Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (6 page)

In 1780, Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, “master of pages” in the court of the Duke of Brunswick, went even further. His “war chess” board consisted of more than 1,600 squares, each color-coded to indicate terrain: white for level ground, green for marshes, blue for water, red for mountains. There were hundreds of pieces, each one a colored chit representing an entire military unit, including batteries of mortars, pontoon boats, and regiments of hussar cavalry. The rules became so complicated that Hellwig required the participation of a neutral third party to direct the game and settle disputes—the Holy Roman Empire’s version of a Dungeon Master.

In the early days of the Napoleonic wars, Georg Leopold von Reiswitz, a Prussian civil servant, wanted to play Hellwig’s War Chess, but couldn’t afford a set, so he developed his own version. Published
in 1812 as
Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers Under the Guise of a War Game,
it used dice to simulate the role of luck in battle and a table covered in sand in order to model topography. In 1812, he constructed a luxurious game table using modular wooden tiles instead of sand. He presented it as a gift to King Frederick Wilhelm III. Kriegsspiel, literally “war game,” began to catch on. In the 1820s, von Reiswitz’s son, Georg Heinrich Rudolf, refined the rules further, and mass-produced the game in a box the size of a hardcover book—small enough for a soldier to carry in his pack.

In the 1860s, under Otto von Bismarck, the game became a standard training exercise for Prussian officers. When two decades of military success followed, Kriegsspiel basked in reflected glory: After the Franco-Prussian War, British generals cited it as a factor in von Bismarck’s decisive victory. Armies around the world copied the game and began using it to train their own officers.

By the twentieth century, war games were commonplace in the military and had begun to spread into the mainstream. In 1913, the British novelist H. G. Wells took his own stab at the genre, publishing
Little Wars: A Game for Boys from Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys’ Games and Books
. The text amounted to
Kriegsspiel for Kiddies
: a short, simple, accessible set of rules. Wells did away with complicated boards, encouraging play on a kitchen table or bedroom floor. And he ditched the counters and markers that represented military units:
Little Wars
required only a child’s own collection of tin soldiers.

It was a seminal moment. Wells stripped away rigid conventions that had built up over a millennium and saw into the heart of playing soldier: It’s a game, and it’s supposed to be fun.

A pacifist, Wells was quick to distance his “diversion” from martial instruments of war like Kriegsspiel. “How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing?” he asked. “Here is the premeditation,
the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster—and no smashed nor sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings nor devastated country sides.”

With World War I only a year away, Wells hoped simulated violence might help avoid actual bloodshed. “Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion,” he wrote. “Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.”

1
. Games are also a frequent subject of ancient scriptures: In one Indian story, Shiva and his consort Parvati are playing a game of dice and ask the divine bull Nandi to officiate. Shiva loses, but Nandi declares that he’s the winner anyway. This may be the world’s earliest example of a bad Dungeon Master.

2
. “Troglodyte: This reptilian creature looks somewhat humanoid . . . It has spindly but muscular arms and walks erect on its squat legs, trailing a long, slender tail. Its head is lizard-like and crowned with a frill that extends from the forehead to the base of the neck. Its eyes are black and beady . . . Hit Dice: 2d8+4 (13 hp) . . . Armor Class: 15 . . . Special Attacks: Stench.”
Monster Manual,
page 246.

I
knew that if I truly wanted to understand Dungeons & Dragons, I had to first understand the games that gave birth to it. But I couldn’t just go to a toy store and buy a hundred-year-old war game: today, games like Little Wars and Kriegsspiel are decidedly out of style.
¹
They’ve been replaced as entertainment by war-themed video games and supplanted in education by incredibly complex simulations. Militaries around the world still use war games for training, but these exercises are usually either computerized or playacted. The U.S. Army employs game designers in the Simulations Division at its Command and General Staff College; their events look like highly moderated role-playing games, a cross between D&D, fantasy football, and high school Model UN.

