1028 lines
61 KiB
Markdown
1028 lines
61 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2017-08-26T02:33:03.000Z'
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title: 'Destroy All Monsters: A Journey into the Caverns of Dungeons and Dragons (2006)'
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url: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_lafarge
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author: smacktoward
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points: 147
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story_text:
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 49
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1503714783
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_smacktoward
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- story_15103743
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objectID: '15103743'
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year: 2006
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---
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PAUL LA FARGE
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DISCUSSED: Basements as Dungeons, Middle-earth, War Games, Moral
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Clarity, Vin Diesel, Biological Determinism, Death by Misadventure,
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||
Freaks & Geeks, Tom Hanks, Castration Anxiety, Satanism, The Pantheon of
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||
Cool Dangers, The Buck Rogers Fortune, Cthulhu Calamari, Tom Waits, The
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Holy Scriptures, Orson Welles
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# NOTE TO THE READER
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This article is divided into two parts: a manual and a scenario. The
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first part, the manual, is an exposition of the game Dungeons & Dragons:
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what it is, how it’s played, how it came to be, and how it came to be
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popular, at least, in certain circles. If you once played D\&D yourself
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(no need to admit that you played a lot, or that you still play), you
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may want to skim the [manual](#manual), or turn directly to the
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[scenario](#scenario), which is an account of a trip my friend Wayne and
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I took last spring to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in order to fulfill a wild
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and uncool dream: to play D\&D with E. Gary Gygax, the man who invented
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the game (more or less: see below). If it isn’t immediately clear why
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||
this would be an interesting, or, to be frank, a fantastically exciting
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and at the same time a curiously sad thing to do: well then, you’d
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better start with the manual.
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**THE MANUAL**
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# 1.0 OUTSIDE THE CAVE
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You are standing outside the entrance to a dark and gloomy cave. If you
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are anything like me, you have been here many, many times before. It
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isn’t always the same cave: Once it was a “cave-like opening, somewhat
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obscured by vegetation,” which led to the mystical Caverns of
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Quasqueton; another time it was the Wizard’s Mouth, a fissure in the
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side of an active volcano (“This cave actually seems to breathe,
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||
exhaling a cloud of steam and then slowly inhaling, like a man breathing
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on a cold day”). Once it was a passage from the throne room of Snurre,
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the Fire Giant King, “extending endlessly under the earth.” Once,
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||
memorably, the “cave” was made of metal: it was the outer airlock of a
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spaceship which had crash-landed in the crags of the Barrier
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Peaks.\[[1](#footnote1)\] You don’t know what lies in that darkness, but
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you have heard rumors: there are troglodytes, dark elves, a long-dead
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wizard, terrible creatures, treasure. You are here to learn the truth.
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So strike a light: you’re going in.
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If you are not between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, or if you
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happen to be a woman, you may not know what Dungeons & Dragons is,
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exactly, or why you would want to get involved with it, even in the
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context of an essay in a respectable magazine such as this one. This
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introduction is for you, although, as it turns out, neither question is
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easy to answer from outside the cave. TSR Hobbies, the company that used
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to make D\&D,\[[2](#footnote2)\] once wrote a brochure for hobby-store
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owners, in which they tried to explain what they were selling:
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||
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> While one of the participants creates the whole world in which the
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> adventures are to take place, the balance of the players—as few as two
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> or as many as a dozen or more—create “characters” who will travel
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> about in this make-believe world, interact with its peoples, and seek
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> the fabulous treasures of magic and precious items guarded by dragons,
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> giants, werewolves, and hundreds of other fearsome things. The game
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> organizer, the participant who creates the whole and moderates these
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> adventures, is known as the Dungeon Master, or DM. The other players
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> have personae—fighters, magic-users, thieves, clerics, elves, dwarves,
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> or what have you—who are known as player characters. Player characters
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> have known attributes which are initially determined by rolling the
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> dice… These attributes help to define the role and limits of each
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> character… There is neither an end to the game nor any winner. Each
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> session of play is merely an episode in an ongoing
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> “world.”\[[3](#footnote3)\]
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This is what the cave sounds like when it speaks to outsiders: its
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diction is erudite and occasionally awkward (“treasures of magic”); it
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||
uses game terms as though their meaning will be obvious (what are
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attributes?); it raises as many questions as it answers. You who have
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never played could be forgiven for asking, what are the rules of D\&D?
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If no one wins, how do you know if you’re playing well? Where’s the
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board? OK, listen up: there is no board. You play a character, as in
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theater, though you don’t usually act out your character’s words or
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deeds. Rather, you communicate about your character with other players
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and with the Dungeon Master, whose job is to speak for the world. You
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tell the Dungeon Master what you do; someone rolls some dice; the DM
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tells you what happens. Together you tell a story: a fantasy epic à la
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Tolkien or whomever you will; or rather, given that the game has no
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natural end, maybe we should call it a fantasy soap opera. Imagine for a
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moment that Adam and Brian are players, and Charlie is the DM. Their
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story might go like this:
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> CHARLIE: OK, you guys have just entered the mystical Caverns of
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> Quasqueton. You’re in a 10-foot-wide corridor, which leads to a large
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> wooden door.
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>
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> ADAM: I’m going to open the door.
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>
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> CHARLIE: Just like that?
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>
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> ADAM: OK, maybe not. Brian, have your elf check the door.
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>
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> BRIAN: Don’t tell my elf what to do. \[Pause.\] My elf checks the
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> door.
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>
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> CHARLIE: \[Rolls dice.\] It appears to be a normal door.
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What may remain obscure, even now, is why people would choose to play
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D\&D, all night, night after night, for years.\[[4](#footnote4)\] Why
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intelligent human beings would find the actions of imaginary fighters,
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thieves, dwarves, elves, etc., as they move through a space that exists
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only notionally, and consists more often than not of dimly lit
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corridors, ruined halls, and big, damp caves, more compelling than books
|
||
or movies or television, or sleep, or social acceptance, or sex. In
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short, what’s so great about Dungeons & Dragons?
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# 2.0 THE HARLOT
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ENCOUNTER TABLE
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The appeal of D\&D is superficially not very different from the appeal
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of reading. You start outside something (Middle Earth; Dickens’s London;
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the fascinating world of mosses and lichens), and you go in, bit by bit.
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You forget where you are, what time it is, and what you were doing.
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Along the way, you may have occasion to think, to doubt, or even to
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learn. Then you come back; your work has piled up; it’s past your
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bedtime; people may wonder what you have been doing.
