Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (2 page)

We call the time the vampires took over the Nightfall. The Dawn is when humans fought back.

Most people who play Dungeons & Dragons don’t just sit down for a single, self-contained session, like they would with a board game. Instead, they join a “campaign,” a group that meets on a regular basis and uses the same characters in the same world, building on past actions. One week, the players raid the pharaoh’s tomb, and the next, they pick up where they left off, facing the consequences of their decisions.

As these campaigns go on for weeks and months and even years, the successes and failures of past sessions provide history and context and suggest new challenges. If the players stole the pharaoh’s treasure
and cursed the land with famine, a DM might design a future session where they’re hunted by vengeful farmers.

Players are both audience and author in D&D; they consume the DM’s fiction but rewrite the story with their actions. And as authors, they’re free to make their own decisions. If a troll is trying to eat you, you can hit him with a sword, shoot him with an arrow, or run away—it’s up to you. For that matter, you could sing him a song, try to recruit him into Scientology, or lie down for a nap. Your choice might be a dumb one, but it’s still yours to make.

Unlike board games, which limit the player to a small set of actions, or video games, which offer a large but finite set of preprogrammed possibilities, role-playing games give the player free will. As long as it doesn’t violate the integrity of the fictional universe—proclaiming that up is down or suddenly transmogrifying into Abraham Lincoln—you can do whatever you want.

The resulting game play is rather different than other pastimes. In a game of Clue, you are asked to solve a murder mystery but must do so by moving a token around a board and looking at playing cards. If Clue was played like D&D, you could grab the lead pipe, beat a confession out of Colonel Mustard, and have sex with Miss Scarlet on the desk in the conservatory.

There are rules, of course. Books and books of rules, sold at $19.95 each, which inform a player’s decisions and determine their success. Attacking someone with a lead pipe? That’s armed combat with an improvised weapon, and page 113 of the
Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook
explains how to figure out if you hit your target and how much it hurt. Seducing another character might require a Diplomacy check (page 71), a Will save (page 136), and maybe an opposed Sense Motive roll against your Bluff skill (page 64). It’s not romantic, but it works.

All this free will can wreak havoc with the game’s continuing story.
A DM might spend weeks designing a complex network of caverns to explore, filled with clever traps and new monsters to fight. But if the players stop at the mouth of the cave and decide they’d rather go back to town and get drunk, they are free to do so—and they’ll derail the story in the process.

In order to keep freedom of action from leading to chaos, a good DM will usually weave a primary conflict into his story. This often takes the form of a classic heroic quest: a wrong to right, an enemy to destroy, or a world to save.

For a century after the vampires came to power, they imprisoned and fed on what was left of the human race. Stuck in the pens and denied the use of modern technology, humanity lived in fear, never knowing when their masters would descend from the city to feed.

But the undead were arrogant, and humans adapted. They watched the vampires cast spells and copied their actions, developing their own knowledge of magic. These secrets were shared and used to communicate with other pens. Together, humanity planned its escape.

And one day, as dawn swept across the globe, the people of the pens rose up and fought. The vampires were taken by surprise, but their power was still great. Many humans were recaptured, and many more died. But some escaped and returned to their abandoned cities, where they constructed defenses to keep the vampires at bay.

In the generation since the Dawn, both human and vampire have rebuilt. We hold a handful of cities, but they do too, and thousands are still captive in the pens. Beyond the walled cities, there is wilderness, filled with monsters.

But we’re not hiding, and we do not rest. We learn, and we prepare, and we plan for the day we can take our planet back.

Frodo Baggins needed the help of three hobbits, two men, an elf, a
dwarf, and a wise old wizard to save the world. So nobody expects a role-playing nerd to go it alone. Uniquely among tabletop games—and especially uniquely among activities enjoyed by teenage boys—Dungeons & Dragons is cooperative, not competitive. Players work together to advance the story and solve problems, not to beat each other to a finish line.

