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

by Ewalt, David M.

  “One of my goals, and one of the ways that the stories I’m writing are different from most other authors’, is that I’m really looking to create scenes we can bring to life with a reasonably high degree of realism,” says Hayes. “I won’t write a story that’s set in a castle, because as much as I love to read novels set in castles, we don’t have a castle at our disposal, and I don’t want to settle for a room with cardboard rocks taped to the wall and a ‘pretend this is a castle’ sign. That’s why, at Otherworld, you won’t meet anyone who can fly.”

  By Saturday night, when the rising action hit a fever pitch, I’d been completely drawn into the adventure. Living in a ubiquitous fiction—one made of not just words but physical objects and real people—made me realize how stupid it was to be self-conscious, and I began to truly enjoy the adventure. When a crisis arose that required all eight parties to team up and tackle three simultaneous battles, I committed wholeheartedly—and fought tooth and nail with a dozen strangers, swinging my foam sword like it was Excalibur.

  When the adventurers from Keer all returned to our shared cabin—tired, dirty, and triumphant—we were completely sold on the idea we were heroes. As we settled into bed, we swapped tales of our victories; Jen offered a well-deserved victory speech. “Other people went out drinking for their thirtieth birthday,” she said. “I slayed a fucking banshee.”

  * * *

  I had a great weekend, but something was amiss. As the event concluded on Sunday, I heard other participants describe their adventure in terms like “life-changing” and “best thing I’ve ever done”—and I couldn’t reciprocate. Sure, it was fun . . . but not profound. I wondered why I didn’t share that experience.

  It’s possible my initial fears and prejudices kept me from fully enjoying the event, but I doubt it. I’m sure everyone else started out nervous, but before long we were all fully engaged. Instead, I think the people affected most strongly by Otherworld lack my regular access to fantasy. Sure, they might watch Game of Thrones or play World of Warcraft, but that’s observation, not participation. Their personal day-to-day existence is mundane: expected, explainable. We all live in the muggle world, and only a few of us are lucky enough to get a peek into Hogwarts.

  I’m no wizard—but once a week, I feel like I am. Role-playing games allow me to experience the fantastic, and even though it’s make-believe, the catharsis is real. My life isn’t wanting for magic, because I’ve got Dungeons & Dragons.

  * * *

  1. “These garments offer magic protection in the form of a +1 to +5 resistance bonus on all saving throws (Fortitude, Reflex and Will).” Dungeon Master’s Guide, page 252.

  2. “An undead spellcaster, usually a wizard or sorcerer but sometimes a cleric or other spellcaster, who has used its magical powers to unnaturally extend its life.” Monster Manual, page 166.

  14

  D&D NEXT

  A few weeks after Otherworld, I packed my dice and set out for a new adventure. I’d been sick and wasn’t ready to travel—for all I knew I was patient zero in a major outbreak of Captain Trips, the Andromeda Strain, or spattergroit. But a few weeks earlier, I’d received an offer I couldn’t refuse:

  “Wizards of the Coast would like to invite you to our headquarters in Renton, Washington, to take part in an exclusive Dungeons & Dragons Summit. As one of our trusted press partners, and a respected member of the D&D community, you have been chosen to participate in this private meeting where we will share some exciting news.”

  Journalists get offers like this all the time. Companies try to get us interested in covering upcoming products by using words like “exclusive” and “exciting,” and flattering us that we’re “respected.” It’s a carnival pitch: corporate marketing manager as barker, reporter as mark. I like to think of myself, at least in professional terms, as a cynical ink-stained wretch. So I delete most of these entreaties and give them little thought.

  But this one hit me hard. The people who make D&D think I’m a respected member of their community? Reading that turned me to putty; it was something like Jesus, Krishna, or Delleb1 coming down from heaven and saying, “Hey, man—you’re pretty cool.”

  Did I want to fly cross-country while exhausted and sick, sit in a conference room, and watch people read from a PowerPoint presentation? If they were the people who make D&D, hell yes I did. I also had an inkling that their “exciting news” might be a brand-new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, so forget battling the flu: For a chance to be one of the first people to see D&D 5.0, I’d fight a bugbear with a sling made from the elastic band of my own underpants.

  * * *

  Ground zero for the worldwide phenomenon of Dungeons & Dragons, the home of the greatest fantasy game of all time, the place where imaginations soar and adventures begin . . . is a boxy, glass-covered building in an ordinary office park. Wizards of the Coast’s corporate headquarters is located in a blue-collar Seattle suburb; there’s day care on the ground floor and a nice little coffee shop.

  But on the fourth floor of the building, corporate normalcy fails its saving throw and dies. A twelve-foot-tall statue of a red dragon looms over the reception area; uncut sheets of Magic: The Gathering cards hang framed on the walls; conference rooms are labeled with names like “The Tomb of Horrors” and “Leomund’s Tiny Hut.”2 A staffer led me to a large conference room, where I joined a few other “respected members of the D&D community” in trying to sit still and avoid passing out from excitement.

