Anyone who has played a video game in the last twenty years won’t find that shocking. But D&D pioneered the idea of characters that become more powerful over time; before its invention, games were almost all static. The rules of Monopoly never change, no matter how many times you go around the board.4
Because D&D characters can grow, like real people, playing the game becomes a uniquely visceral experience. Participants are more motivated to succeed, since victories are accumulative. They experience greater joy from those successes, since they are more emotionally invested. And they know the thrill of real danger, since no one wants to lose a character they’ve spent years building.
In short, D&D players live vicariously through their characters the way a parent might live through their children—not that any gamer would take the relationship that seriously, unless they’re crazy. But more on that later.
Naturally, advancement is measured in terms of a mathematical progression. At various points in an adventure, usually during breaks in the narrative, a DM will review the players’ accomplishments and reward them with “experience points.” They’ll get points for every monster they’ve defeated, based on their relative threat; killing a rat might earn 100 experience points, while slaying a dragon could be worth 100,000. They’ll also, at the DM’s discretion, receive points for abstract achievements, like solving a puzzle or successfully role-playing their way out of trouble. When a character has earned enough experience points they advance a level, gain access to new abilities, and become more powerful.
The characters aren’t the only thing changing over time. Since D&D campaigns can last months, years, or even decades, players will come and go as their personal lives allow more or less opportunity for leisure.
Vampire World has seen its share of personnel changes. Brandon’s friend Nick played a barbarian, Taluug, until he moved out of the apartment. A second Alex (we called him “Deuce”) had a few characters, including a druid, a magic-user who draws his powers from nature. Deuce was a college student and quit because of school obligations.
R. C. Robbins joined the game well after Abel, Jhaden, Ganubi, and Weslocke met in Kyoto. He plays Graeme, a rogue. They’re an essential part of any adventuring party; skills like finding traps and picking locks are frequently useful in the fantasy-adventure genre. But since R. C. didn’t make the game tonight, we consider Graeme “in pocket”—he hasn’t died or left the party, he’s just off in the background until next time. It’s a shame, because we could use a little help with these pirates: Babeal’s fireball scorched them but didn’t take them down.
* * *
Now it’s my turn. Weslocke is a cleric, and, like Babeal, he’s capable of casting powerful spells. Many of them are focused on healing—in any adventuring party, the cleric often plays the role of medic. But I’ve got a few haymakers as well.
I pick up my mini (a man in silver plate armor, holding a heavy flanged mace) and move it five squares toward the pirates. I’m still allowed to take an action after moving, so I check my character sheet and then pick up a d20.
“I cast Searing Light on this pirate,” I tell Morgan, pointing at a figure, and then roll the die: 17, more than high enough to confirm the hit. The spell incurs one eight-sided die’s (or 1d8) worth of damage per two caster levels; I’m a twelfth-level cleric, so I scrounge around the table to find six eight-sided dice. I roll and sum the numbers: 41 hit points’ worth of damage.
“A blast of light shoots from your palm, like a ray of the sun,” says Morgan. “It strikes the pirate and he withers and dies.” Alex cackles. I smirk.
* * *
I named Weslocke after one of the very first D&D characters I ever played. I was ten years old, in fourth grade, and impossibly nerdy: I wore trousers, black socks, and thick glasses to my magnet school for gifted children.
By that age, I’d already been sucked into many of the classic 1980s nerd interests, including Star Wars, computer programming, and listening to Weird Al Yankovic. But I hadn’t explored the realms of fantasy literature any deeper than The Chronicles of Narnia and was only dimly aware of role-playing games. So when my friend Scott Johnson produced a beat-up copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, it was a revelation: In this world, I wasn’t a “neo maxi zoom dweebie” in JCPenney slacks. I was an ass-kicking, dungeon-crawling, goblin-slaying epic hero.
