Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (10 page)

It’s strange, because I am unquestionably a giant nerd, and it’s hardly a secret. My friends would have been no more shocked if I told them I played Dungeons & Dragons than if I said I had chicken for dinner. But the desire to keep the hobby secret was burned deep into my psyche—a self-defense mechanism that came from years of teasing, bullying, and living on the fringes of schoolyard society. Geeky kids learn to hide their passions and play their cards close to their chest, lest they surrender more fodder for mockery.

The one person I did tell was my girlfriend Kara.
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She had never tried D&D and didn’t know anything about it; Kara played sports and went to parties in high school instead of fighting trolls and hiding from reality. She was supportive but a little confused. “Are you going to wear a costume?” she asked.

I took care to explain the game in detail and reassure her I wouldn’t be dressing up like an elf or doing anything deviant—just sitting down at a table with a couple of normal guys. “It’s no different than playing cards,” I told her. “Just think of it like I’m going to a weekly poker game.”

That satisfied her, for a while. But as weeks passed and it became clear that I wasn’t on a temporary flight of fancy, she started to get more concerned. “Why are you still doing this?” she asked me one night. “Are you okay with me telling people you’re going out and playing Dungeons & Dragons?”

I had no answer.

My new D&D companions had their own problems. When we started playing, Alex Agius, who plays Jhaden, was living with a girl who had strong negative feelings toward the game, thanks to a D&D-
playing brother. “He was a pothead, a dropout, kind of a fuckup,” Alex told me. “She had always associated D&D with that. When I started playing with you guys it really stuck in her craw. It was a sticking point between us until the day we broke up.”

Later, when Alex met Jennifer, the girl who eventually became his wife, he hid his D&D habit until the relationship started getting serious. “I was very hesitant to tell her,” he said. “I don’t remember how it finally came up, but I told her that I was playing D&D, and she was just like, ‘That’s cool.’ ”

Despite any reservations held by certain players and girlfriends, our D&D group continued to meet, and our adventuring party prospered. After Weslocke, Jhaden, Babeal, and Ganubi fought off the fish-monster pirates, we managed to free our ship and sail to San Francisco, the only human city left on North America’s Pacific coast—Los Angeles, of course, is full of vampires. We spent a few sessions knocking around the Bay Area, killing random monsters, and eventually earned enough experience points for our characters to advance a level.

Leveling up a Dungeons & Dragons character is serious business. Level isn’t just a badge of honor indicating how long a character’s gone without dying; it’s a way to quantify the heroic journey and allow characters to become more powerful over time. The process is detailed in the
Player’s Handbook,
with tables that cross-reference statistics like base attack bonus with level, and instructions that tell players when they can add a point to one of their ability scores or skills. This time, as Weslocke advanced from a level-twelve to a level-thirteen cleric, the transition was simple. But advancement can get really complicated if you want it to—particularly if you start pulling abilities, spells, and powers from one of the dozens of supplemental D&D rule books.

The next time we met, Morgan asked us if we’d completed the leveling process.

“I did,” Phil said. “I’m now a fourth-level rogue, fourth-level bard, and fourth-level shadowdancer.” D&D characters aren’t limited to a single class, even though most players stick to one. Phil has taken this to extremes, stacking levels first in bard, then in rogue, and then adopting an advanced “prestige class” available only to higher-level characters, the super-stealthy shadowdancer.

“And I’m going to take another prestige class at next level,” he said. “The Evangelist from the
Complete Divine
sourcebook.
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I’m going to try to start a religion.”

Morgan laughed. “The Church of Ganubi.”

After a long day traveling through the mountain foothills south of San Francisco, we made camp at the top of a ridge, a few hundred yards from a primal oak forest. Jhaden caught a rabbit, built a fire and a spit. When the cooking was done, Ganubi told one of his stories while we feasted.

“Hark to the tale of Ganubi and his gallivanters,” he began, “brave heroes on a righteous quest. One night, while sailing across the great ocean, their ship was overtaken in an unnatural fog . . .”