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Once you set foot inside the cave, however, you see very quickly that
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D\&D is quite different from a book, or movie, or soap opera. For one
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thing, there are a lot more rules. I remember opening the Basic D\&D
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rulebook—I was eight years old—and coming to the “Table of Bonus and
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Penalties Due to Abilities,” which begins,
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Prime requisite 15 or more add 10% to earned experience Prime requisite
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13-14 add 5% to earned experience Prime requisite 9-12 no bonus
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By reading the accompanying text, I figured out that my character’s
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abilities—his strength, his intelligence, his wisdom or lack thereof,
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and so on—were each determined by rolling three six-sided dice, and that
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the “prime requisite” was the ability my character needed to do what he
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did (a fighter’s prime requisite is strength; a magic-user’s is
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intelligence, etc.). It would be several pages before I understood that
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“earned experience” referred to the experience points a character
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earns for killing monsters and amassing treasure, and which regulate his
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promotion to ever-greater levels of power and ability. And I remember
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||
how, as the meaning of these terms became clear, my bewilderment yielded
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to delight. The rules guaranteed the reality of the game-world (how
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||
could anything with so many rules not be real?), and, if they were hard
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||
to understand, at least they were written out, guessable and debatable,
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||
unlike the implicit, arbitrary, and often malign rules that people live
|
||
by in the actual world.
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||
D\&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play even the
|
||
basic game, you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of
|
||
instructions, which cover everything from “Adjusting Ability Scores”
|
||
(“Magic-users and clerics can reduce their strength scores by 3 points
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||
and add 1 to their prime requisite”) to “Who Gets the First Blow?” (“The
|
||
character with the highest dexterity strikes first”). In fact, as I
|
||
wandered farther into the cave, and acquired the rulebooks for Advanced
|
||
Dungeons & Dragons, I found that there were rules for everything: what
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||
kind of monsters you could meet in fresh water, what kind you could meet
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in salt water, what wise men knew, what happened when you mixed two
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magic potions together. If you happened to meet a harlot in the game,
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you could roll two twenty-sided dice and consult a table which told you
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||
what kind of harlot it was.\[[5](#footnote5)\] It would be a mistake to
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think of these rules as an impediment to enjoying the game. Rather, the
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||
rules are a necessary condition for enjoying the game, and this is true
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||
whether you play by them or not. The rules induct you into the world of
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||
D\&D; they are the long, difficult scramble from the mouth of the cave
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to the first point where you can stand up and look
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around.\[[6](#footnote6)\]
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# 2.1 THE INVENTION OF
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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
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D\&D gets its appetite for rules from wargames, which have been around
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for thousands of years. The modern war game began in the late eighteenth
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century, when a certain Helwig, the Master of Pages to the German Duke
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of Brunswick, invented something called “War Chess”: instead of rooks
|
||
and knights and pawns it featured cavalry, artillery and infantry;
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||
instead of castling it had rules for entrenchment and pontoons. The
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||
Prussians adapted Helwig’s game to train their officers; the French
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||
learned the value of wargames the hard way in 1870. In 1913, when the
|
||
Prussians were again rattling their sabers, the British writer H. G.
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||
Wells came up with a game called Little Wars, which was played on a
|
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tabletop, with miniature lead or tin soldiers. Then, in 1958, a fellow
|
||
named Charles Roberts founded the Avalon Hill game company, and
|
||
published a board game based on the battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg and
|
||
its successors were wildly popular; all over America, college students
|
||
and other maladjusted types began to recreate, in their dorms and
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basements and family rooms, the great battles of history.
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||
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One of these enthusiasts was a high-school dropout named Ernest Gary
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Gygax. In the late 1960s, Gygax was living in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin,
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where he worked as an insurance underwriter. He was married to a Lake
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Geneva girl and had four children, but he remained an active gamer:
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||
together with a couple of friends, Gygax founded the grandly named
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||
International Federation of Wargaming, the Castles & Crusades Society,
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||
for medieval war gamers, and the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies
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Association, which met weekly in his basement. In the course of these
|
||
meetings, he became friendly with a hobby-shop owner named Jeff Perren,
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and they co-authored a set of rules for medieval miniatures
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combat,\[[7](#footnote7)\] called Chainmail, which was published in
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||
1971.
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||
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Meanwhile, up in Minneapolis, a student named Dave Arneson was running
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||
Napoleonic miniatures games in his parents’ basement.\[[8](#footnote8)\]
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||
Arneson got a copy of the Chainmail rules; only it turned out that
|
||
medieval miniatures combat wasn’t very exciting,\[[9](#footnote9)\] and
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||
Arneson and his fellow gamers looked for a way to spice it up. A fellow
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named Dave Wesley gave each player a personal goal: now the figurine on
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the table represented Sir So-and-So, and he had a rudimentary
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||
personality. This was the dawn of tabletop role-playing. Then Arneson
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issued a Star Trek phaser to a druid, much to the disgust of the other
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||
players: this was the dawn of tabletop fantasy role-playing, although no
|
||
one seemed to realize it yet.\[[10](#footnote10)\] The phaser wasn’t
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||
enough; Arneson spent a weekend eating popcorn and reading Conan novels,
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and at the end of it, he had an idea. The next time the Napoleonic
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miniatures people showed up in the Arnesons’ basement, they found a
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model of a castle on the sand table. They thought it was going to be
|
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some place in Poland, which they would storm or defend. Then Arneson
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||
told them that they were looking at the ruined castle of the Barony of
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Blackmoor, and that they were going to have to go into the dungeons and
|
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poke around. The Napoleonic miniatures people weren’t thrilled; they
|
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would have preferred to storm the castle. But they agreed to poke
|
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around. And around, and around.
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In the fall of 1972, Arneson visited Lake Geneva and introduced Gygax to
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Blackmoor. Gygax liked the game, and he and Arneson worked together to
|
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develop a publishable version of the rules. The first edition of
|
||
Dungeons & Dragons appeared in 1974. Gygax and his business partners,
|
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Don Kaye and Brian Blume, assembled the sets by hand in Gygax’s
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basement:\[[11](#footnote11)\] they put stickers on the boxes, collated
|
||
the rulebooks, folded the reference sheets. Even so, they didn’t know
|
||
what they had on their hands. They called D\&D “rules for fantastic
|
||
medieval wargames,” and Gygax hoped to sell 50,000 copies, that being
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the approximate size of the wargaming market. At first, D\&D seemed
|
||
unlikely to meet even these modest expectations. It took eleven months
|
||
for Tactical Studies Rules, which is what Gygax, Kaye and Blume called
|
||
their partnership, to sell out the first thousand copies. But news of
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||
the game was traveling by word of mouth, from hobby shops to college
|
||
dorms, from dorms to high schools. People called Gygax in the middle of
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the night to quiz him about the rules. The second thousand copies, also
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||
hand-assembled, sold in six months, and from then on sales increased
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exponentially. In 1975, Tactical Studies Rules incorporated and changed
|
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its name to TSR Hobbies; in 1979, the company sold 7,000 copies of the
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D\&D Basic Set each month. Their gross income for 1980 was $4.2 million.