I wasn’t alone. In the decade following its 1974 debut, D&D grew from an obscure hobby into a worldwide phenomenon—one of the most passionately loved, bestselling, and most controversial games ever made. It dominated my preteen years and became the center of my most important social interactions; my best friends were the guys I played D&D with. When we got together for one of our frequent Saturday-night sleepovers, sometimes we’d watch a movie, sometimes we’d go swimming, sometimes we’d throw firecrackers at each other or ignite pools of lighter fluid in Scott’s driveway—but we’d always play D&D.
* * *
It’s the pirates’ turn now, so Morgan takes over the action. After my spell fried their comrade, the pirates decided I’m their biggest threat, so Morgan moves their minis to surround me—one in front, and two on either side. They attack with their spears, and two connect. Suddenly, I’m down to only 55 of my 82 hit points.
Everyone in the fight has made a move, so the initiative order starts again from the top. Jhaden pivots and hacks at one of the pirates but doesn’t drop him. Ganubi falls back, draws his bow, and fires an arrow, which misses. Babeal zaps one with a Magic Missile spell, but only for 16 hit points.
I decide to get clever. I announce to the table that I’m casting a spell, Blade Barrier, which summons an immobile curtain of whirling blades into existence. I evoke this barrier, I explain, in a circle directly around Weslocke: the eight squares on the grid bordering my own, three of which are currently occupied by pirates.
Morgan will have to roll high for each pirate to successfully dodge the blades and back out of the curtain. If they don’t, they’re going to be chum.
He tosses the dice. One dies instantly, shredded by the blades. Another makes his roll and jumps backward, taking no damage. The third also dodges successfully—but instead of pushing his mini away from mine, Morgan picks up the figure and drops it right in my square.
“The pirate jumps forward to escape the blades and crashes into you,” he explains. “You both collapse to the ground.”
I have trapped myself inside a cage of whirling knives with a raging fish monster.
* * *
Playing D&D might be uniquely rewarding, but it’s not always easy. Role-playing games carry a lot of baggage, and devotees run the risk of being branded as nerds, weirdos—or even criminals.
To be fair, this prejudice has some root in reality. The game does tend to attract fans of fantasy literature, mythology, mathematics, and puzzles—in other words, nerds. They value the community they find among D&D players and strive to be welcoming to others; the game table becomes a place where outcasts can feel comfortable. It’s admirable, but it does the hobby no favors in the PR department.
I don’t know if I played D&D because other kids my age thought I was a nerd, or if they thought I was a nerd because I played D&D. Causation and correlation tend to get confused when some hormone-addled thirteen-year-old bully is threatening to sew your ass to your elbow. What I do know is that I had it easy. I played D&D as much as I wanted and put up with only occasional teasing: Other kids were forbidden to play the game and ostracized when they did.
In the 1980s, D&D found itself at the center of a massive hysteria. The game was linked to murders, satanic rituals, and teen suicides. Schools banned it; churches demonized it; courts criminalized it. Law enforcement officials would report that a suspect “was known to play D&D” the same way they might reveal he tortured animals or was a serious drug addict.
I never wavered in my love of D&D, though I did see other games. As we entered our angsty teenage years, my friends and I spent increasing amounts of time with D&D’s children:
role-playing games that stepped out of the fantasy genre to emulate spy thrillers (Top Secret), science fiction (Star Trek: The Role Playing Game), and whatever it is you’d call Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.
We were particularly fond of postapocalyptic games like Cyberpunk 2020, which belong to a genre inspired by authors like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. In high school we spent hundreds of hours playing Shadowrun, a futuristic game that brilliantly combined sci-fi with classic D&D elements. The game imagined an apocalypse caused by the return of magic, instead of warfare or disease: It had trolls on motorbikes, elven computer hackers, and an ancient blue dragon named Dunkelzahn who got elected president.
In practice, Shadowrun played something like Blade Runner meets Conan the Barbarian. My favorite character was a wizard who could shoot a gun with one hand and cast fireball spells with the other. I sat in a friend’s basement and played that character on almost every Saturday night of my high school senior year.
