons & Dragons takes place within a fantasy world that is invented by its players but inspired by centuries of storytelling and literature. Books like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings helped set the tone: heroic knights and wise old magicians battling the forces of evil. A typical D&D session might find a party of adventurers setting off to search an underground cave system for treasure and having to fight all the slobbering monsters lurking in the dark.
But D&D isn’t a board game with a prepr
inted map and randomized game play (roll a die, move four spaces closer to the treasure, pick up a card: “You got scared by a goblin! Go back two spaces”). Instead, each setting is conceived in advance by one of the participants and then actively navigated by the players.
The person who does all the prep work is called the Dungeon Master, or DM. It’s his job to dream up a scenario, something like “Archaeologists have discovered a pharaoh’s tomb in the desert, and the players are grave robbers who have to break in and steal the hidden treasure.” He also has to sketch out the details, like making a map and deciding where the traps are, where the treasure is, and what monsters are guarding it.
This act of creation gives the players an unknown world to explore and keeps each game session different from the last. It’s sort of like sitting down to play Monopoly, except you can’t see the names or costs of the properties until you land on them.
An experienced DM takes game design even further. He might decide the players should start out in a Bedouin camp near the tomb and negotiate with the sheik to buy a couple of camels. He could plan for them to be waylaid by desert raiders on the way to the tomb. And once they’ve found the pharaoh’s treasure, he may ask them to make a moral choice: The treasure carries a curse, and if it’s removed from the tomb, the region will suffer ten years of famine. The players will have to weigh getting rich and letting thousands die against leaving empty-handed and protecting the innocent.
At this level, setting up a role-playing game becomes something like writing a screenplay or novel. And just as fantasy fiction may include all kinds of different settings and plots, a fantasy role-playing game does not have to be constrained to a standard medieval setting.
Vampires have always hunted man, but we were not always in their thrall. For millennia they hid in the shadows, keeping their numbers small, feeding only on humans who wouldn’t be missed. The few stories that betrayed their existence were dismissed as urban legend or lazy fiction.
But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, something changed. Vampires were tired of hiding, of letting weaker humans ruin the planet. So they gathered, and they plotted, and one dark night, they struck.
Most humans died without ever knowing their enemy. The vampires had magically bound our leaders to their will, and on their command, the armies of the world exploded upon one another. Those who survived the first strike had nowhere to hide: A magically enchanted retrovirus mutated ordinary animals and plants, turning them into monsters that overran both ruined cities and poisoned wilderness.
What few shreds of humankind remained were easily rounded up, brought to a dozen vampire-controlled cities, and locked into pens, like cattle. Our species survived, but only as a food source for Earth’s new masters.
We call the time the vampires took over the Nightfall. The Dawn is when humans fought back.
Most people who play Dungeons & Dragons don’t just sit down for a single, self-contained session, like they would with a board game. Instead, they join a “campaign,” a group that meets on a regular basis and uses the same characters in the same world, building on past actions. One week, the players raid the pharaoh’s tomb, and the next, they pick up where they left off, facing the consequences of their decisions.
As these campaigns go on for weeks and months and even years, the successes and failures of past sessions provide history and context and suggest new challenges. If the players stole the pharaoh’s treasure and cursed the land with famine, a DM might design a future session where they’re hunted by vengeful farmers.
Players are both audience and author in D&D; they consume the DM’s fiction but rewrite the story with their actions. And as authors, they’re free to make their own decisions. If a troll is trying to eat you, you can hit him with a sword, shoot him with an arrow, or run away—it’s up to you. For that matter, you could sing him a song, try to recruit him into Scientology, or lie down for a nap. Your choice might be a dumb one, but it’s still yours to make.
Unlike board games, which limit the player to a small set of actions, or video games, which offer a large but finite set of preprogrammed possibilities, role-playing games give the player free will. As long as it doesn’t violate the integrity of the fictional universe—proclaiming that up is down or suddenly transmogrifying into Abraham Lincoln—you can do whatever you want.
The resulting game play is rather different than other pastimes. In a game of Clue, you are asked to solve a murder mystery but must do so by moving a token around a board and looking at playing cards. If Clue was played like D&D, you could grab the lead pipe, beat a confession out of Colonel Mustard, and have sex with Miss Scarlet on the desk in the conservatory.