But dedicated war gamers soldier on. The Historical Miniatures Gaming Society, a nonprofit foundation created to promote the hobby, has more than two thousand members worldwide and hosts a yearly convention—four days of seminars, socializing, and lots and lots of
games. Since I had never actually played a war game, I decided to check the con out—these games are too important to ignore. (In other words: Fear not, ranger. We’ll get back to D&D in two shakes of a lamia’s
²
tail.)

Historicon was held over the second weekend in July at the Valley Forge Convention Plaza in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, an edge city about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The town is best known for its massive mall, the largest in the United States. It’s also home to Valley Forge National Historical Park, where George Washington and the Continental Army famously made camp during the American Revolution. But the mall gets way more visitors.

It’s easy to find the convention center, an unappealing 1970s concrete bunker connected to dusty and dated hotels at either end; the whole complex rises out of a sea of parking lots like a crashed alien spacecraft. Three thousand attendees walked through the doors that weekend to grab spots at over six hundred games. I got there early on Friday to procure one of twelve tickets for “Napoleon’s Battles Boot Camp,” a hypothetical skirmish between French and Prussian armies, intended for novice players. With time to kill, I wandered the halls.

There are certain characteristics common to all game conventions, whether they’re dedicated to historical minis, role-playing, video games, or board games like chess and Scrabble. The first is gender imbalance. Maybe men are more attracted to competitive games or more likely to obsess about their hobbies; either way, they always constitute a majority of attendees. The second is age imbalance. Convention-goers are more likely to sport gray hair than tattoos and
ear gauges, probably because of the high cost of attending. Finally, there’s racial imbalance. Chalk it up to social differences or economic ones, but crowds inside a game convention are always whiter than the population outside, even in cities like New York and San Francisco.

In other words: The typical game convention attendee is a middle-aged white guy. This will come as a shock to few, but it’s worth noting. Appropriately, war gamers refer to themselves as “grognards”—a French term for “old soldiers.” The literal translation, “grumbler,” was first applied to Napoleon’s elite Imperial Guard, veterans so respected they could freely complain about orders and even groan to the emperor himself.

In the main ballroom, a few hundred attendees were setting up games on long folding tables pushed together side by side; sixty or seventy of these surfaces had been set up around the room. A historical-miniatures battle requires significant preparation compared to something like chess; there’s no set board or layout of pieces. Instead, participants build scale dioramas, usually representing the location of an actual battle. The simplest of these may be a flat tabletop overlaid with a few pieces of fabric and a handful of plastic soldiers. But many war gamers—particularly the hard-core grognards who go to conventions—strive for the detail and artistry of museum pieces. Their game tables feature tiny plastic trees, realistic hills and valleys, and meticulously painted buildings. And all of it’s to scale, usually so that the period-accurate toy soldiers are between ten and twenty-eight millimeters tall.

For one game, simulating the English invasion of a French castle during the Hundred Years’ War, the organizers had re-created a medieval village and keep; the plastic resin castle at one end was easily four feet wide and three feet tall. The biggest display, tucked in a far corner of the ballroom, consisted of a fifty-foot-long model of the main street from an Old West village, complete with villagers, horses,
stagecoaches, and dozens of buildings, including a saloon, a jail, a market, and a butcher.

In the dealer’s room, located in a subbasement of the convention center, row after row of merchants sold the gear required to make these models. To start a game, you need a battlefield. Thrifty players can get away with a tabletop, but wouldn’t
you
prefer to cover that surface with a Wargames Terrain Mat? It’s a six-by-four-foot chunk of coarse fabric available in “Forest Green” and “Scorched Grass Brown” and costs $29. Of course, once you’re simulating grass you’ve got to decorate the battlefield with details like plastic trees ($7 per thicket), rivers ($8 per ten-inch stretch), and hedgerows ($12 for a pack of four). Get really into the details and you’ll want to add buildings like a one-room hut ($17) or a stable ($23). And maybe you’d like a nice old barn ($65), a bombed-out house ($80), or even a church ($120)?

