Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (23 page)

“I feel bad about this,” Morgan said. “I really do. But I play by the rules, and that’s fifty-five points of damage.”

“Oh wow.” Phil stared at his character sheet.

We all froze, silent, waiting for him to react.

“Yeah. Well, make sure you guys tell the illithids that I was going in there to help them.”

Adventuring is a high-risk enterprise. Characters in your campaign will die, sometimes because they were reckless and sometimes because luck was against them. Fortunately, D&D is a game, and death doesn’t have to be the end.

—
DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE,
PAGE 41

D
o we know how to preserve a body?” Alex asked. We’d finished the ghouls off without further casualties, but now had to face an even worse problem. “A week of walking around dragging Ganubi’s corpse sounds like a bad idea.”

“Actually, you know, I was thinking about that,” Phil said. He turned to Morgan. “Would you allow me to convert one of the illithids to the Church of Ganubi and have me take them over as a player character? Because I wouldn’t mind giving up Ganubi for that.”

“I don’t think so,” Morgan said. “That would open up a great big can of worms.”

Phil sighed. And then I had a flash of inspiration.

“No, Phil, wait.” I pounded on the table in excitement. “Ganubi’s
been preaching to these guys for a week, and then he got killed trying to protect them. I’m going to spend the rest of the trip home telling the illithids, ‘He died for you guys, he saved you!’ ”

Alex saw it coming. “Oh man, you’re going to turn Ganubi into Jesus.” He laughed. “Come on.”

“No, seriously. If we can get some illithids to be Ganubi’s followers, how awesome would that be?”

“That would be pretty cool,” Alex said. “This could be the catalyst that turns their whole civilization to good instead of evil.”

“He died for them, man! Every day, on the way back, I am going to cast . . . what’s that spell you cast on a dead body so it doesn’t decay?”

“Gentle Repose,” Morgan said.

“Yes, Gentle Repose. Every day I will secretly cast that on Ganubi’s body, and then I will remark on the miracle that his body is not decaying. The illithids don’t know I’ve got these spells. I’m going to pretend to be shocked and tell them, ‘Perhaps this is a sign! Perhaps Ganubi is too great to be destroyed in this manner! He may yet return to us!’ ”

Morgan shook his head, but he was smiling. “Make a Bluff check,” he said.

I picked up my favorite d20, shook it in my hand, and tossed it onto the table. We all held our breath as it rolled to a stop.

Twenty.

Alex roared. “It was meant to be!”

“You have been remarkably convincing on this subject,” Morgan deadpanned. “All right, so eventually you reach the walls of San Francisco and you have got three tentacled monsters with you. Now what are you going to do?”

We live in a dangerous world. Death lurks around every corner. But sometimes, if you have enough gold, you can tell him to take a hike.

When we got back to San Francisco, Jhaden and Graeme went to sell
all the trade goods we’d brought from Las Vegas. I brought the illithids back to our docked ship and placed Ganubi’s body at rest on the deck.

“This is the ship that carried Ganubi’s life force across the great ocean,” I told them. “Now that he’s back on the vessel of his soul, we have to wait and see if he returns to us. I am praying for a miracle.”

The concept of an afterlife was still confusing to the illithids, but they were perfectly familiar with the concept of death. So when we sold our trade goods and used the cash to hire a high-level cleric to secretly cast the spell True Resurrection,
¹
I knew they would be suitably impressed.

The illithids were watching as Ganubi’s motionless form stirred, sat up, and looked around.

“He has returned from the dead!” I shouted. “It’s a miracle!”

Ganubi stared at me, perplexed, and then at the stunned illithids, and then back at me again. I saw a twinkle in his eye.

“Yes!” he said, standing and raising his arms toward the heavens. “I have returned!”

“Oh boy, we are all going to hell,” Alex said, laughing. “See, this is the shit that they talk about when they say that D&D is the devil’s game.”

“I think we’ll end on that note,” Morgan said.

Phil laughed. “And that is how you gain a level in the evangelist class,” he said.

Just like Ganubi, Dungeons & Dragons lived to fight another day. In 1997, Lorraine Williams sold TSR and all its gaming properties to Wizards of the Coast for $25 million and retired to become a full-
time mother. Then in 1999, Wizards was bought by gaming giant Hasbro for $325 million.

As part of the same corporate family as brands including Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe, Monopoly, and Scrabble, Dungeons & Dragons could have been relegated to an afterthought. But credit Wizards of the Coast for helping revive the franchise with clever marketing. In 2000, after sales of the game nearly flatlined, Wizards released
Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition,
a major revision of the rules that was well received by fans. But the third edition was more than another attempt to update the core rule books; the game was released as the centerpiece of the “d20 System,” an entire universe of role-playing game rules covered by an open-source content license. Inspired by the up-and-coming Linux computer operating system, these documents were free to download, copy, distribute, and use—and they quickly found their way into the hands of players around the world.

The license also granted hobbyists the right to publish their own derivative works. In the years that followed, a rich ecosystem of homemade D&D rules began to appear, mostly online, but also in gaming and book stores. Each add-on made the game more compelling, and each drew more players back into the fold.

In 2003, when Wizards followed up the d20 System with the closed-license, $20-per-book
Dungeons & Dragons Version 3.5,
they incorporated many of the best ideas of these homegrown supplements. And since the new edition remained compatible with the open-source system, it encouraged even more hobbyist development. By 2004, the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, the game was growing faster than it had in a decade.

The last update leaned heavily on tech trends to attract new players.
Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition,
released in June 2008, tweaked the game in ways that some critics said made it too much like a video game: A wizard, for instance, could cast the same spell over and over
again, ad nauseam, like a kid mashing the “attack” button on his Xbox controller. Old-school fans were horrified, but the new edition did manage to attract some younger players.