|
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# 3.0 I’M A FIFTH-LEVEL
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DARK ELF WITH A
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\+2 SWORD.\[[12](#footnote12)\]
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What set D\&D apart from its cousins, the war games, was, first of all,
|
||
the thrill of “being” someone else. In 30 Years of Adventure: A
|
||
Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons, a volume published in 2004 by Wizards
|
||
of the Coast, celebrity gamer Vin Diesel remembers his twin brother
|
||
selling him on D\&D with the line that “\[it’s\] a game that allows you
|
||
to be anyone you want to be….” Games designer Harold Johnson heard from
|
||
a friend: “It’s a fantasy game. You get to play knights and wizards,
|
||
clerics and thieves.” The appeal isn’t hard to understand, especially if
|
||
“being” yourself isn’t all that much fun: if you are, say, a bookish
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adolescent male with few social skills and no magical powers to speak
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||
of.\[[13](#footnote13)\] What’s more, D\&D offers its players a moral
|
||
clarity rarely found in the real world: your character has an alignment;
|
||
he or she can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Most players choose
|
||
good; the paladin, a virtuous knight with magical powers, is a perennial
|
||
favorite, although the evil-leaning dark elf is also popular.
|
||
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In practice, though, the transformation of player into character often
|
||
turns out to be cosmetic: the fearless paladin and the sexy dark elf
|
||
both sound and act a lot like a thirteen-year-old boy named Ted. And
|
||
what Ted likes to do, mostly, is kill anything that crosses his path.
|
||
It’s little wonder that Dungeons & Dragons was uncool in the 1970s and
|
||
’80s. Under the guise of role-playing, the game condoned behaviors that
|
||
would get you ostracized (or worse) if you tried them in the real world.
|
||
The dungeon adventures which were the game’s mainstay in the early ’70s
|
||
had only two objectives: destroy all the monsters, and get all the
|
||
treasure.\[[14](#footnote14)\] Circa 1978, Gary Gygax wrote and
|
||
published a series of adventures with a narrative arc: the characters
|
||
begin by taking on a hill giant, and they are gradually drawn into the
|
||
underground world of the Drow, or dark elves, one of Gygax’s best-loved
|
||
creations. The story was compelling to the people who played the
|
||
adventures, but this may have had less to do with its complexity than
|
||
with the fact that there was a story at all. In any case, the ins and
|
||
outs of Drow society only slightly mitigated the game’s
|
||
bloody-mindedness; instead of destroying all monsters, the wise course
|
||
now was to destroy some monsters.\[[15](#footnote15)\]
|
||
|
||
Women in the game—female players, female “non-player characters” who
|
||
turned up in bars and dungeon cells—fared little better. Gary Alan Fine,
|
||
a sociologist who published a book-length study of fantasy role-playing
|
||
games in 1983, reported that “in theory, female characters can be as
|
||
powerful as males; in practice, they are often treated as chattels.”
|
||
Indeed, one of the players Fine observed\[[16](#footnote16)\] reported
|
||
that he didn’t like playing with women, because they inhibited his
|
||
friends’ natural tendency to rape the (imaginary) women they met
|
||
in-game:
|
||
|
||
> Because a lot of people I know go in and pick up a woman and just walk
|
||
> off…. Some people get a little carried away and rape other people….
|
||
> Well, I’ve seen a lot of players just calm down because of
|
||
> \[females\].\[[17](#footnote17)\]
|
||
|
||
You will not be surprised to learn that, in one 1978 survey of fantasy
|
||
role-playing gamers, only 2.3 percent of respondents were female; in
|
||
another, only 0.4 percent. Nor did TSR, in the early days, do much to
|
||
remedy this situation (I recall a print ad for D\&D, in which a tweenage
|
||
girl is pictured playing with some boys, and enjoying herself: now that
|
||
was a fantasy, I thought), perhaps because Gygax is a self-avowed
|
||
biological determinist who believes that “women’s brains are wired
|
||
differently… the reason they don’t play is that they’re not interested
|
||
in playing.”
|
||
|
||
# 3.1 THIS IS B.A.D.D.
|
||
|
||
In 1979, an average of 6,839 young men were picking up Dungeons &
|
||
Dragons each month: sooner or later there was bound to be trouble. And
|
||
sure enough, that same year, a Michigan State student named James Dallas
|
||
Egbert III disappeared after a game of D\&D. The thing was, Egbert and
|
||
his friends weren’t just rolling dice and moving lead miniatures around
|
||
on a card table; they had been acting out their characters’ exploits in
|
||
the university’s steam tunnels. It seemed possible that the game had
|
||
gone too far, and that Egbert had been killed, or died by misadventure.
|
||
A few weeks later, Egbert turned up in Morgan City, Louisiana, and
|
||
revealed that D\&D had nothing to do with his disappearance, but the
|
||
case caused a sensation. The private investigator hired to find Egbert
|
||
published a faintly lurid book called The Dungeon Master, which inspired
|
||
a lurid novel called Mazes and Monsters, which inspired a made-for-TV
|
||
movie of the same name, starring Tom Hanks. Meanwhile, in Washington
|
||
state, a seventeen-year-old boy shot himself in the head. Witnesses said
|
||
that he had been trying to summon “D\&D demons” just minutes before his
|
||
death. Was Dungeons & Dragons a blood sport? Was it a gateway to
|
||
Satanism? A woman named Pat Pulling, whose son, a D\&D player, had also
|
||
committed suicide, started an organization called Bothered About
|
||
Dungeons and Dragons, or, yes, B.A.D.D., and before long D\&D had joined
|
||
a pantheon of mostly cooler or at least more authentically dangerous
|
||
phenomena which were said to be corrupting America’s youth: marijuana,
|
||
rock and roll, free love, LSD, heavy metal.
|
||
|
||
Even from the point of view of a teenage boy who would have liked
|
||
nothing better than to be corrupted by any of the phenomena listed
|
||
above, if corrupted meant meeting girls or even just getting out of the
|
||
house, the furore over D\&D was hard to understand. Didn’t the grown-ups
|
||
understand what losers we were? That all we did was roll dice and shout
|
||
and stuff our faces with snacks? Evidently not: in 1989, Bill
|
||
Schnoebelen, a reformed Milwaukee Satanist, wrote an article called
|
||
“Straight Talk on Dungeons and Dragons,” which can still be found on
|
||
Chick Ministries’ website.\[[18](#footnote18)\] He listed the
|
||
“brainwashing techniques” which D\&D uses to lure its players into the
|
||
devil’s world, among which are:
|
||
|
||
> 1. Fear generation—via spells and mental imaging about fear-filled,
|
||
> emotional scenes, and threats to survival of FRP \[fantasy
|
||
> role-playing\] characters.
|
||
>
|
||
> 2. Isolation—psychological removal from traditional support
|
||
> structures (family, church, etc.) into an imaginary world.
|
||
> Physical isolation due to extremely time-consuming play activities
|
||
> outside the family atmosphere.
