Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (15 page)

So as the year drew to a close, Dave Arneson left the party to seek out his own adventure. But he’d be back for his share of the treasure.

1
. I’m imagining Michael Cera, Channing Tatum, and Kristen Stewart as the respective leads in the buddy flick based on this paragraph, working title
Cognitive Dissonance
. Hollywood, you’re welcome.

2
. Game systems where players memorize a fixed list of spells are described as using “Vancian” magic, because that’s the way magic works in a series of books by author Jack Vance.
Eldritch Wizardry
’s psionics (and countless modern video games) use a point-based system, where players have a flat amount of magic available, and each spell has its own cost. The debate over Vancian vs. points is one of the most enduring and annoying arguments in modern geek culture, right up there with Kirk vs. Picard and Marvel vs. DC Comics.

3
. In November 1976, TSR released an original game by James Ward called Metamorphosis Alpha, notable as the first role-playing game with a science-fiction setting. The game takes place on the starship
Warden,
a vast spaceship built by the player characters’ ancestors; in the aftermath of some unknown disaster, their progeny survive on the ship but don’t understand its technology and must fight mutated creatures to ensure their survival.

4
. A year and a half later, in the foreword to
Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes,
dated July 4, 1976, Kask still sounds wounded: “
My first assignment, fresh out of college, was
Blackmoor
. I came to regard it with a mixture of love and loathing, that has gradually seen the love win out. The loathing grew out of the educational trip that it was for me. They don’t teach you in college what to do when the press breaks down, or your manuscript gets mysteriously misplaced; you just have to wing it.”

A
t the peak of his fame, the artist Marcel Duchamp developed an obsession with chess, and it quickly took over his life. He played constantly, stopped producing art, and even spent his entire honeymoon studying chess strategies, instead of his wife. “
Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or the Queen,” he wrote, “and the exterior world has no other interest for me other than its transformation to winning or losing positions.”

I know the feeling. As I threw myself headlong into researching the origins of Dungeons & Dragons, I began to feel an obsession with the game reemerging from deep within my psyche. Every rule book and history I read drew it further out. At work, I read D&D Internet forums; at home, I rolled up sample characters; on the weekends I pored over a library search of every article ever published that included the words “Dungeons & Dragons.”

A few months into the project, my girlfriend Kara and I got married. I didn’t play D&D on our honeymoon in the Caribbean, but I did bring along a stack of books with names like
The Creation of
Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games
and
The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art.
“Just beach reading material,” I told her.
¹
I told myself it was essential research, but this went far beyond due diligence. I was geeking out.

I needed to play D&D, too—I was dependent on it, like a junkie needs a fix. If my Tuesday-night game was canceled because someone had to work late or Morgan was out of town, I was agitated and restless for the rest of the week. When I was out of town and the game went on without me, that was even worse. Once I had to fly to San Francisco on a Tuesday morning to report a story for
Forbes
and knew I’d be missing a session, so I posted a message in an online “looking for game” forum: “Anyone running a D&D game (any edition) in the Bay Area, preferably within an hour drive of San Francisco International Airport?” It felt dirty, like I was an unfaithful husband trolling for casual sex on Craigslist. It felt worse when I couldn’t find any action.

So that Tuesday night, while Jhaden, Ganubi, and Graeme negotiated a job with a group of rich San Francisco merchants, Weslocke stayed home, and I sat in my room at the “real world” San Francisco airport Marriott, reread
A Game of Thrones,
and tried to ignore the irony. I wondered what they were up to and what I was missing—and how I’d gotten to this point again.

We traveled south out of San Francisco, along the edge of the bay, and then east across rolling grasslands and into a great valley. Before long we came across a highway and followed it into the mountains. All that remained of the road were chunks of asphalt, but they were enough to point the way.

The merchants had found the route while studying ancient docu
ments printed in the twentieth century, before the vampires came out of hiding. They also found a description of riches “beyond your wildest dreams”—a treasure, buried beneath a pyramid somewhere in the desert. They hired us to find it and protect them along the way.

It was no easy journey. On the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada we were caught in a snowstorm and then attacked by walking corpses with icy skin. They fell upon us and tried to consume our flesh, but we fought them off with fire and spells that shattered their frozen bodies. Perhaps they were the remains of some dishonored party—travelers who got lost in the mountain pass and turned upon each other, committing evil deeds that doomed their spirits to an eternity of undeath.

In the desert below, we fought a massive sandworm with a mouth bigger than a man, full of hundreds of tiny teeth. Jhaden charged the beast, tried to jump on its back and ride it—but he missed his mark, and it swallowed him whole. Fortunately, he held on to his sword and managed to cut his way out of the great worm’s gullet, killing it in the process.

A few days later, we found the object of our quest: a city, built in an arid basin on the desert floor. At the heart of it stood a huge black pyramid, shining like glass in the midday sun.

In April of 1958, American anthropologists Clifford Geertz and his wife, Hildred, traveled to Bali, Indonesia, to perform an ethnographic study. They found a place to live in the small village of Tihingan, the local chief welcomed them, and the prospects for their research looked good.

The villagers, however, did not care to participate. “
As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us, with a gaze focused several yards behind,” Clifford wrote. “The indifference, of course, was studied; the villagers were watching every move we made . . . but they acted as if we simply
did not exist, which, in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did not, or anyway not yet.”

It’s not easy to win the trust of a group of strangers, particularly if your appearance or behavior seems strange. But what broke the ice for Clifford and Hildred Geertz is the same thing that’s worked for thousands of geeks over the forty-year history of Dungeons & Dragons: joining the strangers in their favorite game.

