Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (20 page)

6
. “[Elementals] are strong but relatively stupid beings conjured magically from their normal habitat—the elemental planes of air, earth, etc. . . . Upon command an air elemental can form a whirlwind [that] sweeps away and kills all creatures under three hit dice, and causes 2–16 hit points of damage on all non-aerial creatures which it fails to kill outright.”
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual,
page 10.

7
. “Topped by a huge mass of yellow orange hair which looks light a fright wig, Queen Frupy’s face is a mass of jowls and wrinkles, set in the middle of a very large head which sits squarely upon her shoulders. Her body is lumpy and gross, and her skin is covered with bristles the color of her hair.”
Hall of the Fire Giant King,
page 4.

8
. “A sphere of annihilation is a globe of absolute blackness, a ball of nothingness 2' in diameter. A sphere is actually a hole in the continuity of the multiverse, a void. Any matter which comes in contact with a sphere is instantly sucked into the void, gone, utterly destroyed, wishes and similar magicks notwithstanding.”
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide,
page 154.

9
. Only 2.3 percent of respondents to the survey were female. While the hobby is still very male dominated, it’s changing fast—as we’ll see later.

10
. Broadly speaking, lawful characters respect some kind of authority, chaotic characters follow their conscience, and neutral characters avoid rigid extremes. You could argue that in the original
Star Wars
movies, Darth Vader is lawful evil, Luke Skywalker is lawful good, and Emperor Palpatine is chaotic evil; Han Solo starts out as chaotic neutral but ends the trilogy as neutral good. Debating the alignment of characters in different TV shows, books, and movies is a popular geek pastime and Internet meme; I’ve seen people deconstruct the casts of everything from
Game of Thrones
to
Downton Abbey.
Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, is apparently true neutral.

11
. That’s $100 in royalties, but some of you already knew that, because you stopped to do the math before you reached this footnote. A true nerd finds unsolved equations irresistible—they’re like unopened birthday presents.

S
ubstance-abuse counselors sometimes describe addiction in terms of four stages. My D&D habit progressed much the same way. When I first joined Morgan’s Vampire World campaign, I was only in Experimentation
(“experimenting may occur once or several times as a way to ‘have fun’ or even to help the individual cope with a problem”), but the stuff was so good, I quickly advanced to Regular Use. By the time our characters began our journey to Las Vegas, I had moved on to Risky Use (“craving and preoccupation”); after we met the illithids and found the pyramid’s treasure I was deep in Dependence (“compulsive use . . . despite severe negative consequences to his or her relationships, physical and mental health, personal finances, job security”).

I could go down the list:
Negative consequences to relationships?
I saw my D&D buddies every week but neglected all my other friends.
Physical and mental health?
Forget about the freshman fifteen; I put on the D&D thirty.
Personal finances?
I spent a small fortune buying out-of-print rule books on eBay.
Job security?
Instead of completing
stories for the magazine, I spent entire days browsing online role-playing game forums for interesting discussions (“If you could only take three sourcebooks to a desert island, what would they be?”).

One of my favorite forums was a small section on the social news site Reddit. In April 2011, some of Reddit’s users organized a Secret Santa–style gift exchange, one of those affairs where you’re randomly assigned another participant and have to send them an anonymous gift. Since this swap was held online, participants were assigned a stranger—someone chosen from the entire site’s user base, not just the RPG forum—and had to figure out what to get them based on what they’d written on the site. It sounded like a nice diversion from D&D, so I signed up.

I was assigned a twentysomething college student from upstate New York. I learned right away that she liked to read and was studying to be an archaeologist—more than enough information to pick out a gift. But I dug deeper into her comment history, looking for something else . . . and found it. A single post, over a year old, where she mentioned she’d played a role-playing game with some friends.

That was all I needed to hear. I ordered a few supplies, and when they arrived, I broke out my power tools and my gaming gear. A few precision-drilled holes later, I strung a purple twenty-sided die on a silver chain and attached jewelry closures to each end. It wasn’t the ugliest necklace I’ve ever seen, but it was definitely the nerdiest. With a satisfied grin, I showed it to my wife.