Something happened to me after that last Vampire World game. The ridiculous, surprising awesomeness of Ganubi’s death and resurrection got stuck in my head: If I’d already been addicted to D&D, now I was obsessed with it. All I could think about was making more of those stories.

The day after the game, I was leaving my office for lunch when I saw a group of students in front of the nearby Parsons School of Design filming each other with an old eight-millimeter camera. It struck me as so apt for that location that I began to wonder if it was actually planned; maybe I was a PC in someone else’s role-playing game, and a cosmic DM had simply rolled up “hipsters with obsolete camera” on a random-encounters table. That night I stayed up late creating role-playing game reference tables for Manhattan: Deli, roll of 12: Homeless guy asking for change. Coffee shop, roll of 4: Unpublished novelist pretending to write on a laptop computer.

I was preoccupied with the idea even into the next morning and spent my commute into work thinking about ways to model an entire role-playing game system based on “real” life. Lost in thought, I had made it all the way to the lobby of my office, when one of my friends sidled up to me and broke my train of thought. “Hey, man,” he said, “do you realize you’re wearing two different shoes?”

I missed the next week’s game because I was out of town for work, reporting from the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. It’s the video game industry’s biggest trade show, an orgy
of geekdom where companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts show off the coming year’s new games and hardware. There are fans around the world who would kill for the opportunity to attend—and I spent most of my time sleepwalking through each high-tech presentation, thinking about games played with paper and dice.

To keep myself interested, I started asking every video game executive and designer I met the same question: Have you ever played Dungeons & Dragons? And over and over again, I heard the same thing: They loved the game when they were a kid, and it’s a big part of why they ended up making games for a living.
²

“Almost everybody I know in the game-design field had that experience,” says Ian Bogost, a professor of media studies and interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “They all played Dungeons & Dragons. Some maybe not as intensely . . . but that was a touch point for all of them.”

D&D had a huge influence on the development of the video game industry, Bogost says, because there was a strong overlap between players of tabletop RPG games and folks who were interested in the microcomputer in the 1970s and 1980s. “The obvious thing to do was to put those two things together, because you had a system of rules, and you had a machine capable of simulating and carrying them out.” And in the same way that Tolkien’s fantasy fiction inspired the first role-playing games, D&D provided a model for the first video games: The idea that you have a character that has resources, moves around, encounters obstacles, and develops over time—all that came from D&D.

In November, I had to take a business trip to London. I took a miserable red-eye flight out of New York, sleeping only about two hours on the transatlantic leg and then not at all on a connection from Dublin. By the time I got off the Heathrow Express in Paddington Station, I was tired near the point of exhaustion, so sleepy I felt like my consciousness had become detached from my body and processed everything my body was doing—walking, talking, crossing busy streets—a few seconds after it actually happened.

So naturally I dropped off my bags, pounded down two cups of extremely strong coffee, and went straight off to play Dungeons & Dragons. Fatigue be damned; if I was going to be out of town for my regular game, I had to get my fix somewhere. As soon as I had booked my ticket—and before I even found someplace to stay—I’d located a Sunday-afternoon game at the Ship, a pub on Borough Road in Southwark.

Alistair Morgan, the DM, was a thirty-seven-year-old guy who worked as an IT manager—“possibly conforming to a stereotype or two,” he admitted. But three of the five players at his table were women. “There are two females in the other game that I play in at the moment as well,” he told me. “I think that video games have been driving a lot of interest in D&D, and that’s brought a lot more female players.”

I realized we’d come full circle. D&D helped create video games; video games almost destroyed D&D; and now video games were leading people back to Dungeons & Dragons. Everyone who plays video games—and when you take into account Facebook games, console games, and smart-phone games, that’s just about all of us—has been exposed to D&D’s children, absorbed their D&DNA. The stigma was falling from fantasy role-playing, because it just wasn’t as strange as it used to be.

One of Alistair’s players was Jodi Snow, a twenty-two-year-old visual effects artist who’d been hooked on video games since she was
a kid. She tried D&D for the first time in 2011, when a friend bought the game and they all gave it a go. “You hear all kinds of geeky stories about tabletop RPGs,” she said, “so we were expecting something tedious and incredibly difficult to learn. But we were really surprised.”

I wondered if the other women at the table might have arrived via a more traditional route—like a boyfriend who talked them into joining his game.

Actually, Alistair told me, “Cristina has dragged her husband along to play.”

After I left the game at the Ship, I walked across Waterloo Bridge and toward Cambridge Circus. I was thinking about a new generation of gamers ushering in a renaissance for fantasy role-playing—D&D night, every night! Then I spotted something at the far end of a side street and did a double take—a brightly lit orange sign with black block text, just barely legible:
DUNGEONS DRAGONS
.

I turned on a dime and dashed across traffic toward the light. Speed-walking down the lane, my heart raced at the prospect of discovering a new game store or hobby shop, more evidence of D&D’s bright future—and then I got close enough to see that the sign actually said
DVD&BOOK BARGAINS
.

“We’re not there yet,” I thought. “And I really need to think about something other than Dungeons & Dragons.”

Fortunately, the following morning was completely unscheduled and my one chance to do some sightseeing. I woke up early and looked up directions to Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral . . . and then ignored them, hopping on the train to Kensington to visit the Doctor Who Experience, an exhibition of props and costumes from the BBC science fiction television program. Nerds will be nerds.

1
. “This spell functions like Raise Dead, except that you can resurrect a creature that has been dead for as long as 10 years per caster level . . . Upon completion of the spell, the creature is immediately restored to full hit points, vigor, and health, with no loss of level.”
Player’s Handbook,
page 296.

2
. Even Curt Schilling, the three-time World Series champion who retired from baseball and decided to start his own video game company, told me he was “a hard-core D&D guy.”