|
||
>
|
||
> 3. Physical torture and killings—images in the mind can be almost as
|
||
> real as the actual experiences. Focus of the games is upon
|
||
> killings and torture for power, acquisition of wealth, and
|
||
> survival of characters.
|
||
>
|
||
> 4. Erosion of family values—the Dungeon Master (DM) demands an
|
||
> all-encompassing and total loyalty, control and allegiance.
|
||
|
||
Most of which is, of course, true, though I’d quibble at Schnoebelen’s
|
||
emphasis on torture—usually it was enough for us to kill the monsters
|
||
without torturing them first—and at the logic of No. 4: the DM could
|
||
demand total loyalty as much as he wanted, but he was unlikely to get it
|
||
from us; we were too busy finding ways to reduce his creation to rubble,
|
||
or eating ice cream. But the mention of “spells” in No. 1 is bizarre.
|
||
Did Schnoebelen think that the players were actually capable of working
|
||
magic? Further study of his article suggests that he did. “Just because
|
||
the people playing D\&D think they are playing a game doesn’t mean that
|
||
the evil spirits (who ARE very real) will regard it as a game. If you
|
||
are doing rituals or saying spells that invite them into your life, then
|
||
they will come—believe me\!”\[[19](#footnote19)\] This was every
|
||
player’s fantasy: that the magic in the game would work, that we would
|
||
become our characters, for real, and be rid once and for all of our
|
||
lowball ability scores, our pathetic skills, our humdrum real-life
|
||
equipment. If wishing, or talking, or even praying could have made it
|
||
so, then there would have been a lot of dark elves out there,
|
||
brandishing their +2 swords, and—perhaps the people at Chick Ministries
|
||
will find this reassuring—a lot of paladins, too, curing us of our
|
||
diseases, protecting us from evil within a ten-foot radius.
|
||
|
||
Despite a near-total absence of evidence linking D\&D to Satanism, or
|
||
magic, or anything, really, except obesity and lower-back pain, Pat
|
||
Pulling and Gary Gygax appeared on a special investigative episode of 60
|
||
Minutes, which left viewers with the impression that there was “strong
|
||
evidence” that Dungeons & Dragons could inspire teenagers to kill
|
||
themselves, or each other. Gygax started getting death threats in the
|
||
mail, and he hired a bodyguard. Yet notoriety had its advantages: in
|
||
1981, with the Egbert case still fresh in the public’s mind, TSR’s
|
||
revenues quadrupled, to $16.5 million.
|
||
|
||
# 3.1.1 A FURTHER
|
||
NOTE ON RITUAL
|
||
|
||
As silly as Schnoebelen’s fears may sound to us now, he did get one
|
||
thing right: Dungeons & Dragons is not a game. The French anthropologist
|
||
Claude Lévi-Strauss notes that “Games… appear to have a disjunctive
|
||
effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual
|
||
players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality.
|
||
And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and
|
||
losers.” Which is, as noted above, not true of D\&D: “there is neither
|
||
an end to the game nor any winner.” But if D\&D isn’t a game, then what
|
||
is it, exactly? One theorist of fantasy role-playing games proposes,
|
||
following Lévi-Strauss, that D\&D is, in the strict sense of the term, a
|
||
ritual. “Ritual, on the other hand,” this is Lévi-Strauss again, “is the
|
||
exact inverse: it conjoins, for it brings about a union... or in any
|
||
case an organic relation between two initially separate
|
||
groups….”\[[20](#footnote20)\] D\&D conjoins: this is not the first
|
||
thing you notice when you enter the cave; nor is it mentioned very often
|
||
by the game’s recruiters (or by its detractors), who prefer to talk
|
||
about killing and money and other things the uninitiated can understand.
|
||
And yet it is an essential feature of the game—ritual—whatever you want
|
||
to call it. Adam’s fighter may be more powerful than Brian’s elf, but if
|
||
the fighter kills the elf, or even pisses him off seriously, who will
|
||
find the secret door? In order to get very far in the cave, the players
|
||
need to work together.\[[21](#footnote21)\] Which would make D\&D not
|
||
very different from any other team sport, if there were another team;
|
||
but there isn’t. The remarkable thing about D\&D is that everyone has to
|
||
play together. Even the DM, who plays all the monsters and villains, has
|
||
to cooperate; if he doesn’t—if he kills the entire party of adventurers,
|
||
or requires players not to cheat on life-or-death dice rolls—the chances
|
||
that he will be invited to run another session are small.
|
||
|
||
Here I am tempted to advance a wild argument. It goes like this: in a
|
||
society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete
|
||
successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural; its project, when
|
||
you think about it in these terms, is almost
|
||
utopian.\[[22](#footnote22)\] Show people how to have a good time, a
|
||
mind-blowing, life-changing, all-night-long good
|
||
time,\[[23](#footnote23)\] by cooperating with each other\! And perhaps
|
||
D\&D is socially unacceptable because it encourages its players to drop
|
||
out of the world of competition, in which the popular people win, and to
|
||
tune in to another world, where things work differently, and everyone
|
||
wins (or dies) together. You will object that a group of teenage boys
|
||
slaughtering orcs and raping women doesn’t sound like utopia. Granted.
|
||
But among teenage boys whose opportunities for social interaction were
|
||
otherwise not great, D\&D was like a door opening. Forget for a moment
|
||
that behind the door there were mostly monsters and darkness. For us,
|
||
for the people who played, what waited behind that door was a world, and
|
||
the world belonged to us. We could live in it as we really were; we
|
||
could argue about its rules; we could learn how, by working together, to
|
||
get the better of it. For some of us it was a lesson: the real world
|
||
could, on occasion, and by similar means, be bested. For others of us,
|
||
who never really left the game: at least we had a world.
|
||
|
||
In fact, the ability to function in another world may be the game’s most
|
||
important legacy. D\&D provided a conceptual framework for some of the
|
||
most popular computer games of the 1980s: Wizardry, Ultima, and Zork all
|
||
involve poking around in dungeons and slaying monsters. Wizardry begat
|
||
Wolfenstein 3D, Wolfenstein begat Doom, Doom begat Quake, and Quake
|
||
begat Halo: it may be an exaggeration to say that these games could
|
||
never have existed without Dungeons & Dragons, but D\&D certainly showed
|
||
a lot of people what kind of fun they could have by participating in a
|
||
virtual reality. The game’s influence is even clearer on the massively
|
||
multiplayer online role-playing games: Everquest, Ultima Online, World
|
||
of Warcraft, and D\&D Online, which made its début early this year.
