Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who

by Ewalt, David M.

  The license also granted hobbyists the right to publish their own derivative works. In the years that followed, a rich ecosystem of homemade D&D rules began to appear, mostly online, but also in gaming and book stores. Each add-on made the game more compelling, and each drew more players back into the fold.

  In 2003, when Wizards followed up the d20 System with the closed-license, $20-per-book Dungeons & Dragons Version 3.5, they incorporated many of the best ideas of these homegrown supplements. And since the new edition remained compatible with the open-source system, it encouraged even more hobbyist development. By 2004, the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, the game was growing faster than it had in a decade.

  The last update leaned heavily on tech trends to attract new players. Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, released in June 2008, tweaked the game in ways that some critics said made it too much like a video game: A wizard, for instance, could cast the same spell over and over again, ad nauseam, like a kid mashing the “attack” button on his Xbox controller. Old-school fans were horrified, but the new edition did manage to attract some younger players.

  * * *

  Something happened to me after that last Vampire World game. The ridiculous, surprising awesomeness of Ganubi’s death and resurrection got stuck in my head: If I’d already been addicted to D&D, now I was obsessed with it. All I could think about was making more of those stories.

  The day after the game, I was leaving my office for lunch when I saw a group of students in front of the nearby Parsons School of Design filming each other with an old eight-millimeter camera. It struck me as so apt for that location that I began to wonder if it was actually planned; maybe I was a PC in someone else’s role-playing game, and a cosmic DM had simply rolled up “hipsters with obsolete camera” on a random-encounters table. That night I stayed up late creating role-playing game reference tables for Manhattan: Deli, roll of 12: Homeless guy asking for change. Coffee shop, roll of 4: Unpublished novelist pretending to write on a laptop computer.

  I was preoccupied with the idea even into the next morning and spent my commute into work thinking about ways to model an entire role-playing game system based on “real” life. Lost in thought, I had made it all the way to the lobby of my office, when one of my friends sidled up to me and broke my train of thought. “Hey, man,” he said, “do you realize you’re wearing two different shoes?”

  * * *

  I missed the next week’s game because I was out of town for work, reporting from the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. It’s the video game industry’s biggest trade show, an orgy of geekdom where companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts show off the coming year’s new games and hardware. There are fans around the world who would kill for the opportunity to attend—and I spent most of my time sleepwalking through each high-tech presentation, thinking about games played with paper and dice.

  To keep myself interested, I started asking every video game executive and designer I met the same question: Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons? And over and over again, I heard the same thing: They loved the game when they were a kid, and it’s a big part of why they ended up making games for a living.2

  “Almost everybody I know in the game-design field had that experience,” says Ian Bogost, a professor of media studies and interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “They all played Dungeons & Dragons. Some maybe not as intensely . . . but that was a touch point for all of them.”

  D&D had a huge influence on the development of the video game industry, Bogost says, because there was a strong overlap between players of tabletop RPG games and folks who were interested in the microcomputer in the 1970s and 1980s. “The obvious thing to do was to put those two things together, because you had a system of rules, and you had a machine capable of simulating and carrying them out.” And in the same way that Tolkien’s fantasy fiction inspired the first role-playing games, D&D provided a model for the first video games: The idea that you have a character that has resources, moves around, encounters obstacles, and develops over time—all that came from D&D.

  * * *

  In November, I had to take a business trip to London. I took a miserable red-eye flight out of New York, sleeping only about two hours on the transatlantic leg and then not at all on a connection from Dublin. By the time I got off the Heathrow Express in Paddington Station, I was tired near the point of exhaustion, so sleepy I felt like my consciousness had become detached from my body and processed everything my body was doing—walking, talking, crossing busy streets—a few seconds after it actually happened.

  So naturally I dropped off my bags, pounded down two cups of extremely strong coffee, and went straight off to play Dungeons & Dragons. Fatigue be damned; if I was going to be out of town for my regular game, I had to get my fix somewhere. As soon as I had booked my ticket—and before I even found someplace to stay—I’d located a Sunday-afternoon game at the Ship, a pub on Borough Road in Southwark.

  Alistair Morgan, the DM, was a thirty-seven-year-old guy who worked as an IT manager—“possibly conforming to a stereotype or two,” he admitted. But three of the five players at his table were women. “There are two females in the other game that I play in at the moment as well,” he told me. “I think that video games have been driving a lot of interest in D&D, and that’s brought a lot more female players.”

  I realized we’d come full circle. D&D helped create video games; video games almost destroyed D&D; and now video games were leading people back to Dungeons & Dragons. Everyone who plays video games—and when you take into account Facebook games, console games, and smart-phone games, that’s just about all of us—has been exposed to D&D’s children, absorbed their D&DNA. The stigma was falling from fantasy role-playing, because it just wasn’t as strange as it used to be.

  One of Alistair’s players was Jodi Snow, a twenty-two-year-old visual effects artist who’d been hooked on video games since she was a kid. She tried D&D for the first time in 2011, when a friend bought the game and they all gave it a go. “You hear all kinds of geeky stories about tabletop RPGs,” she said, “so we were expecting something tedious and incredibly difficult to learn. But we were really surprised.”