I usually enjoy Ganubi’s accounts of our adventures, even if he does make himself out to be the hero and the rest us become mere grooms and squires. But on this night, exhausted from our travel, I skipped the stories and bedded down for the night. I drifted to sleep with the sound of Ganubi’s voice on the wind.

A few hours later, I awoke to his screaming.

For a moment, lost in the dark, I clutched my bedroll in panic. But
a warrior’s instincts are strong, and I gathered myself quickly. Ganubi was on watch, and something was attacking the camp. I sat up and, peering into the darkness, tried to identify the threat.

There seemed to be nothing there. Jhaden was already standing and scanning the landscape, sword in hand. On the other side of the camp I could see Ganubi, his back to me, rapidly disappearing into the night. He was fleeing our camp and some unseen enemy, all the while screaming: “Run away! Run away! Run away!”

Ganubi is an interesting character. Phil’s a performer, so he plays the part with zest and gusto, and will frequently make decisions based on “what Ganubi would do,” even when that’s not the best course of action. This devotion to role-playing sometimes makes the game more difficult—Ganubi is overly trusting and not that bright—but it always makes the story more compelling.

Characters are the heart of any D&D game. As a player, the character is your avatar; you see through its eyes and make it do as you wish. But the act of inhabiting an avatar goes two ways. The more you play with a particular character, the more you identify with it and it controls
your
actions.

As a player, I knew what happened before Weslocke woke up. The party was attacked by a pack of invisible demon dogs, and Ganubi fell prey to one of their magical abilities, a fear effect that forces him to flee for 1d6 rounds. I understood that, from a tactical standpoint, the smartest thing to do on my turn would be to get up, chase Ganubi, and cast a Remove Fear spell, allowing him to rejoin the battle. But I also understood Weslocke, and I knew he had just woken up, he was startled, and his instinct was to protect himself. So instead I cast Blade Barrier, putting a whirling curtain of magical knives between me and the dogs.

D&D players invest a lot of time and emotion in their characters, so it’s not surprising that they want to protect them. This impulse even spills out of the game into the real world; I may have sold my rule books back in college, but I still preserve the character sheets from my childhood role-playing games. From fourth grade to my high school graduation, I kept all my characters in a red vinyl document organizer, an off-brand version of the Trapper Keepers that were popular in the seventies and eighties. It was my constant companion to games for a better part of a decade, and even during the long years when I avoided role-playing, I kept it safe—rarely consciously, but always carefully.

In recent years, the character keeper slumbered, forgotten, at the back of a cabinet in my living room. But once I started playing D&D again, it awoke and called to me. Like the One Ring trying to get back to its master, it wanted to be found. So on a quiet spring morning I went to it, shoving aside piles of old tax returns and pay stubs, and held it in my hands for the first time in ages.

It looked old, and its vinyl cover was peeling along the edges, revealing a tatty cardboard core. But it felt vital in my hands, solid and reassuring. The wraparound flap was secured with a small Velcro closure, and when I peeled it open the ripping noise made me shiver—a sound, like a bugle call before a battle, that heralded action and adventure. Inside the organizer there were three expanding folders, all stuffed to bursting, and a half-empty pocket on the inside cover. I reached into the pocket and pulled out a small stack of paper.

It was a pile of possibility . . . or a few dozen blank character records, if you want to be literal about it. Most role-playing game rule books provide one of these fill-in-the-blanks forms for players to photocopy and use when they make a new character. To devoted players, each sheet represents a chance to be a different person, a
new and exciting escape. As a child I fetishized them, and constantly searched new game books and magazines for better layouts. I even made my own on the Brother LW-20 word processor I was stuck with in the days before our home had a computer and a printer. I remember the hours of painstaking work—counting presses of the space bar to ensure that attributes on one line would align perfectly with those below, and holding down “shift” and the hyphen key to produce long underscores where I’d later pencil in each character’s details. After dozens of imperfect drafts, I’d have a pile of crumpled-up pages next to my desk, like a frustrated novelist in an old black-and-white movie . . . and a single perfect sheet, tabula rasa, which I’d protect between the flaps of a stiff manila folder and carefully place in my father’s briefcase. The next day he’d use his office photocopier to make me a few dozen copies, and when he came home from work I’d tear down the stairs to our front door, give him a grateful hug, then grab the prize and bolt back to my bedroom. I’d extract the original character sheet from the folder, archive it between the pages of an oversized children’s illustrated dictionary, and then place the copies into my red vinyl organizer. There they’d stay, safe and secure, until I needed a hero.