|
||
Almost every aspect of the old tabletop game has been recreated in these
|
||
pretty, expensive beasts, except the pleasure of being in the same room
|
||
with other human beings. Perhaps the people who spend thirty hours a
|
||
week playing World of Warcraft, the people who used to buy and sell
|
||
Everquest magic items for real dollars on eBay, and the people who buy
|
||
online characters that have been “leveled up” by workers in the Third
|
||
World, don’t miss the companionship. D\&D taught us to live in an
|
||
imaginary place—a literal utopia—and if that place is engrossing enough,
|
||
what does it matter if there are other people in your living room or
|
||
not? And yet it sounds lonely to me. The great thing about
|
||
old-fashioned, paper-and-pencil D\&D was that it straddled the virtual
|
||
world and the real one: when the game was over, the dungeons and dragons
|
||
went back to their notebooks, but you got to keep your friends.
|
||
|
||
# 4.0 DADDY NEEDS A NEW
|
||
SWORD OF WOUNDING
|
||
|
||
Even now, more than thirty years after its invention, people are still
|
||
playing Dungeons & Dragons. Not quite the game I played as a child: a
|
||
Second Edition appeared in 1989; it tidied up the hodgepodge of rules
|
||
which Advanced D\&D had become, stripped the paladin of many of his
|
||
powers, and was duly reviled by most old-school players. By then, Gygax
|
||
had lost control of TSR; he was replaced by Lorraine Dille Williams, the
|
||
heiress to the Buck Rogers fortune.\[[24](#footnote24)\] Williams was
|
||
not generally beloved by those who worked under her; nonetheless, the
|
||
company managed to publish some good material: the Goth-y Ravenloft
|
||
campaign setting, the killer Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and a number
|
||
of successful fantasy novels. But the market for the game had stopped
|
||
growing. Everyone who was going to buy the rulebooks had already done
|
||
so; in order to keep selling its products to gamers, TSR had to come up
|
||
with new rulebooks. Thus we got, among other things, The Complete Book
|
||
of Gnomes & Halflings, 127 pages on “The Myths of the Halflings,” “A
|
||
Typical Gnomish Village,” etc.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile, TSR spent a lot of money pursuing licensing deals and
|
||
starting lawsuits, several of them against Gygax, to protect its
|
||
copyrights. Changes in the bookselling industry further eroded the
|
||
company’s revenues; TSR went deeply into debt, and in 1997 Williams sold
|
||
the company to Wizards of the Coast, which was best known for a
|
||
collectible card game called Magic: The Gathering. In 2000, Wizards
|
||
published a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which systematized what
|
||
had been erratic or arbitrary in the first two editions. Reactions to
|
||
the Third Edition have generally been positive, although some players
|
||
grumble that the rules are now too consistent. William Connors, a
|
||
designer for TSR and, briefly, for Wizards, says that with the Third
|
||
Edition, “the heart and soul of the game was gone. To me, it wasn’t all
|
||
that much more exciting than playing with an Excel
|
||
spreadsheet.”\[[25](#footnote25)\] A gamer I talked to in a Manhattan
|
||
hobby shop says that he’s afraid the Third Edition is for “power
|
||
campaigners”: people who exploit the rules to make their characters as
|
||
powerful as possible, at the expense of role-playing plausibility or
|
||
narrative interest. Nor has the proliferation of rulebooks been checked.
|
||
Wizards of the Coast publishes about two dozen official rulebooks for
|
||
D\&D, not counting dozens of supplementary books by other publishers;
|
||
and the Third Edition rulebooks have already been superceded by Edition
|
||
3.5.
|
||
|
||
Meanwhile, a stranger transformation has taken place: D\&D is no longer
|
||
uncool. In part, this is because the game has become more sophisticated,
|
||
more narrative-based, less single-mindedly devoted to the destruction of
|
||
monsters. A live-action role-playing game\[[26](#footnote26)\] called
|
||
Vampire: The Masquerade introduced members of the Goth subculture to
|
||
gaming; some of them switched over to D\&D, with the result that there
|
||
are more women gamers now, and they are in a position to make their own
|
||
version of the game.\[[27](#footnote27)\] Also, some of the people who
|
||
create mass culture now were once themselves gamers. There are graphic
|
||
depictions of D\&D in The X-Files and Freaks & Geeks and Buffy the
|
||
Vampire Slayer; Gary Gygax has even made a cameo appearance on Futurama.
|
||
Vin Diesel admits happily to being a gamer; Steven Colbert admits to
|
||
having been one. Mostly, though, D\&D has become acceptable because
|
||
people get used to things. As John Rateliff, who has worked on the game
|
||
since the early ’90s, puts it, “It’s kind of like rock music. All it
|
||
takes is time for people to get over their fear of the new and find out
|
||
whether it’s something they might actually enjoy trying themselves.”
|
||
|
||
The question is, are new people joining the game? According to a recent
|
||
survey, there are four million D\&D players in the United States, and
|
||
that number hasn’t changed much in the last few years. The majority of
|
||
the players are between eighteen and twenty-four years old, then you
|
||
have the twelve- to seventeen-year-olds and the twenty-five- to
|
||
thirty-four-year-olds, who play in roughly equal numbers; then the
|
||
thirty-five to forty-five-year-olds, and finally the eight- to
|
||
eleven-year-olds, very few of whom play D\&D, or have even heard of the
|
||
game. The survey notes cheerily that a third of these tweenagers
|
||
expressed interest in learning about D\&D, but whether Wizards of the
|
||
Coast can translate this interest into sales—and players—remains to be
|
||
seen. Last summer I visited Gen Con, a gaming convention that has been
|
||
held annually since 1968 when Gary Gygax and his friends rented out the
|
||
Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall.\[[28](#footnote28)\] The convention has
|
||
grown to about 26,000 attendees annually, and it has moved, from Lake
|
||
Geneva to Milwaukee and now to Indianapolis, where it occupies the
|
||
convention center downtown, between the state house and the football
|
||
stadium. I didn’t see many twelve- to seventeen-year-olds, and the ones
|
||
I did see were gathered in the Xbox area, blowing each other away in
|
||
Halo 2. The people who filled the gaming rooms and prowled the Exhibit
|
||
Hall were men and women in their twenties and thirties, some of them in
|
||
doublets and hose, some in Goth regalia, most in shorts and T-shirts and
|
||
jeans and sneakers and sandals. If they had dispersed into the streets
|
||
of Indianapolis no one would have known them for anything but citizens,
|
||
if it weren’t for their convention badges and the fervent light in their
|
||
eyes. Of course, these were the people who loved gaming enough to travel
|
||
to central Indiana and spend several hundred dollars on entrance fees,
|
||
game tickets, hotels and restaurants, which, incidentally, were serving
|
||
special game-themed meals: whatever else gamers may be, they are
|
||
apparently willing to spend money on almost anything
|
||
game-related.\[[29](#footnote29)\] You wouldn’t expect a
|
||
fifteen-year-old to turn up here on his own—except that in the early
|
||
days of Gen Con, you heard stories about kids who did just that. They
|
||
came by bus and hitchhiked to the convention center; they gamed all day
|
||
and slept in the hallways at night because they couldn’t afford hotel
|
||
rooms.