* * *
A magic-user controls arcane energies through an act of pure will, so I can dismiss Weslocke’s blade barrier just as easily as I summoned it. But not until my next turn. For now, I have to wait, and right now, it’s the pirate’s turn.
He bites for 11 points of damage, and then Morgan gets a funny look on his face. “Roll against your willpower score,” he instructs me. “The pirate has a special attack.”
I pick up my favorite d20 and toss it on the mat. Four.
“Sorry,” Morgan says, though he is clearly not apologizing. “Weslocke is frozen in fear for the next five turns. You can’t take any actions, including casting or dismissing spells.”
I lie inside my magic cage, cowering, while the monster tears at me with his claws. He digs under my armor and rips through my clothes, slashing my skin in dozens of places. Outside, Babeal, Ganubi, and Jhaden dispatch the other pirates, but reinforcements arrive from belowdecks. And even if they weren’t occupied, they couldn’t help me without being shredded by the barrier.
I can feel my life force bleeding out of me. I’m going to die.
By the time I reached college I had become conflicted about my identity as a role-playing geek. Sure, the games were awesome, but I worried about ghettoizing myself in a world of dice and fantasy.
I didn’t know anyone at my new school, so my first week on campus I went to two club meetings with hopes of making friends. One was the Science Fiction Forum, a sort of nerd fraternity where members watched videotaped episodes of The X-Files, played D&D, and argued about whether the starship Enterprise could defeat an Imperial Star Destroyer in a dogfight. The other club was the Press, the school’s alternative newspaper. It was full of self-styled revolutionaries who smoked clove cigarettes, drank Belgian beer, and thought they were Hunter S. Thompson.
After a few weeks, I quit the Forum and dedicated myself to the Press. The women were better looking.
From there I began distancing myself from my nerd heritage. I spent most of my free time in the Press office, writing articles and arguing about politics. I only played one game of D&D during my freshman year, at a friend of a friend’s off-campus apartment. But I felt embarrassed about it and never returned.
In retrospect, I had merely replaced one geeky habit with another: Only a D&D nerd would think he’d become cool by working on a school newspaper. Still, I managed to cultivate an air of hipster superiority. We were definitely not nerds, oh no; we didn’t spend our weekends playing D&D in someone’s parents’ basement, we spent them arguing about politics in the student union basement.
In the spring of my freshman year, the campus hosted an annual science fiction and gaming convention. I attended under the aegis of a reporter and pretended to look down my nose at the weirdos. When I realized some of the convention’s dealers would pay good money for old hardback D&D rule books, I had my parents ship mine to me overnight and sold them for beer money.
I wouldn’t play again for more than a decade.
* * *
There’s one round left until the fear effect wears off, and I’ve got only 8 hit points. Things look grim for Weslocke the Cleric.
There are three pirates on the deck, including the angry one on top of me. On my turn, I cower. Then the pirate gets his attack. I can barely stand to look as Morgan throws the die.
“He hits,” says Morgan. He picks up two six-sided dice to roll the damage. They skitter across the table and come up 3 and 3.
All five guys around the table groan in unison, a sound of relief and disbelief. “All right,” says Morgan. “You’ve got two hit points left, and the fear is gone, so next round, you can take an action.”
Jhaden skewers one of the pirates with Bloodlust, killing him. Ganubi finishes off the second with a flurry of arrows. Finally, I feel my courage return. I drop the blade barrier and scramble away from my attacker. He pursues but moves slowly and can’t close the distance.
Jhaden’s turn. Alex gives me a hard look. “I’m charging,” he says, “and declaring a power attack for five points.”
Power attacks are one of Jhaden’s special abilities, requiring him to subtract points from his roll to hit an opponent. It makes it harder to hit the target—but if the attack is successful, he adds those points to its damage. It’s a desperation move. Alex rolls the die.