  I wondered if the other women at the table might have arrived via a more traditional route—like a boyfriend who talked them into joining his game.

  Actually, Alistair told me, “Cristina has dragged her husband along to play.”

  * * *

  After I left the game at the Ship, I walked across Waterloo Bridge and toward Cambridge Circus. I was thinking about a new generation of gamers ushering in a renaissance for fantasy role-playing—D&D night, every night! Then I spotted something at the far end of a side street and did a double take—a brightly lit orange sign with black block text, just barely legible: DUNGEONS DRAGONS.

  I turned on a dime and dashed across traffic toward the light. Speed-walking down the lane, my heart raced at the prospect of discovering a new game store or hobby shop, more evidence of D&D’s bright future—and then I got close enough to see that the sign actually said DVD&BOOK BARGAINS.

  “We’re not there yet,” I thought. “And I really need to think about something other than Dungeons & Dragons.”

  Fortunately, the following morning was completely unscheduled and my one chance to do some sightseeing. I woke up early and looked up directions to Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral . . . and then ignored them, hopping on the train to Kensington to visit the Doctor Who Experience, an exhibition of props and costumes from the BBC science fiction television program. Nerds will be nerds.

  * * *

  1. “This spell functions like Raise Dead, except that you can resurrect a creature that has been dead for as long as 10 years per caster level . . . Upon completion of the spell, the creature is immediately restored to full hit points, vigor, and health, with no loss of level.” Player’s Handbook, page 296.

  2. Even
Curt Schilling, the three-time World Series champion who retired from baseball and decided to start his own video game company, told me he was “a hard-core D&D guy.”

  13

  THE INN AT WORLD’S EDGE

  For a long time, Morgan had been talking up something called Otherworld, an “adventure weekend” held every fall at a 4-H camp in Connecticut. Attendees dress up like wizards and warriors and spend three days trying to complete a heroic quest; Morgan discovered the event through a friend and loved it so much he joined the staff.

  I begged off. While I’d become less self-conscious about my geeky pursuits, I wasn’t ready to put on a costume and run around in the woods. I could justify spending one night a week pretending to be a cleric, since it’s not that different from attending a poker game or bowling night. But nobody dresses up like ten-pin legend Walter “Deadeye” Williams before they head down to Barney’s Bowlarama.

  Besides, Otherworld sounded awfully like something I’d grown to fear and revile: a live-action role-playing game, or LARP. The very first LARP may have been Dagorhir, a medieval battle first organized in Maryland in 1977 by a Tolkien fan named Bryan Weise. Flying high on fantasy after reading The Lord of the Rings and watching the Sean Connery film Robin and Marian, he placed an ad on a local radio station soliciting anyone who wanted “to fight in Hobbit Wars with padded weapons.”

  It sounds harmless enough, but to many geeks, LARPs represent the obsessive, delusional side of fantasy role-playing—the actual freaks who make the rest of us look like freaks. There’s an infamous video on YouTube of a LARPer running around in the woods, dressed up as a wizard, and shouting “Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!” Each one of its 3.6 million views has added to the perception that D&D is weird and that I spend my Tuesdays letting grown men whack me with foam swords.

  Since I’d never actually tried a LARP, this bias against LARPing was completely hypocritical and uninformed. And Morgan insisted Otherworld wasn’t a LARP, anyway—the emphasis, he said, is on storytelling, not rules. He argued that many of the attendees were “normal” people, role-playing naïfs approaching the experience like some sort of Outward Bound self-improvement weekend. And he made it sound like it could be fun.

  I knew I was going to have to try a LARP—or something like it—if I was truly going to understand the world of fantasy role-playing. So with the convenient excuse of “reporting” wrapped around me like a Cloak of Resistance,1 I signed up.

  And I started getting into it. A few weeks before Otherworld, a packet arrived in the mail containing the participant handbook and a letter printed in a faux-medieval font on parchment paper. It explained that I’d be playing a mage from Keer, “a medium-sized island in the Talian sea . . . the most wonderful and most terrible place in the whole of the kingdom.” The author, the Duchess of Keer, explained that the island was under attack from a sea monster, a leviathan that was sinking ships and proving beyond her means to defeat. I was to travel to the mainland, to the town of World’s Edge, in order to locate the legendary “Knights of the Golden Circle” and beg them for help.

  To do that, the handbook explained, I’d join five other participants in an adventuring party; we’d face a series of challenges that would be resolved through role-playing, puzzle solving, and yes, foam-sword combat. Aside from a short briefing on Friday night, we’d inhabit a fantasy world until Sunday evening; for just under forty-eight hours, I’d stop being ordinary Dave and become “a heroic version” of myself. In other words: I’d be running around in the woods, dressed up as a wizard, and shouting, “Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!”

  As self-loathing began to rise, I constructed my character. Otherworld participants aren’t assigned a PC; they rely on their own attributes and skills, not numbers on a character sheet. But they are expected to integrate into the story, and that requires a costume, a character name, and a background for your heroic self.