I loved the process of character creation so much that I’d spend hours designing characters with no intention of using them. When you’re making a new character, you may have to record anywhere from a dozen to a hundred personal details, depending on the game. Some parts of the process are simple, like when you roll four six-sided dice to determine a D&D character’s starting ability scores.
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But you’re also required to dig deeper, imagining a character’s personal
history and motivations. I enjoyed it as an analytic exercise (How can I exploit the rules to my advantage?) and as an act of creativity (Who is this person, and what drives them?).

The three expanding folders inside my organizer contained hundreds of characters, and each said something about who I was when I made it. The first pocket was full of D&D characters, most of them created when I was in elementary school. They’re goofy, sweet, and naïve.

On top of the pile was Wizzrobe, an elf wizard I based on an enemy in one of my favorite video games, The Legend of Zelda. My grandparents gave me a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas in 1986, so I was probably ten or eleven years old when I made the character. Looking at it years later, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the way I replicated powers I saw in the video game: Wizzrobe wears a ring of teleportation and carries a magic wand that casts the spell Telekinesis.
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Farther down the pile I found Aries, an eleventh-level human cleric. In the upper left-hand corner of the character record, in a space labeled “Player’s Name,” I’d written “Dr. Dave,” and below that, after “Character Began,” the date: 2/19/88. I was eleven years old. Aries carries a Bag of Tricks, one of my favorite magical items: It’s full of small fuzzy objects, and when a character pulls one out and throws it, it balloons into a full-sized, living animal. Rolling 1d8 determines the species, and, depending on your luck, you could get anything from a weasel to a lion.

As I flipped through the sheets, each character reminded me who they were and what I wanted them to be. Leaf, a rogue, was
inspired by Matthew Broderick’s role in the 1985 fantasy film
Ladyhawke.
Robin, a swashbuckling fighter, was my attempt to emulate C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian. Another character, written in pencil on a faded piece of graph paper, wasn’t mine, but I remembered it all the same: Nightwind, a level-fifteen human ninja, carried a distinctive +3 wakizashi.
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He belonged to my friend Michael Bagnulo and was used in a campaign we played all summer long before we started sixth grade. When school was out, role-playing game campaigns could stretch to a truly epic length and complexity; this one drew to a close in a marathon thirty-hour session at a beach house owned (and barely supervised) by our friend Scott Johnson’s parents.

Not long after that, Michael transitioned from player to Dungeon Master and eventually ran the games that captivated me throughout high school. The next character sheet in the pile, a tenth-level human magic-user with the goofy name Alka the Seltzer, hinted at the beginnings of that storytelling skill: In the character description area of the sheet, under “Fears/Dislikes,” I wrote “sharks and anything else Mike thinks up.”

Next I found Sir Howland the Wolf Knight, a level-fifteen human ranger. This character was a great example of a game gone wrong—an inexperienced Dungeon Master who has allowed his players to build ridiculously powerful characters and then showered them with money and treasure.
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Sir Howland carries a +6 vorpal sword, a +4 dagger, and a +5 lance; in the section of the character sheet labeled “Special Abilities,” my younger self wrote “incredible senses, great speed, immune to disease, detect evil, summon ethe
real sword, black belt in karate and ninjitsu, use technology, time/dimension travel.”

Deeper in the red vinyl organizer, I found character sheets from other pursuits, like Star Trek: The Role-Playing Game. Instead of controlling wizards and warriors in a medieval fantasy setting, players of this 1982 game took the roles of crew members aboard a Federation starship. It bored the hell out of me, but I sure did like imagining new
Star Trek
heroes like the ones on these official “Starfleet character data records.” There’s Charles Adams, captain of the USS
Achilles
; T’Pec, his Vulcan helmsman; Lieutenant Commander John Martin, first officer of the USS
Lexington
; even Lieutenant David Ewalt, chief security officer of the USS
Enterprise
.