It’s impossible to say what first drew me to Dungeons & Dragons. It might have been the vivid ads in the G.I. Joe and Fantastic Four comic books I read growing up, barbarians swinging axes and swords at dragons bursting from the page. Or maybe it was my babysitter Mike, the coolest seventh-grader in the world to eight-year-old me, who talk on end about D&D when he wasn’t focused on football and girls. It could have been the session I attended at a church youth retreat warning against the dangers of a cult called Dungeons & Dragons, which threatened to enslave us to Satan, who would make us sacrifice babies to praise him.
This actually happened.
And it made me want to play D&D very, very badly.
I was a pretty reclusive kid. I had neighborhood friends, sure, but I liked to spend most of time by myself, because I’m an only child and that’s the kind of thing we like. So I didn’t really have anyone to play with. And I didn’t want to ask my parents to buy me the books or accessories. I knew the books were expensive, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to share my interest in satanic cults to my parents.
And so it was that my first experience with D&D came in the back seat of a car. My friend Harrison and I were coming home after our first week-long backpacking trip with our scout troop. It had been an exhausting hike through the Washington and Jefferson Forest in Virginia, including a section of the Appalachian Trail. I was only 12, and by the end of the third day I was ready a helicopter extraction. But I adapted, along with the other hikers, and by the end we were in good spirits.
We planned our D&D adventure on the way down, using Harrison’s books and substituting torn pieces of paper in an upturned baseball cap for dice. I created a heinously overpowered paladin, blissfully unaware of the panoply of conditions to that power. It didn’t matter, because Harrison didn’t really know how to play either. So we spent the six-hour ride in the back of his dad’s Geo Metro—stuffed to the gills with backpacking equipment for three—failing to accomplish anything and enjoying every minute of it.
It’s really quite remarkable, the place Dungeons & Dragons has come to hold in the American consciousness. Once the province of dorks, nerds, and losers, now it’s…still the province of dorks, nerds, and losers—but it’s cool! Dorks and nerds and losers are a welcome part of the social fabric, unlike the more vicious treatment they received in the 1980s. Gamers and DMs (Dungeon Masters) were stereotyped as pizza-faced dweebs with the interpersonal skills of an abrasive meerkat.* But they’ve become part of mainstream popular culture. Big Bang Theory, Futurama, and Stranger Things have all featured D&D, and famous players range from the predictable Wil Wheaton and Patton Oswalt to the more surprising Vin Diesel and Joe Manganiello, whose dedication to D&D extends to a clothing line, a consultancy with D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast, and DMing a “high-rolling” campaign with players like Tom Morello, Paul “The Big Show” Wight, and Vince Vaughn.
* Pizza-faced dweebs, of course, are still welcome, as are pencil-necked geeks and 98-pound weaklings.
For those unfamiliar with the game, allow me a brief introduction. Created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, Dungeons & Dragons was originally published by Tactical Studies Rule (TSR) in 1974 (Wizards of the Coast took over production in 1997). The rules developed from miniature war games, which usually restaged famous battles, most often from the Napoleonic era. There have been numerous editions, with each change tweaking the rules governing combat, character creation and development, and other game mechanics. Harrison and I must have been using a second edition book, but most of my D&D experience was under version 3.5 (seriously). The game is currently in its fifth edition, which significantly streamlined many of the more baroque mechanics. *
* If this kind of stuff interests you, I recommend David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People Who Play It.
The only thing you really need to know about D&D (probably the thing you already do know) is that it’s based on dice rolls. In it’s current iteration, most rolls involve a 20-sided die (d20), which you roll to perform “checks,” where you strive to match or exceed a target number set by the DM. If you succeed, you pass your check. If you don’t, you fail. There are a number of modifiers that can raise or lower your total (armor, magical items, and so on). If you roll a natural 20 (meaning the number 20 lands face up), it’s considered a critical success, while a natural 1 is a critical failure (sometimes called a “botch”).
The DM is the central figure. He plans the adventures, laying out dungeons or castles and populating them with foes that will challenge the players without overwhelming the party. Players are free to make whatever choices they like, with dice rolls determining how successful they are in these endeavors. Many a DM has had to throw out an entire plot because the adventurers decided the old abandoned mine wasn’t worth exploring, or that they didn’t care if the king of a neighboring kingdom was in danger of being overthrown. The best DMs welcome these unexpected deviations, working with the players so they feel like free-roaming adventurers rather than passengers on a plot train.
Roleplaying games (RPGs) have played a big role in my life, particularly from high school to when I left Ohio for Missouri in 2008. We played a number of variations on D&D, such as the cyberpunk Shadowrun, stylized variations on the D&D rulebooks, and games published by White Wolf, including games like Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension. Each game had its pros and cons, and we usually played them for a few months before someone else would want to start a new campaign in a new system, or to create a character incompatible with our current campaign. Sure, the short duration of our campaigns could be frustrating at times, but we also gathered a vast collection of ridiculous characters, whose character sheets must still be tucked away in someone’s basement.
One recurring theme were what we termed “ourselves” games. One of us would serve as DM, and the rest of us would create characters meant to represent, well, ourselves, aiming to be as “accurate” as possible (I’m not sure what the standard is for casting oneself as a highly-powered mythological being, but we felt like we had a pretty good handle on it). We would spend the first two or three game sessions gathering our in-game personas, always with the same desperate exhortations of “All the stuff in those books was true!” Honestly, by the second or third time our characters should have been used to it. Being “amazed” each time is like the crew of the Enterprise being surprised every time the Holodeck malfunctioned.*
* Yes, that’s a dorky allusion in an entirely dorky blog post. It’s dork-ception.