  Thankfully, Liz Schuh, Wizards of the Coast’s head of publishing for Dungeons & Dragons, got right to the point. “We’re in the midst of what a lot of people call edition wars,” she told us. “We want to fix that. We don’t want there to be a break in the audience. So we’re here to tell you about the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons . . . a new, universally compatible set.”

  Here’s the problem, as Wizards saw it: Dungeons & Dragons was no longer a single game. For decades, the company kept changing the rules and releasing new editions, because it was a good way to get players to keep spending money. But every time they updated the rules, they left a fraction of the customer base behind: people who preferred the old rules or couldn’t afford the new. Now, half a dozen3 versions later, the customer base was so fractured that only a small percentage of the people who played D&D actually paid for D&D. Most of them are still using the books they bought years—or decades—ago.

  It was a big problem for players too. Every time we’d lost a player in the Vampire World game, we’d struggled to replace them, because we were looking for members of a subculture’s subculture: not just D&D players, but players who knew and preferred the 3.5 edition rules. Trying to find a new player was like trying to find a needle in a haystack among a field of haystacks.

  To solve the problem, Wizards had set an ambitious goal: to create a “universal rule set” that unifies all players under one single system. Mike Mearls, senior manager of the D&D research and development team, took the floor to explain what that meant. “We’re focusing on what gets people excited about D&D and making sure we have a game that encompasses all different styles,” he said. “Even if you haven’t played in twenty years, we want you to be able to sit down and say, ‘This is D&D.’ ”

  Almost a year ago, Mearls explained, he sat down with his team, read through the rules, and played a few sessions of each edition of the game going back to 1974. Their goal was to look past the rules and identify the core of D&D, the experiences that define it—like exploration, combat, adventure, and story. The thinking was that if the game feels like D&D, the rules don’t matter. Players respond to the experience and only notice the rules when they get in the way.

  Of course, different people seek out different experiences. A group of old grognards that’s spent the last forty years clearing out dungeons doesn’t want the same thing as a clan of artsy college kids who are really into theatrical role-playing. To address that, the new edition was being conceived of as a modular, flexible system, easily customized to indi
vidual preferences.

  “Just like a player makes his character, the Dungeon Master can make his rule set,” Mearls said. “He might say, ‘I’m going to run a military campaign, it’s going to be a lot of fighting’ . . . so he’d use the combat chapter, drop in miniatures rules, and include the martial arts optional rules. You can have as little or as much customization as you want. It’s about letting people find their own way to play.”

  Mearls and Schuh weren’t ready to talk about specific products. But in practice, I imagine the game will be built around a few core rule books—like the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual—that describe the concept of D&D, its basic execution, and its fantasy setting. What rules they do contain will be simple and direct. Then, around that core, will be a whole universe of books that provide personalization to forty years of gamers. Are you an old-school gamer who wants to determine each day’s weather and track the effects of temperature and precipitation on your character? Buy the new Wilderness Survival Guide. Do you prefer the fourth edition and want characters with powers that have push-button simplicity? Try Heroes of Will, a book with a long list of 4.0-style character classes.

  Mearls doesn’t want to tell people how to play the game—he was on the staff of designers that put together D&D 4.0 and learned firsthand why that’s a bad idea. “With fourth edition, there was a huge focus on mechanics,” he said. “The story was still there, but a lot of our customers were having trouble getting to it. In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal.’ But there’s other ways to play guitar.”

  This time around, the idea is to make a core that everyone can agree on, provide extensions so each gaming group can customize—and then make the real money selling add-on products: campaign settings like Greyhawk; adventure modules like The Tomb of Horrors; accessories like miniatures; and even digital services, where you might charge gamers $9.99 a month to access tools like character-building apps, map generators, and virtual tabletops.

  Mearls’s biggest job is to get that core set of rule books just exactly right. It needs to feel like a fantasy role-playing game, not a video game, or a card game, or a combat simulator. It needs to be simple without being stupid, and efficient without being shallow. And it must encourage players to explore, create, and tell compelling stories. Mearls needs to capture the flavor of Dungeons & Dragons, the feeling. Everything else is just a distraction.

  “D&D is like the wardrobe people go through to get to Narnia,” he told us. “If you walk through and there’s a McDonald’s, it’s like, ‘This isn’t Narnia.’ ”

  * * *

  The impending fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons was announced on January 9, 2012. In a column posted on Wizards of the Coast’s website, Mike Mearls revealed to the world that the game—now officially code-named “D&D Next”—was under development. He also announced an open-to-the-public play test, starting that spring. “By involving you in this process, we can build a set of D&D rules that incorporate the wants and desires of D&D gamers around the world,” he wrote. “We want a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront.”

  A new edition of Scrabble or Monopoly rarely attracts the news media’s attention. But D&D is embedded so deep in the heart of American pop culture that The New York Times covered the news on the front page of its arts section. The article’s author, journalist and memoirist Ethan Gilsdorf, quoted me regarding the difficulties of playing D&D across editions: “Imagine trying to organize a basketball team, if the point guard adheres to modern league rules, but the center only knows how to play ancient Mayan handball.” I’m not sure which inflated my nerd ego more: the implicit confirmation of my status as D&D expert, or successfully dropping a tlachtli reference in the newspaper of record.