  I decided my mage was a scholar of magic, detached and intellectual—a character choice clearly driven by psychological defense mechanisms. I named my wizard Dewey, after the library classification system. The fact that I thought this indicated winking ironic detachment—instead of providing proof I was already the world’s biggest nerd—shows my level of delusion.

  For a costume, I’d wear brown cargo pants and a dark blue henley shirt, topped by a dramatic ankle-length black fleece cloak. At $200, the handmade item (ordered from a costume shop specializing in LARPs and historical reenactments) represented a level of financial commitment that might signify I was taking this seriously. So I told Kara and the few friends who knew where I was going that the purchase was a dodge, allowing me to wear normal clothes underneath. (Secretly, I was pretty damn stoked: I challenge any even slightly geeky person to put on a real, high-quality cloak and not imagine they’re Gandalf, Dumbledore, and/or Luke Skywalker.) A hand-bound leather journal completed the ensemble—my “spell book,” doubling as reporter’s notebook.

  The Otherworld Adventure was held that year on the first weekend in October at the Windham-Tolland 4-H Camp in Pomfret, Connecticut. It’s a lovely spot in the rolling hills about 150 miles northeast of Manhattan, a three-hour drive unless you’re dumb enough to leave your Fifth Avenue office right before rush hour, in which case it takes six hours. When I finally arrived, the only light in the camp came from a two-story lodge, built into a hill so its basement opened onto the parking lot.

  As I entered, I realized I was the last one there. Seven groups of six people perched on wooden benches turned, laughed, and gave me an ovation. I smiled gamely, grabbed the nearest open seat, and tried to score a 20 on my Hide roll.

  Kristi Hayes, one of Otherworld’s founders and its current writer and director, stood at the front of the room, giving final directions. Only rogues may disarm traps, she warned us. Stay hydrated. Don’t hit people on the head with your sword.

  The demographic breakdown of the participants was my first surprise of the weekend. Nearly half of them were women, and while twenty- and thirty-year-olds did constitute the single largest group, there was a decent number of adults outside that age range.

  The six adventurers from Keer were no exception. Three of them, young women from Austin, Texas, had come to Otherworld as part of a thirtieth-birthday celebration. Jen, the birthday girl, would play our bard, “Kinkaid.” She wore fashionable large-frame glasses, a stud in her lip, and sparkly tights under a knee-length green cloak. Summer (a rogue called “Pearl”) bore a resemblance to Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club; her costume included a blue and gold jacket that looked like it was designed by John Galliano for a pirate-themed fashion show, lost at the Milan airport, and rediscovered years later in a Texarkana thrift store. She got compliments on it all weekend long. Elaine (a ranger, “Merrick”) was tall and thin and slightly boyish—or at least that was the effect of the overalls and flannel she wore for a costume. Charron was also female, but older, probably north of sixty. She was local and, like me, had a friend on the Otherworld staff. She’d play “Willow,” our cleric. The final member of the party was comfortably familiar: Phil, from Boston, a tall thirtyish white guy, quiet and a little nerdy. He told me he’d be playing a paladin named “Sure, Swift Justice” . . . but I could call him “Justice.”

  There was also a fifth member of our party. Chris, a six-year veteran of the Otherworld staff, would be our companion for the weekend. A combination of a camp counselor and a fixer, a companion is charged with keeping their team from breaking anything important—including bones, the rules, and the story line. Chris grew up on Long Island and seemed familiar to me, perhaps because he fell into a common Suffolk County archetype: an upper-middle-class joe, fond of boating or lacrosse, inevitably described as “a good guy.” He was slightly short, with an athletic build, a healthy tan, and hair cut close to hide where it was thinning and receding.

  Chris’s first duty was to lead us outside, and to our combat training. Since the ultimate goal of an event like Otherworld is to immerse yourself in fantasy, th
ese games eschew dice-rolling in favor of actual—though carefully mediated—physical confrontation. LARP battle rules can get quite complex; at Otherworld they keep things simple. Each character gets a set number of “free hits” (hit points, basically) and each time you get touched with a sword, you lose one. When you’re down to zero, a hit on a limb means you must stop using that limb; a hit to the torso knocks you unconscious. When that happens, you fall down and quietly count to fifty; if no one comes to your aid before you finish, you’re dead.

  As a mage, I had just one free hit, making me the weakest member of the party. I could get hit at most three times (anywhere, limb, anywhere) or as little as two times (anywhere, then torso) and be killed stone dead. Fortunately, as Ganubi has demonstrated, death is rarely permanent in fantasy role-playing games. At Otherworld, getting killed means you become a ghost, and you take a piece of cheesecloth out of your pocket and drape it over your head like a Scooby-Doo villain. You’re not allowed to speak or physically interact with people, and you must remain that way until resurrected by a cleric’s spell or magic potion.

  A friendly staffer handed us each our “boffers”—three-foot-long swords built on a rigid core, but padded all over with thick black foam. They’re light and easy to wield, and when you’re hit with one, it hurts about as much as getting tagged in a pillow fight. My compatriots were all issued swords that were about three feet long; as the mage, I received a dirk, about a foot shorter but otherwise identical. I couldn’t help myself: “It’s not the size of the sword, but how you use it,” I told them.