There are rules, of course. Books and books of rules, sold at $19.95 each, which inform a player’s decisions and determine their success. Attacking someone with a lead pipe? That’s armed combat with an improvised weapon, and page 113 of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook explains how to figure out if you hit your target and how much it hurt. Seducing another character might require a Diplomacy check (page 71), a Will save (page 136), and maybe an opposed Sense Motive roll against your Bluff skill (page 64). It’s not romantic, but it works.
All this free will can wreak havoc with the game’s continuing story. A DM might spend weeks designing a complex network of caverns to explore, filled with clever traps and new monsters to fight. But if the players stop at the mouth of the cave and decide they’d rather go back to town and get drunk, they are free to do so—and they’ll derail the story in the process.
In order to keep freedom of action from leading to chaos, a good DM will usually weave a primary conflict into his story. This often takes the form of a classic heroic quest: a wrong to right, an enemy to destroy, or a world to save.
For a century after the vampires came to power, they imprisoned and fed on what was left of the human race. Stuck in the pens and denied the use of modern technology, humanity lived in fear, never knowing when their masters would descend from the city to feed.
But the undead were arrogant, and humans adapted. They watched the vampires cast spells and copied their actions, developing their own knowledge of magic. These secrets were shared and used to communicate with other pens. Together, humanity planned its escape.
And one day, as dawn swept across the globe, the people of the pens rose up and fought. The vampires were taken by surprise, but their power was still great. Many humans were recaptured, and many more died. But some escaped and returned to their abandoned cities, where they constructed defenses to keep the vampires at bay.
In the generation since the Dawn, both human and vampire have rebuilt. We hold a handful of cities, but they do too, and thousands are still captive in the pens. Beyond the walled cities, there is wilderness, filled with monsters.
But we’re not hiding, and we do not rest. We learn, and we prepare, and we plan for the day we can take our planet back.
Frodo Baggins needed the help of three hobbits, two men, an elf, a dwarf, and a wise old wizard to save the world. So nobody expects a role-playing nerd to go it alone. Uniquely among tabletop games—and especially uniquely among activities enjoyed by teenage boys—Dungeons & Dragons is cooperative, not competitive. Players work together to advance the story and solve problems, not to beat each other to a finish line.
This means there’s rarely a real “winner” in a D&D game; no single player comes out on top. In fact, winning is something of an alien concept—most campaigns never last long enough to reach their dramatic conclusion. It’s more about the journey than the destination, to invoke that old cliché, and about developing your part in the story.
A player in a game of D&D doesn’t just push a premade plastic token around a board. Instead, they create a “player character,” or PC, a unique persona to be inhabited like an actor in a role, imbuing it with motivation and will and action. It’s like Avatar, but with knights instead of weird blue cat people.
Of course, D&D is not a playacting exercise. At t
he most fundamental level, a PC is defined by a bunch of numbers written down on a piece of paper—the DNA of an imaginary person. (It’s no coincidence that so many people who play the game also happen to be keen on math and science.)
At the start of a new game, players roll a handful of dice to determine their PC’s basic attributes, following the directions set out in a rule book. Some of these attributes define the character physically: how strong they are, how dexterous, how hardy. Others measure personality traits, like whether they are perceptive or oblivious, strong willed or weak. Each score is recorded by the player and kept for future reference.
Over the course of a game, a player will continually refer to these attributes to measure their success in different actions. Want to pick up a heavy rock and throw it at the barbarians invading your castle? That’ll require a high strength score. Trying to dive under the trellis gate before it closes? Sorry, your dexterity is too low.
Next, a player has to select one of about a dozen character classes. This is something like choosing a profession and has a profound effect on the role a PC plays in the game. Classes are best explained within the context of The Lord of the Rings—as the most mainstream example of the fantasy genre, LOTR references come up all the time in Dungeons & Dragons.
Aragorn, the scruffy hero who turns out to be heir to the kingdom of men, would be a “ranger” in a D&D campaign—at home in the wilderness, an expert tracker, equally comfortable with a bow or a blade. Legolas the elf would be a ranger, too. Boromir and Gimli the dwarf would probably be “fighters”—masters of brute-force combat, emphasizing power rather than a ranger’s finesse. Gandalf? They call him a wizard, but D&D “wizards” have to study a lot, write their spells in a book, and use magic ingredients to make anything cool happen. Gandalf’s really more like a “sorcerer”—someone who is born with special abilities and doesn’t have to learn them. The diminutive hobbits are probably “rogues”—stealthy, agile, and sly. Often, since they’re so good at sneaking around, rogues are played as thieves. But our good-hearted hobbits don’t have to be pickpockets to play the class properly.1