  Fan reaction to the announcement was initially skeptical, but much of their angst seemed to be connected to old grievances. “Too little, too late,” one commenter wrote on the story I published online about the new edition. “The rules had better be amazing, and the marketing very apologetic to us ‘grognards’ if WotC is going to have any chance of drawing some of us back.”

  James Maliszewski, author of the role-playing games blog Grognardia, was also skeptical. “Allow me a momentary guffaw at the notion that Humpty Dumpty can ever be put back together again,” he wrote. “I don’t doubt for a minute WotC’s sincerity in wanting to hear what D&D fans have to say about the future of the game, but I also think it’s a recipe for disaster, especially given how fragmented the fanbase is these days.”

  The loudest dissent seemed to come from players of fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons, who faced not only their own obsolescence but the implication that the game they loved was an embarrassing mistake. (To be fair, these players did get a raw deal; a lot of them invested serious time and money in the product, only to see it become the shortest-lived rule set in D&D’s history.) Wizards tried to reassure them by saying they would continue publishing fourth-edition rule books until the fifth edition was finished, and promised that there’d still be room for “fourth edition–style play”—but I couldn’t help but hear these assurances in the disdainful voice of a nerd talking to someone they think is below them: “My new computer has a six-core four-point-two megahertz processor, sixteen gigabytes of quad-channel RAM, eight terabytes of . . . yes, Mother, you can still play solitaire on it.”

  Still, most D&D fans seemed hopeful. Dedicated players may complain about changes, but ultimately they can’t help but root for the game’s future success; they care too much about it. One player wrote this comment on my story:

  “The D&D player is a business manager that wants to take on trolls under the bridge on a Friday night . . . a chemical engineer [who] wants to rescue the gnome prince from the clutches of the evil duergar . . . a teacher who hunts for Beholders in the Underdark. The D&D fan comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but the hunger is unique; it is a hunger for adventure and ultimately to escape. I’m glad that [Wizards] is worried about the fans and the players. Let’s just hope that they are as hungry for adventure as the players are.”

  * * *

  Anxious D&D players got their first taste of the new edition two weeks later, when Wizards staff appeared to run play tests at the D&D Experience, a convention in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was twitching at the prospect of another chance to play the game, so I booked a ticket—and then spent the intervening weeks complaining to friends about being forced to visit the frigid Great Lakes region in January. Fortunately, Fort Wayne International Airport provided a gentle welcome: There’s a vintage Ms. Pac-Man machine right in the terminal, and when you walk outside security, a peppy gray-haired volunteer greets you with a smile and a free cookie from the bakery across the street.

  The Grand Wayne Convention Center was less warm but nice enough. When I arrived, I bought one $8 ticket allowing me access to the “D&D Secret Special,” Wizards of the Coast’s public debut of the fifth-edition rules. Over the course of the convention, Wizards’ staff and a small cadre of volunteer Dungeon Masters would lead ten four-hour play-test sessions; during each, multiple tables of gamers would run first-level pregenerated characters through the same short adventure. By Sunday afternoon, over five hundred fans would have gotten their first taste of the new D&D.

  * * *

  Fittingly, Wizards of the Coast set their debut game in the Caves of Chaos—the monster-filled caverns from The Keep on the Borderlands, a classic 1979 adventure module. It’s reassuring to know future generations of gamers may first experience D&D the same way I did: killing kobolds (or getting killed by kobolds) in the twisty passages of a Gygax adventure.

  By the time I found my table it was nearly full, and most of the pregenerated characters were taken. Dallas and Angela, a cute young couple, both wore identical blue T-shirts depicting Doctor Who’s time machine, the TARDIS. Dallas had chosen to play a ha
lfling rogue, Angela a half-orc fighter. John, a pale middle-aged midwestern dad, was playing an elf wizard. Mike, another fiftysomething dad, was one of the few black people at the convention. He’d chosen a dwarf cleric.

  That left me with either a human female paladin or a tiefling warlord. Tieflings made their D&D debut in 1994 as a monster race in the AD&D Planescape Campaign Setting. They’re half-demons, descendants of a human empire that made a pact with devils to gain power and territory. Tieflings became a playable character race in the fourth edition—the same time the warlord became a character class. Warlords are tactical experts, designed to increase the effectiveness of allies: Their powers include such exciting options as Commander’s Strike (“With a shout, you command an ally to attack”), Viper’s Strike (“You trick your adversary into making a tactical error that gives your comrade a chance to strike”), and Surprise Attack (“Despite the chaos of battle, you see a golden opportunity for an ally to make a surprising attack”).

  I took the paladin. Dame Eilora Arroway, a human noble, strong of heart and low on hit points. My character sheet told me she wore chain mail and carried a very big sword; I’d have to dream up any further characterization on the fly.

  Our final player, Daniel, arrived shortly after I’d settled in and got stuck with the warlord. Ex-military, he wore his hair typically short, but the large earring dangling from his left lobe would have gone better with a ball gown than combat camouflage.

  Our Dungeon Master, Willi, told us we’d have four hours to run a simple mission, hopefully comprising several fights and a bit of role-playing. He started our adventure in the obvious place.