In our first—and longest-lasting—iteration, we were all turned into vampires. After a number of game sessions, I found myself under attack from a clan of assassin vampires in a downtown Columbus hotel. I managed to kill them all, but in doing so, I became so drained of blood (the Vampire version of hit points) that I went into a frenzy, trying to smash through another hotel room door in search of blood. I broke the door, but the resulting damage sent me into Torpor (the Vampire version of death), and that was that.
In another game, I found I was a powerful mage, endowed with what was called an Avatar, essentially a voice in my head that helped me cast much more powerful magical spells. Sullivan, the DM, allowed Jeff (who would be the best man at my wedding) to play as my avatar, and he proceeded to wreak havoc with my psyche. As my avatar, his first act was to make me memorize the entirety of Spin Doctor’s Pocket Full of Kryptonite, much to the annoyance of the rest of the party. Another party member tried to use his power of suggestion to get me to take some sleeping pills, but he rolled a natural one, one of those “botches.” Using his discretion as DM, Sullivan made Biechler’s character take the sleeping pills himself, which at least granted Biechler relief from another round of “Jimmy Olsen’s Blues.”
One of my favorite games was a long-running campaign in Xcrawl, one of the D&D variations. Set in “present day,” the conceit of the game is that all the players are essentially professional dungeon-runners. The party competes against other parties in televised matches as the Dungeon Judge (DJ) creates parallel challenges, to see who can finish first. Characters are awarded extra points and perks for mugging to the camera, grandstanding to the crowd, and otherwise creating a persona that is either loved or hated by the crowd.
I played as Doug “The Hammer” Smythe, a fighter/meat-shield who fought like a beast but was dumber than a sack of hammers. As his character progressed over several dungeon crawls, he became more and more full of himself, purchasing golden armor and an ermine cape. Had the game not petered out, I had positioned him to make a spectacular heel turn at the most inopportune time, morphing into his “Golden Hammer” persona, a prima donna whose antics were meant to glorify himself but often led to dire consequences for the rest of the party.
My most recent roleplaying experience was less in-depth, but was also some of the most unbridled fun I’ve had in quite some time. About a year ago, a group of friends from college gathered in a cabin in Ohio for a guys’ weekend, and my friend Nat brought his copy of Goblin Quest. In this game, each player creates and controls five goblins, with the intent of making them as inept as possible. The group then creates an ultimate goal, usually something relatively easy to achieve, and lays out a number of plot points they need to reach in order to achieve that goal.
The mechanic of the game is simple: goblins can declare actions at any point, then roll a six-sided die. On a 5 or a 6, the goblin succeeds. On a 1 or a 2, the goblin fails, and they lose one of their two hit points. If they lose both hit points, the player describes the hilarious manner of their death before discarding it and moving on to their next goblin. Rolling a 3 results in “something bad,” while a 4 means “something good.” In either case, the player decides what the good or bad thing is, and how it relates to the plot point the group is trying to achieve.
Thanks to the mix of hilarity and alcohol, I don’t remember many of the specifics of the game. I do remember that one of Nat’s goblins was a tire. Like, a physical, sentient car tire. The action was insane, with goblins perishing from the simplest task, like one of mine who tried to think of an idea, rolled a one, and had his brain catch fire and melt his head. The cabin was filled with grating, high-pitched goblin voices, and somehow, we managed to achieve the big goal (whatever it was—it seems it wasn’t that important), and we still had, I think two or three of the original twenty-five goblins left alive.
I desperately miss gaming like this. The games themselves were fun, but I really miss the chance to hang out with my friends every week and populate a ridiculous world full of ridiculous people in ridiculous circumstances. I recently came across a podcast called Dumb-Dumbs & Dragons, which follows three improvisers who’ve never played D&D. The show is so very dumb, but in the absolute best way. It’s full of idiotic decisions, quest-altering missteps, and allusions to “popular traveling stage shows” like Die Hard and Hot Fuzz. But what makes it work is the DM and the players. The players commit to their characters, and while they offer commentary on their character’s actions, their in-game behavior stays true to their characters. The DM is knowledgeable and flexible, using storytelling to explain failures and successes and weaving a compelling narrative rooted in the choices the characters make. The game feels organic. No one is forcing their viewpoint on the game, and it flowers because of that.
It reminds me of those happy nights ensconced in someone’s basement, surrounded by paper and books and dice, rolling up characters and reading through supplemental books to find some obscure power or preposterous feat to complement our bard or wizard or rogue. We would plow through Mountain Dew and chomp down on Cheetos, staying out well past midnight, even on school nights. We had our favorite dice, our favorite chairs, and never enough pencils. For some, high school was parties and sports; for us, it was theatre and roleplaying. Sure, we were dorks, but we knew it and we didn’t care.
I’m still a dork, as are most of my friends, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I still long to roll up a character, maybe a philosophical fighter or an uneasy bard. I’ve got my Crown Royal bag full of dice sitting in my desk, each die just waiting for the opportunity to disappoint me at a critical juncture. But they have to wait. I can’t say I want to play with just anybody—there’s not much point to that. But my friends and I are all busy with our lives, and making a game work is a commitment. But if you’re out there, just know I’m ready. Let me know when and where, and I’ll be there, Crown Royal bag in hand, ready to attack the darkness.
MetaFrizzics 