Kara gave me a look that fell somewhere between amused and pitying. When I said I was going to make her a necklace, too, she seemed less than thrilled.

My sad attempt at jewelry design wasn’t the first time someone tried to channel enthusiasm for role-playing into novelty products. A small
TSR licensee called Troubador Press crossed that line in 1979, when it published the
Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album
; in the years that followed, other companies released a torrent of D&D-branded merchandise, including lunch boxes, beach towels, and action figures.

It seems silly, but at the time, the words “Dungeons & Dragons” could make any product a top seller. Even TSR’s bigger competitors knew they had value: In 1980, TSR partnered with Mattel to release the Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game, which required players to move a die-cast metal hero through a molded plastic maze. An electronic sensor (the “computer”) beeped and chirped every time a player moved their piece.
¹
A September 1980
Forbes
article described D&D as “
the hottest game in the nation” and predicted explosive growth. TSR went on to post sales of $8.5 million for the year, an increase of 400 percent year over year.

In its early years, Dungeons & Dragons had been a pastime for grizzled veterans and nerdy college students. But after the success of AD&D and the Basic Set, the game went mainstream. D&D rule books and a whole universe of licensed products made it into the hands of children all across America—and it wasn’t long before confused adults started freaking out.

James Dallas Egbert III was a gifted child. He graduated from high school at age fourteen, beloved by teachers—and resented by peers. Alienated and friendless, when he started college at Michigan State University he was moody and depressed, even for a teenager.

For a while, it seemed like college would provide the friends he’d
been missing. He joined a club called the Tolkien Society, where students spent time discussing
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings,
and sometimes played Dungeons & Dragons. But then on August 15, 1979, sixteen-year-old Egbert disappeared.

A few weeks passed before William Dear, a private investigator hired by Egbert’s parents, developed a theory: Egbert had been playing a live-action version of Dungeons & Dragons and got lost in a labyrinth of steam tunnels located below the campus. Maybe he was still down there, wandering alone and confused—or maybe he’d been killed by a competing player.

Dear had obviously never played D&D, nor had any of the Michigan state police. But the investigators were all convinced the game was at fault, even though they didn’t have any proof. Desperate for clues, officers collected several empty bulletin boards they found in Egbert’s bedroom and drove them three hundred miles to TSR’s headquarters. Upon their arrival, the cops asked TSR staff to analyze the placement of unused thumbtacks on each board, in case they represented some sort of secret pattern or map. Gary Gygax and Tim Kask spent three days staring at the boards before concluding—rightly—that they signified nothing.

But Dear didn’t give up. The press-happy dick
²
gladly shared it with reporters, and the disappearance of Egbert became national news. Breathless newspaper stories pulled heartstrings with descriptions of an innocent genius led astray, a young boy tempted into a deviant world. Surely this game, they suggested, full of magic and demons, had led to his downfall.

The truth was simpler. Egbert, in a fit of depression, had run away. Eventually he bought a bus ticket to New Orleans, checked into a cheap motel, and attempted to poison himself. When that didn’t work, he hid out in Louisiana for a few more days before deciding to go home.
³

The staff of TSR was worried about receiving so much negative attention, but only until they saw the results. “
The continual press coverage of [D&D] and its ‘dangers’ caused sales to skyrocket,” Gygax said in a 2002 interview. “We couldn’t print fast enough to fill orders.” Just one year after the Egbert affair, TSR posted annual revenues of $8.5 million; two years later, in fiscal 1981, revenues exceeded $12.9 million.