|
||
|
||
I didn’t play much D\&D while I was at Gen Con, in part because the
|
||
Third Edition rules are too different from the rules I grew up with, and
|
||
in part because tournament play isn’t my cup of tea: it’s goal-directed,
|
||
without much emphasis on role-playing.\[[30](#footnote30)\] However,
|
||
according to the same survey, the largest group of D\&D players are just
|
||
my age: thirty-five-year-old men make up almost 10 percent of the
|
||
D\&D-playing population (twenty-two-year-olds are next, at 7 percent,
|
||
then thirty-two-year-olds, at 5.5 percent). These are the people whose
|
||
adolescence corresponds to the peak of D\&D’s popularity, the ones who
|
||
were in college when Second Edition came out and the game’s popularity
|
||
surged again. At the risk of drawing false conclusions, I will venture
|
||
to speak for my demographic: we were hooked early, and the hooks went
|
||
deep into us. Few of the people I talked to or read about, who have been
|
||
involved with gaming since the early ’90s or longer, show any sign of
|
||
wanting to quit. John Rateliff says, “If I’m still alive \[at
|
||
seventy-five\], I’ll still be playing. Why not? I intend to still be
|
||
listening to the music I like and reading the books I like at \[that
|
||
age\], if I’m still able. Why shouldn’t I still be enjoying my favorite
|
||
hobby?” Skip Williams, who has been working on D\&D since First Edition
|
||
days, has left Wizards of the Coast, but he can’t seem to leave gaming;
|
||
right now he’s sprucing up a bunch of “classic monsters” for a new
|
||
monster book. Even Brian Blume, who left TSR after a bitter struggle
|
||
with Gary Gygax, and seems unlikely to have fond memories of those days,
|
||
was recently roped into a game of Boot Hill, the Wild-West-era
|
||
role-playing game he co-wrote in 1975. “I was at a games convention in
|
||
Des Moines, and a fellow was running a big barroom shootout, and I got
|
||
involved. It was a big nostalgic moment.” Apparently the referee begged
|
||
Blume to play the sheriff, the toughest role, because usually in those
|
||
situations the sheriff is the first one to be shot. “Were you shot?” I
|
||
asked. “I role-played it a little,” Blume said, and chuckled. “I got
|
||
about halfway through, and I’m happy with that.”
|
||
|
||
If Wizards of the Coast can’t find a way to make Dungeons & Dragons
|
||
compelling to children, then the day will come when D\&D is the
|
||
equivalent of bingo or shuffleboard, played by forgetful old men in
|
||
retirement homes, community centers, and, yes, church basements. “I’m an
|
||
elf of some sort,” one of the players will say. “Where did I put that
|
||
character sheet?” But the best hope for D\&D’s future currency may be
|
||
that we thirty-five-year-olds will overcome our geekdom for at least
|
||
long enough to start families. “My kids are coming tomorrow,” said one
|
||
Gen Con visitor, a thirty-six-year-old man who had been playing D\&D for
|
||
twenty-four years. “They’ve never played before, but I thought I’d give
|
||
them the chance to try it out.” There’s no reason to think that children
|
||
have lost the desire to become elves, warriors, wizards, and thieves. If
|
||
we’re lucky, they’ll be willing to play with their parents.
|
||
|
||
**THE SCENARIO, OR,
|
||
WAYNE AND I MEET
|
||
THE WIZARD**
|
||
|
||
# BACKGROUND INFORMATION
|
||
|
||
We are far enough into the cave now that I can tell you that I have
|
||
mixed feelings about Dungeons & Dragons. I played fantasy role-playing
|
||
games more or less incessantly from 1978, when my father brought home
|
||
the D\&D Basic Set, until 1985, when I changed high schools and fell out
|
||
of constant contact with my gamer friends. I played so much that it’s
|
||
hard for me to understand in retrospect how I managed to do anything
|
||
else, and the truth is that I didn’t do anything else. I was a mediocre
|
||
student; I didn’t see hardly any of New York City, where I lived; I knew
|
||
less about girls than I did about the Gelatinous Cube (immune to cold
|
||
and sleep; takes normal damage from fire). I played at friends’ houses;
|
||
I played in the school cafeteria; I played in the hallway between
|
||
classes; I cut class to play in whispers in the library. I hesitate to
|
||
say that I was addicted to role-playing games only because I never knew
|
||
what it was like to go without them; in D\&D I had found something I
|
||
loved more than life itself. Then a number of things happened, and for
|
||
fifteen years I didn’t think about D\&D at all. I was living in San
|
||
Francisco, where dungeon referred to something entirely different, and
|
||
life seemed mutable and good, like a game. In December 2001, I moved
|
||
back to New York, and soon afterward I began to think about D\&D again.
|
||
It turned out that my agent’s office was a block from the Compleat
|
||
Strategist, the hobby shop where I used to buy my role-playing games. I
|
||
wasn’t eager to revisit that part of my life, which I thought of as a
|
||
dangerous mire from which I had miraculously escaped, but I slunk into
|
||
the store. Nothing had changed: nothing. The same pads of hex
|
||
paper\[[31](#footnote31)\] stood in the same racks by the door, their
|
||
covers bleached by twenty years of sunlight. It was as if the place had
|
||
been preserved as a museum to the heyday of tabletop role-playing games;
|
||
it was as if someone had set out to demonstrate that you could go home
|
||
again. Maybe I wanted to come home; maybe I had never really left that
|
||
mire; maybe I needed to own up to an old love—an old habit—in order to
|
||
make my life whole. This thing of dorkness I acknowledge mine. All I
|
||
knew was that I had to do something about Dungeons & Dragons: put it
|
||
behind me once and for all, or return to its warm, embarrassing embrace.
|
||
For a long time I did neither. Then one day, when my friend Wayne and I
|
||
were talking about our gaming days, he said, why don’t you interview E.
|
||
Gary Gygax? It made sense. Gygax was the source of Dungeons & Dragons,
|
||
the wizard who cast the original spell.\[[32](#footnote32)\] Perhaps by
|
||
going to see him I could get the spell lifted at last. And besides, as
|
||
Wayne was quick to point out, how cool would it be to meet Gary Gygax?
|
||
Not to mention, he said, the possibility that we could convince him
|
||
somehow to play D\&D with us. We, he said, because of course it had to
|
||
be both of us. You need three people to play D\&D; besides, Wayne was
|
||
under the spell, too.