This means there’s rarely a real “winner” in a D&D game; no single player comes out on top. In fact, winning is something of an alien concept—most campaigns never last long enough to reach their dramatic conclusion. It’s more about the journey than the destination, to invoke that old cliché, and about developing your part in the story.

A player in a game of D&D doesn’t just push a premade plastic token around a board. Instead, they create a “player character,” or PC, a unique persona to be inhabited like an actor in a role, imbuing it with motivation and will and action. It’s like
Avatar,
but with knights instead of weird blue cat people.

Of course, D&D is not a playacting exercise. At the most fundamental level, a PC is defined by a bunch of numbers written down on a piece of paper—the DNA of an imaginary person. (It’s no coincidence that so many people who play the game also happen to be keen on math and science.)

At the start of a new game, players roll a handful of dice to determine their PC’s basic attributes, following the directions set out in a rule book. Some of these attributes define the character physically: how strong they are, how dexterous, how hardy. Others measure personality traits, like whether they are perceptive or oblivious, strong willed or weak. Each score is recorded by the player and kept for future reference.

Over the course of a game, a player will continually refer to these attributes to measure their success in different actions. Want to pick
up a heavy rock and throw it at the barbarians invading your castle? That’ll require a high strength score. Trying to dive under the trellis gate before it closes? Sorry, your dexterity is too low.

Next, a player has to select one of about a dozen character classes. This is something like choosing a profession and has a profound effect on the role a PC plays in the game. Classes are best explained within the context of
The Lord of the Rings—
as the most mainstream example of the fantasy genre,
LOTR
references come up all the time in Dungeons & Dragons.

Aragorn, the scruffy hero who turns out to be heir to the kingdom of men, would be a “ranger” in a D&D campaign—at home in the wilderness, an expert tracker, equally comfortable with a bow or a blade. Legolas the elf would be a ranger, too. Boromir and Gimli the dwarf would probably be “fighters”—masters of brute-force combat, emphasizing power rather than a ranger’s finesse. Gandalf? They call him a wizard, but D&D “wizards” have to study a lot, write their spells in a book, and use magic ingredients to make anything cool happen. Gandalf’s really more like a “sorcerer”—someone who is born with special abilities and doesn’t have to learn them. The diminutive hobbits are probably “rogues”—stealthy, agile, and sly. Often, since they’re so good at sneaking around, rogues are played as thieves. But our good-hearted hobbits don’t have to be pickpockets to play the class properly.
¹

There are many other classes in the game that aren’t represented in Middle-earth. “Clerics” are warrior priests. They can cast spells but frequently do so in order to assist other players, such as to repair a wound. “Paladins” are chivalrous knights who fight evil and follow
a strict code of conduct. And “barbarians” are uneducated bruisers, likely to fly into a homicidal rage. They’re the anabolic steroid users of the D&D world.

Once they’ve been assigned a class, PCs are allocated specific skills, as chosen from lists in the rule book. They may learn only a small number, so skills must be chosen wisely: If a player wants their rogue to be a cat burglar, it’s best to concentrate on skills like “Open Lock” and “Move Silently.” Any time the PC tries to perform a related action in the game, their success will depend on it.

Characters are also usually rounded out with a personal history, something that places them in the context of the larger D&D campaign. This is where the process becomes more art than science; each PC is its own work of fiction.

A good backstory can make or break a game. It lends depth to the fictional world, provides the player with motivation for future decision-making, and breathes life into a collection of numbers and rules.

I am Weslocke, a cleric. I was born in Kyoto, one of the few cities reoccupied after the Dawn, and I will not rest until humanity is free.

Generations of my family have dedicated their lives to this cause. My great-great-grandmother, a doctor, practiced her art in secret after the vampires threw her in the pens. Her children learned and did the same, hoping that one day humans would be strong enough to fight back. When that day came, my parents aided in the battle with healing magic, spells that stitch wounds and mend broken bones.