D&D was famous. On November 8, 1979, just six weeks after Egbert returned to his family, Gygax appeared on the late-night television show
Tomorrow with Tom Snyder
to talk about the phenomenon; to his credit, Snyder seemed to embrace D&D in the spirit in which it was intended, and even needled an unprepared Gygax to run him through an impromptu dungeon on camera. But outside of late-night, the game was treated differently. The Egbert incident had marked Dungeons & Dragons in the public eye as something dangerous. And as the 1980s began, the game became a cultural bugaboo—seen, along with satanism and heavy metal music, as a corrupter of youth.

In May of 1980, parents in the “solidly Mormon” farming town of Heber City, Utah, convinced their local school board to shut down an after-school D&D club and accused its organizers “
of working with the Antichrist and of fomenting Communist subversion.” Local Christian minister Norman Springer told
The
New York Times
that the
game was
“very definitely” antireligious: “These books are filled with things that are not fantasy, but are actual in the real demon world and can be very dangerous for anyone involved in the game because it leaves them so open to Satanic spirits.”

TSR did what it could to prevent an all-out witch hunt. A few months after the Heber City incident, the company ran a half-page ad in
The Dragon
with the banner headline “
Real-life Clerics: TSR Hobbies needs you.” The ad solicited players who happened to be clergy “of any organized religion” to share their stories of D&D’s “helpful, positive influence.”

But they were too late. In 1981, author Rona Jaffe published a novel inspired by the Egbert case.
Mazes and Monsters
told the story of Robbie Wheeling, a college student who suffers a psychotic break while playing a D&D-like game. Wheeling comes to believe he is actually his character, the cleric Pardeux, and that he must jump off one of the World Trade Center towers in order to win the game. The made-for-TV movie version, released in 1982, starred a post–
Bosom Buddies
Tom Hanks.

Mazes and Monsters
is nonsensical, hysterical, and a woefully inaccurate depiction of Dungeons & Dragons. But for many Americans who knew little about the game, it cemented an idea that fantasy role-playing was the road to perdition. In the summer of 1982, officials in Oklahoma banned the game from school districts, citing its “satanic nature.” In 1984, when San Diego, California, police officer Kirk Johnson was shot and killed by his own son, the boy’s attorneys tried to use his obsession with Dungeons & Dragons as an explanation in an insanity defense. Later that same year, British clergymen warned that letting children play D&D was essentially handing them over to Satan: “
This is indeed only a game, but it is a game of life and death!” the Reverend John Hollidge of Gold Hill Baptist Church in Buckinghamshire said in a letter to parents.

Increasingly, Dungeons & Dragons became the go-to scapegoat for teen suicides. In 1984, Bergen County, New Jersey, police blamed the deaths of two teenage brothers on D&D. “
My understanding is that once you reach a certain point where you are the master, your only way out is death,” the police chief told the Bergen County
Record
. Later the same year, Richmond, Virginia, mother Patricia Pulling sued Gary Gygax and TSR for $10 million, claiming that her sixteen-year-old son killed himself after his character was “cursed” by another player. The suit was dismissed, but Pulling went on to form Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or BADD, an advocacy group that harried D&D players for years.

In 1985, the TV news magazine
60 Minutes
dedicated an entire segment to the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons. Anchor Ed Bradley re-reported overly credulous police and local media reports as fact and relied heavily on an emotional interview with grieving mother Pulling. A psychologist interviewed for the segment, Dr. Thomas Radecki, was also highly critical of the game (a few years later, he was stripped of his medical license). After the broadcast, Gygax forwarded letters to Bradley from the mothers of two children cited in the report as D&D suicides; both letters said the game had nothing to do with their children’s deaths. The show never issued a retraction.

And the criticism didn’t stop. In her 1988 book
Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,
co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and future second lady of the United States Tipper Gore railed against D&D, claiming it had been linked to “
nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides.” After the 1988 murder of Lieth Von Stein, a North Carolina business executive, police quickly arrested his twenty-year-old stepson, Chris, as well as two of his friends, and all three men were eventually convicted of scheming to collect a $2 million inheritance. But when two competing books about the case,
Blood Games
and
Cruel Doubt,
were released in 1991, both played up the fact that the friends had occasionally played D&D together.