|
||
|
||
# LAKE GENEVA
|
||
|
||
Gary Gygax still lives in Lake Geneva, a resort town about two hours
|
||
northeast of Chicago. Incorporated in 1844, it has a cutesified little
|
||
downtown and a historical museum in which a street from Old Lake Geneva
|
||
is haphazardly recreated, down to the Indian arrowheads, barber poles,
|
||
and photographs of former firemen. There’s an excellent video arcade,
|
||
with a vintage Robotron console still in good working order. There’s a
|
||
place that sells Frozen Custard Butterburgers, two distinct Midwestern
|
||
delicacies, I hope. There’s a big lake, which freezes in winter; people
|
||
build a shantytown on the ice and go fishing for bass and cisco. Gygax
|
||
was born in Chicago, but he grew up here, and he returned to Lake Geneva
|
||
in his mid-twenties to raise his family. It’s not hard to see how
|
||
Dungeons & Dragons would come out of a place like this, a place where,
|
||
on a fine spring night, you can find the town’s youthful population
|
||
walking up and down Main Street, from the ice cream parlor to the
|
||
arcade, from the arcade to the lake. If you grew up here, you would need
|
||
to dream of something.
|
||
|
||
Gygax and I agreed to meet on a Saturday in May. I said I’d come at
|
||
eleven; he said, come at nine, I’ll make you breakfast. So Wayne and I
|
||
found ourselves outside his big yellow house one gray morning, wondering
|
||
if we were worthy to meet the Wizard. Then he let us in. Gygax does not
|
||
look un-wizardly: he has a long white ponytail, a white beard and fierce
|
||
black eyebrows, like Gandalf. He is shorter than Gandalf, however, and
|
||
stouter, and more cheerful: picture him as a cross between Gandalf and
|
||
Bilbo Baggins.\[[33](#footnote33)\] A lifelong smoker, Gygax sounds a
|
||
bit like Tom Waits, especially when he laughs, and he laughs often. He
|
||
had a mild stroke in 2004, and his doctor ordered him to quit
|
||
cigarettes; now he smokes Monterrey Black and Mild cigarillos, one after
|
||
the other. He led us to a table at the corner of the screened porch,
|
||
which was cluttered with a long life’s worth of wicker furniture and
|
||
floor lamps. In the center of the table lay a big pleather-bound copy of
|
||
the Holy Scriptures: maybe it was there by accident, or maybe Gygax
|
||
wanted to reassure us that he wasn’t a Satanist. I had told him that I
|
||
was writing for a magazine called the Believer, after all. As we sat
|
||
down, his wife appeared from within the house, saw us, and cried,
|
||
“They’re two hours early\!” Gygax excused himself and conferred
|
||
within. Then he came out as if nothing had happened; he lit a cigarillo
|
||
and began to speak.
|
||
|
||
E. Gary Gygax was born in 1938. His father, Ernst Gygax, came to America
|
||
from Switzerland; he settled in Chicago, and one summer he went to a
|
||
dance in Lake Geneva. There he met Almina Emilie Burdick, the daughter
|
||
of an old Lake Geneva family, married her, and returned to Chicago, not
|
||
necessarily in that order. Ernst wanted to play the violin, he put
|
||
himself through music school and for a time he played with the Chicago
|
||
Symphony Orchestra, but when he saw that he would never make first chair
|
||
he gave it up and sold clothes instead. He was, Gygax says, an attentive
|
||
father, and he must have been a permissive father also, because Gygax’s
|
||
childhood was marked by a disregard for rules and obligations. He went
|
||
to school half a block from his childhood house in Lake Geneva, but he
|
||
was rarely to be found there. “It was just dull and stupid,” he says,
|
||
“and you know, I had so many other things I wanted to do. I had a day
|
||
full of active going out with my friends, playing chess, hanging around,
|
||
trying to pick up girls, usually without any success whatsoever. What?
|
||
Sit home? Do school work? Unthinkable.” Instead he threw firecrackers at
|
||
the chief of the waterworks, shot .22s down empty streets, and haunted
|
||
the abandoned Oak Hill Sanatorium, a five-story brick building that
|
||
overlooked Lake Geneva. He played make-believe with the kids next door:
|
||
he was a cowboy named Jim Slade, and he got the drop on his friends so
|
||
often that they quit in disgust.
|
||
|
||
Easygoing as he sounds, Gygax likes to win; there is in him more than a
|
||
little of the Ernst who would be first violin or nothing. You can hear
|
||
it in the way that he talks about the invention of Dungeons & Dragons.
|
||
Gygax and Dave Arneson are credited equally as authors of the original
|
||
game, but as Gygax tells it, Arneson had at most a minor role in the
|
||
process. When I asked him whether Arneson ran his Blackmoor campaign
|
||
before the D\&D rules were written—a fact which seems beyond doubt, and
|
||
which establishes Arneson’s involvement in the creation of the
|
||
game—Gygax answered evasively, “Um, he was up in Minneapolis, and he
|
||
ran a lot of game campaigns. He was using my Chainmail rules for a
|
||
campaign and I think that was called Blackmoor.” Arneson, for his part,
|
||
claims that he scrapped the Chainmail rules early on, in favor of a more
|
||
complex system derived from Civil War–era naval
|
||
simulations.\[[34](#footnote34)\] And the gloom thickens: Arneson sued
|
||
TSR more than once for royalties and a co-authorship credit on the
|
||
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks; the court decided in his favor,
|
||
but as far as I know he never got the credit.\[[35](#footnote35)\]
|
||
Arneson is legally enjoined from discussing the matter, and Gygax
|
||
doesn’t like to talk about it either, perhaps because it reflects
|
||
badly on him, or perhaps because he is at heart a Midwesterner, and so
|
||
not disposed to speak ill of his fellow man. As we talked, though, it
|
||
became clear that Gygax thinks strategically about more or less
|
||
everything. He mentioned that his son Luke had served in the first Gulf
|
||
War: “I told him when he was over there for Desert Shield, I said,
|
||
‘Well, here’s what’s going to happen. The \[Coalition’s\] left flank
|
||
is gonna come around and pocket all those dummies\!’ And that’s exactly
|
||
what they did. I couldn’t believe it, you know? Boy, Saddam Hussein’s
|
||
not a general.” Wayne asked Gygax what he would have done in Saddam’s
|
||
place. Gygax thought about it, then answered, “I would have gotten right
|
||
out of Kuwait…. You’d have to slow ’em up and you’d try to fight a
|
||
guerilla war.” He conceded that against Allied airpower, the Iraqis
|
||
would have lost anyhow. But it didn’t stop him from figuring out how to
|
||
make the best of a weak position.