Then there are the actual soldiers. You could buy kits—a set of forty-two twenty-eight-millimeter Napoleonic infantrymen costs $29—but then you’ll have to glue them together and paint them. Factory-painted plastic figurines are convenient but costly—eight Roman auxilia troops for $16, or $2.25 each if bought individually. Then there’s the top-of-the-line, hand-painted cast metal figurines. They’re gorgeous but crazy expensive: twelve “Boxer Rebellion Boxers,” $96; twenty late-Roman foot soldiers, $175; twelve French lancers, $220.

The need for all this equipment creates a high barrier for entry and makes it incredibly difficult for a casual gamer to get rolling. All told, a hard-core historical-miniatures gamer could easily spend thousands of dollars on his hobby.

After checking out the dealer’s room, I wandered through the corridors of the adjoining hotels, where games were under way in a dozen hot, cramped meeting rooms. As I padded into the deep
reaches, I started to feel like the kid in Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining,
my footsteps beating rhythmically on the carpet as strange tableaus flashed by. Through one open door, a guy that looks like Santa Claus waving a yardstick, bellowing about assignment of artillery casualties; through another, a room-sized naval battle, fought with foot-tall model clipper ships; then a Japanese castle, surrounded by a thousand brightly painted samurai; Normandy on D-Day; William Wallace at Falkirk; the Battle of Britain. Finally, it was time to play.

Few of us slept the night before the battle. At sundown, Napoleon’s damnable artillery began raining death on the center of the Coalition lines. Our position, in the north, was unscathed, but we lay awake listening to the roar of the cannons, a constant rumbling reminder of what was to come.

The sun was high over Saxony when the word finally arrived: The French lines were moving. Our orders were to occupy several small villages in the Bohemian foothills, hold the line, and stop the French advance.

The stakes couldn’t have been higher. After Napoleon’s Grande Armée was driven from Moscow, Prussia finally drew its sword against the invader; now we fight the
Befreiungskriege,
wars of liberation. We will drive the French from our land and finish Napoleon once and for all.

We checked and rechecked our muskets, sharpened our bayonets, and prepared to fight.

The Napoleon’s Battles Boot Camp was staged near the center of the main exhibit hall, on a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot table. As befitting a beginner’s game, the battlefield was simple: a surface covered with green felt, with two long “roads” of balsa wood crossing at the center. Five small plastic houses served as the only ornamentation,
each representing a small town—one at the crossroads, and one at the midpoint of each road segment.

Our volunteer game master explained the scenario: Twelve players would fight out a hypothetical engagement between the French and Prussian armies, six to a side. The goal was to force the opposing army to flee from the map. If the game hit its four-hour time limit before that happened, whichever army controlled more towns would win.

The armies consisted of long lines of toy soldiers, arrayed at the edges of opposing sides of the table. At a game scale set to fifteen millimeters, each miniature soldier stood just over half an inch tall. Since each mini represented an entire unit of one hundred twenty soldiers, there were something like thirty thousand men on the table, ready to go to war.

Each player was assigned to an army—I randomly drew the Prussians—and given several “stands” of miniature figures representing a specific regiment. I got two stands of line infantry, each one consisting of sixteen little plastic men in blue uniforms, with rifles drawn and bayonets fixed. Since each soldier was so tiny, they were standing in groups, four minis to a single base. I also had a stand of sixteen
Landwehr
infantry, the volunteer troops that proved critical when Prussia and its allies fought to liberate Europe from Napoleon in 1813. My
Landwehr
regiment traveled with a twelve-pound cannon, a piece of artillery on a base about one inch square. When the soldiers moved, they’d need to make sure the cannon moved with them. Finally, I had a single regimental commander, a guy on a gray stallion, perched on his own miniature base. As commander of the First Brigade, he represented my divisional leader—at all times, my regiments needed to be within three inches of him on the table in order to receive instructions.