Jhaden’s blades go snicker-snack. The hit connects. The last pirate crumples to the deck.
Morgan shuts his notebook. “And that’s it for this week,” he says.
* * *
I grew up, got a job as a reporter, put on a jacket and tie, and didn’t think much about D&D. So did thousands of other gamers: Dungeons & Dragons faded as an object of nerd obsession, replaced by video games and the Internet.
But then something happened. Players started picking up the game again—and this time, they weren’t hiding in their parents’ basement. In August 2012, more than forty-one thousand men, women, and children descended on Indianapolis for the D&D-heavy Gen Con gaming convention—the biggest crowd in its forty-five-year history. In San Francisco, gamers show up on Market Street and repurpose outdoor chess tables for open-to-the-public D&D sessions. In New York, trendy bars and coffee shops host D&D nights. In London, they play at hundred-year-old pubs.
What happened? People who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons remembered how much fun they had. D&D offers a unique form of entertainment, a communal storytelling that’s more interactive than video games, more engrossing than TV or film, and more social than books. It’s hard for people who’ve experienced that to stay away for too long.
The D&D players of the eighties matured to a point where they recognize, and value, how the game shaped their lives. Above all else, Dungeons & Dragons is a social game, and for many players, it was the tool that helped them form friendships that have lasted a lifetime. It’s also a game defined by performance, where players live vicariously through their characters. As such, it’s responsible for a kind of resurgent atavism. We fight and win and live or die along with the members of our gaming group. D&D players are our clan.
That’s why, after more than a decade clean, I picked up my dice bag and responded to a Craigslist ad seeking players for a new D&D campaign. It will make a good story, I told myself. I hoped to justify the lost hours of my youth by approaching the game as a journalist and reporting on the phenomenon with the advantage of insider experience. And I didn’t worry about getting sucked back into the world of swords and sorcerers, even if my friends and girlfriend did: I’m an editor at Forbes now, I bragged, an award-winning journalist, not an impressionable kid in a Conan the Barbarian T-shirt.
I was wrong. Before long, I was in over my head. Sure, I did witness the revival of the game and met lots of normal people who play D&D the same way they might join a weekly poker game. But I didn’t expect the game to change my life. I didn’t anticipate making new friends—good ones—and coming to terms with the way I relate to other people. Returning to D&D forced me to redefine my self-image, reexamine my childhoo
d, and change the way I look at the world. And after a while, I wasn’t just a reporter writing about people who play Dungeons & Dragons. I was one of them.
Now I know magic.
* * *
1. That sound you hear right now is thousands of fantasy geeks shouting their dissent. Debating what D&D classes fictional characters or real people would belong to is a contentious sport in nerd society. I once spent hours at work arguing with a colleague about the makeup of our office. At the end of the day, we agreed the boss was a dwarf rogue.
2. Table 3–17: Random Door Types, Dungeon Master’s Guide, page 78.
3. It’s a long story. Suffice it to say that if we ever manage to rid the earth of vampires, the next world-killing peril we’ll have to deal with is a badass flying serpent with a raging case of multiple personality disorder.
4. Just imagine if the battleship eventually gained the ability to fire its cannons and blow the thimble to pieces.
2
LITTLE WARS
The current publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, Renton, Washington–based Wizards of the Coast, estimates that over thirty million people have played the game since 1974. I’m willing to bet that twenty-nine million of them had their first adventure begin in a tavern.
It’s easy to imagine why. Bars are a dramatically convenient place to bring together a cast of characters—where better for strangers to meet and decide to do something dangerous? As a result, “You’re all at a tavern . . .” has become the D&D equivalent of “Once upon a time.” In a section on establishing a campaign, The Dungeon Master’s Guide actually refers to this as “The Cliché.” Still, you can’t argue with tradition. Even Geoffrey Chaucer gathered his pilgrims in a tavern before they set out for Canterbury.
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 3