Ten days or so after the anthropologist’s arrival, a large cockfight—a favorite pastime among the Balinese
²
—was held in the public square. Clifford and Hildred attended and, in the excitement of the event, found themselves drawn into the crowd, where hundreds of people “fused into a single body around the ring, a superorganism in the literal sense.” When the police arrived to break up the match, the Geertzes fled in terror with the villagers, even though they could have easily stayed and simply shown the police their official papers.

The next morning, the village was a completely different world. “Not only were we no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of all attention, the object of a great outpouring of warmth, interest, and, most especially, amusement,” Clifford wrote. “It was the turning point so far as our relationship to the community was concerned.”

Author and blogger Cory Doctorow found that games helped him make friends among a different kind of tribe. “I grew up in this very politically lefty household,” he says. “Normally when I encountered people from the far right, they’d be shouting ‘Get a job!’ or ‘Go back to Russia, you hippies!’ when we were out demonstrating. But when
I was eleven or twelve years old, I started going to game stores . . . and there were a ton of military and ex-military guys playing D&D.”

As he became a regular at Toronto’s gaming hotspots, Doctorow got to see that his political opponents weren’t just one-dimensional villains. “These were people who were wearing badges that said ‘Nuke ’em all, let God sort ’em out’ and ‘Better dead than red.’ Serious weirdo ultra–right wing nut jobs. But they were nevertheless part of the same thing as me. A whole social group kind of appeared out of nowhere; it was really very interesting.”

Humans play games for lots of reasons, but the fact that they so easily bring people together must be near the top of the list. Most of us form our closest relationships through play; it’s irrelevant whether that play takes the form of make-believe in the schoolyard, simulated combat on a chessboard, or two angry chickens pecking at each other. They’re all games, and they all transport us to a different world.

When a group of people play a game together, they enter a sort of alternate reality where friendships form at an accelerated rate. In part this is due to the structure of the game itself: The players have limited time, so things have to move quickly, and they’ve got a specific goal, so they focus on winning, not on the normal rules of social interaction. Then, as the game picks up, the players become engrossed in the experience; they stop being anxious scientists and become fighting birds of prey. Lost in the game, behavioral norms are forgotten, and emotional defenses weaken. Players begin to feel—and act upon—unusually strong impulses.
³
Emotions run high, and they keep getting higher; joy, anger, excitement, fear, even the terror of (simulated) death. In this artificially accelerated and emotionally heightened social environment, bonds are forged quickly and forged strong.

And even when a game is over, the bonds that have been created persist. “
A play community generally tends to become permanent even after the game is over,” wrote Johan Huizinga, one of the fathers of academic game studies
.
“The feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the original game.”

Whether you’re a young nerdy kid or a happy adult, this kind of experience can be profound. It’s the reason why so many people build their strongest social connections with people like sports teammates or members of a D&D campaign. The people that you play games with become your clan. They share your experiences, know your strengths and weaknesses, and help protect you from a dangerous world.

I knew we were in trouble as soon as I saw the pyramid.

The ancient documents described a desert oasis, a city of fabulous riches. But the vampires destroyed most human cities during the Nightfall, so I’d expected to find the oasis in ruin. Instead, someone—or something—had kept the city standing, and even protected it behind new stone walls. Off in the distance, the glassy black pyramid appeared unmarred and unbroken; dozens of tall buildings surrounded it, sprawling out for miles.

We couldn’t see any movement or make out any living creatures, but something had to be there. So we made camp about a mile from the city and waited for dark. Graeme is small and stealthy, so he volunteered to go closer and scout.

“Don’t worry,” he told us as he slipped into the night. “I’ll stay out of trouble.”

A few hours later, he returned.

“You’re not going to like this.” He sat on a pile of rubble and rubbed
his balding head. “I kept my distance at first, at least a quarter of a mile, and worked my way around the walls looking for doors. There’s one on the far side from us. But it’s closed, and there are guards on the walls. They looked like they could be human, but they were wearing black hooded cloaks, so I couldn’t really tell.

“So I decided to sneak in closer. I was sure they hadn’t seen me, but when I got about sixty feet from the gate, I heard a voice—well, not heard, exactly, more like felt—a voice in my head. It said, ‘Who goes there?’ I didn’t know what to do. Then one of the guards stepped off the wall, into thin air, and didn’t fall . . . it slowly floated toward the ground. So I ran. It didn’t follow me, and I wasn’t about to go back for a closer look.”

We couldn’t agree on what we should do. We’d dealt with creatures with psychic powers before and knew we were relatively powerless against their attacks; Jhaden carries a magic amulet that hides his thoughts, but it only protects the person wearing it, not all of us at once. He wanted to find an unguarded section of the city walls, climb over, and scout the city himself. I argued for more caution—I could summon a magical creature, perhaps a hippogriff, and fly high over the city to get a better look. The merchants just wanted us to shut up and get their treasure.

Finally, Ganubi ended the debate. “Listen, it’s simple,” he said. “When the sun comes up, I’ll just walk up and knock on the door.”

Games help you make friends. They certainly worked for me when I was a kid. But that doesn’t explain why I got addicted to D&D—and not once, but twice. Games, in general, have always been my favorite and most frequently indulged-in pastime, but I usually don’t get obsessed with board games or video games. So why is D&D so uniquely powerful?

Part of it, I think, is cultural: In his book
The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games,
author Michael J. Tresca argues that the game
appeals to an American sense of individualism—you build your own world, with your own values and rules. There’s a little bit of manifest destiny in the mix, too: “
American culture has some nuances that are unique to it, one being the notion of limitless growth for businesses, consumer buying power, and the economy. In Dungeons & Dragons, this ideology is true of dungeon exploration too. There’s always a monster with treasure around the next corner, always a new area to explore, always a new frontier to conquer.”