After Kyoto was resettled, my parents pushed to continue the war and destroy the vampires entirely. Few would listen. But they never gave up and raised me in the hope I could finish what they started. I learned to fight, and to heal, and to hate the vampires, and want nothing but their destruction.

When my parents died, I swore to uphold their legacy. I made plans
to leave the city, to develop the skills needed to fight the undead, and to find other people who shared my goals. And then, one fateful day, I got arrested for fighting in a bar.

Vampire World is a creation of Morgan Harris-Warrick, a thirty-three-year-old executive for a family-centric marketing agency. By day he runs focus groups, studying how kids are likely to respond to new advertising campaigns. By night he’s a Dungeon Master, inventor of the Nightfall and the Dawn.

In any game of Dungeons & Dragons, the Dungeon Master serves as author, director, and referee. A good DM must be creative, designing a world from scratch and spinning it into narrative. But they also must possess an ordered, logical mind, capable of recalling and understanding hundreds of pages’ worth of rules.

It’s a role that suits Morgan. Tall and rangy, with a shock of short black hair, he dresses in the manner of a nerd artiste, wrapped in a trench coat and topped with a wool felt fedora. He’s technical (he once built and programmed his own digital video recorder, instead of just buying a TiVo) but not ignorant of aesthetic pursuits: He’s written two unproduced screenplays, including an alternate telling of
Peter Pan
where Tinker Bell dies after a cynical audience refuses to clap.

Morgan started playing D&D when he was in fifth grade. “I was a socially inept little geek when I was a kid,” he says. “D&D was a way to socialize that you could be geeky and still do.” On Saturdays, he’d walk over to a friend’s house and spend the afternoon playing with a small group of like-minded peers.

“It wasn’t an ongoing campaign like what I’m running now,” he explains. “We had characters, and whoever felt like running an adventure would write something up and we’d throw our characters into
it. There weren’t big, ongoing stories. There wasn’t really even much of a world.”

The kids took turns running the game, so Morgan didn’t really come into his own as a Dungeon Master until he was a few years older. “In high school we had a D&D club, where we’d meet once a week in a spare room,” he says. “I had a separate campaign that I created for that, based on Piers Anthony’s
Xanth
books.”

In college, a wealth of other social activities beckoned, and Morgan stopped gaming. But when he moved to New York City a couple years after graduation, he started thinking about playing again. “It’s a good way to meet people, people with interests similar to mine,” he explains. “I had discovered the joys of Craigslist and how you could find people with any specific interest, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I see if I can find a D&D group?’ ”

He already knew what kind of game he wanted to play. “I’m a sucker for the postapocalyptic stuff . . . something I recognize, but changed,” he says. “I’d seen an anime film called
Vampire Hunter D,
and the premise was that vampires had taken over the world, but it was set after the humans had fought back and won. And I was watching that, and I was thinking, ‘You know, this is a fun enough movie, but they skipped the really interesting part, while the humans are just starting to rise up against the vampires. Let’s go back and fill in that story.’ ”

Today our quest was interrupted. We had secured passage aboard a ship sailing to San Francisco, hoping to find new allies in our fight against the vampires. But two days into the journey, the sails went slack and our ship was engulfed in a murky fog. Before we could prepare ourselves, we were set upon by unnatural creatures—bodies like men, but with scaly hides, webbed hands, and the wide-set eyes and gaping mouths of fish.

Taken by surprise, we were captured by the creatures—common pirates, despite their appearance—and imprisoned in the hold of our
own ship.

They should have killed us. Within an hour, Ganubi had managed to slip his bonds and untie us. We recovered our gear and headed for the deck—and now, we hide behind the wheelhouse as Ganubi pokes his head around the corner, surveying the scene.

“You see four of the fish-men standing near the mast, about thirty feet away,” Morgan says during one of our weekly game nights. “They carry big, jagged-tipped spears and seem to be having a conversation, though you can’t understand their language. It sounds like a bubbling, half-clogged drain.”