|
||
|
||
Gygax’s own position at TSR had become weak by 1982. In order to finance
|
||
the publication of D\&D in 1974, he and his partner Don Kaye had brought
|
||
in a friend named Brian Blume, whose father, Melvin, was willing to
|
||
invest money in the company. Kaye died in 1976, and Brian got his
|
||
brother Kevin named to TSR’s board. Gygax was the president of TSR, but
|
||
the Blumes effectively controlled the company; to keep Gygax further in
|
||
check they brought in three outside directors, a lawyer and two
|
||
businessmen who knew nothing about gaming but always voted with the
|
||
Blumes. So Gygax moved to Los Angeles, and became president of Dungeons
|
||
& Dragons Entertainment, which produced a successful D\&D cartoon, and
|
||
set out to produce a D\&D movie. This was, to put it mildly, a strategic
|
||
retreat. Gygax rented King Vidor’s mansion, high up in Beverly Hills,
|
||
with a bar, a pool table, and a hot tub with a view of everything from
|
||
Hollywood to Catalina. He had a Cadillac and a driver; he had lunch with
|
||
Orson Welles, though he mentions with Gygaxian modesty that “I find no
|
||
greatness through association.”\[[36](#footnote36)\] Here a whiff of
|
||
scandal enters the story. Gygax had separated from his first wife, the
|
||
mother of five of his six children; he had not yet married his second
|
||
wife, Gail.\[[37](#footnote37)\] In the interim, well, it was Hollywood,
|
||
and Gygax was in possession of a desirable hot tub. Gygax refers to the
|
||
girlfriends who used to drive him around—he doesn’t drive; never has—and
|
||
to a certain party attended by the contestants of the Miss Beverly Hills
|
||
International Beauty Pageant. But he also mentions that he had a sand
|
||
table set up in the barn, where he and the screenwriters for the D\&D
|
||
cartoon used to play Chainmail miniatures. This is perhaps why Gygax,
|
||
unlike other men who leave their wives and run off to L.A., is not
|
||
odious: his love of winning is tempered by an even greater love of
|
||
playing, and of getting others to play along. He ends the story about
|
||
the beauty pageant girls with the observation that Luke, who was living
|
||
with him at the time, was in heaven, seated between Miss Germany and
|
||
Miss Finland.
|
||
|
||
Gygax spent a lot of money in Hollywood. According to Brian Blume, he
|
||
paid the screenwriter James Goldman, best known for A Lion in Winter,
|
||
$500,000 for the script of the would-be D\&D movie, but a movie deal
|
||
remained elusive. Meanwhile, TSR had other problems: believing that it
|
||
would continue to grow indefinitely, the Blumes had overstaffed the
|
||
company; they invested in expensive computer equipment, office
|
||
furniture, a fleet of company cars. But TSR’s growth spurt was over. By
|
||
1984, the company was $1.5 million in debt, and the bank was ready to
|
||
perfect its liens on TSR’s trademarks: in effect, to repossess Dungeons
|
||
& Dragons. Gygax got word that the Blumes were trying to sell TSR, and
|
||
he returned to Lake Geneva, where he persuaded the board of directors to
|
||
fire Kevin Blume and published a new D\&D rulebook to raise
|
||
cash.\[[38](#footnote38)\] At the same time, Gygax looked for people to
|
||
invest in the company. While he was living in Los Angeles, he’d become
|
||
friends with a writer named Flint Dille, with whom he collaborated on a
|
||
series of choose-your-own-adventure-type novels. Flint arranged for
|
||
Gygax to meet his sister, Lorraine Dille Williams, who, in addition to
|
||
the Buck Rogers fortune, had experience in hospital and not-for-profit
|
||
administration. Gygax asked Williams to invest in TSR; Williams
|
||
demurred, but agreed to advise Gygax on how to get the company back on
|
||
its feet.
|
||
|
||
In May, 1985, Gygax exercised a stock option which gave him a
|
||
controlling interest in TSR; he named himself CEO, and hired Williams as
|
||
a general manager. And here the darkness of the cave becomes so great
|
||
that almost nothing can be seen. Some time in the summer of 1985,
|
||
Williams, impressed by the potential value of TSR’s intellectual
|
||
property, decided to take control of the company. She bought out the
|
||
Blume brothers, who wanted to quit anyway; but first she got Brian Blume
|
||
to exercise his stock option, which meant that Williams ended up with a
|
||
majority of the shares of TSR. At this point, Brian Blume says, “ugly
|
||
things happened.” Blume says that Gygax tried to fire Williams and hire
|
||
Gail Carpenter (the future Mrs. E. Gary Gygax) in her place. Gygax says
|
||
that he wanted to fire Williams when she was still only a manager, but
|
||
was advised not to, and didn’t, until it was too late. Flint Dille
|
||
speculates that Gygax wanted the company for himself. “Gary was
|
||
interested in running TSR again. He was going to replace the board with
|
||
his then-girlfriend, family members, and pets. And Lorraine said, you
|
||
can’t do that. We don’t want to replace one tyranny with another.”
|
||
|
||
For nearly a year after we met Gygax, Wayne and I entertained various
|
||
wild theories about what had really happened, and why. Then I found
|
||
Lorraine Williams. She has kept silent about TSR since she left the
|
||
company, in 1997, but she agreed to talk with me for some reason,
|
||
perhaps because I didn’t sound like a hard-core gamer, or because even
|
||
keeping silent no longer seems important to her after all these years. I
|
||
hoped for something extraordinary from our conversation: a revelation, a
|
||
glimmer of light in the dark heart of the cave. I was disappointed.
|
||
“There’s no great, hidden story,” Williams told me, “as much as people
|
||
would like there to be one.” She saw the potential for TSR to move
|
||
beyond the sluggish market for role-playing games: “If you look at the
|
||
track record of what has been published by TSR, and how many people in
|
||
the fantasy and science fiction area got their start publishing with
|
||
TSR, it’s impressive. And I found that exciting. I also saw an
|
||
opportunity that we were never really able to capitalize on, and that
|
||
was the ability to go in and develop intellectual property.” She moved
|
||
in. “And it was my intention at that time,” she said, “and I really
|
||
thought that Gary and I had actually worked out the deal, that he would
|
||
continue to have a very strong role, a leading role in the creative
|
||
process, and I would take over the management. But that didn’t work for
|
||
a bunch of really extraneous reasons.” Williams declined to say what
|
||
those reasons were, but her brother speculates, plausibly, that they had
|
||
to do with the Los Angeles operation: basically, Gygax didn’t want to
|
||
give up King Vidor’s mansion, not when a movie deal could come through
|
||
any day, not when he was having so much fun.\[[39](#footnote39)\] Gloom,
|
||
gloom.
|
||
|
||
When Gygax learned that Williams had bought the Blumes’ shares, he tried
|
||
to block the sale in court. He lost. Lorraine Williams had outmaneuvered
|
||
him, and she would continue to do so through the 1980s and ’90s,
|
||
thwarting his attempts to create games which were, in her eyes,
|
||
infringements on TSR’s intellectual property.\[[40](#footnote40)\] Gygax
|
||
succumbed to the business equivalent of air superiority. In 1986, he
|
||
became the chairman of the board of directors of a company called New
|
||
Infinities Productions, which published the Cyborg Commando role-playing
|
||
game, which has been utterly lost, like most of the role-playing games
|
||
published in the 1980s. Not even the Compleat Strategist stocks it
|
||
anymore.
|
||
|
||
King Vidor’s mansion has been torn down; Gary Gygax is back in an old,
|
||
cluttered house a few blocks from where he grew up. He has sold or
|
||
renounced his rights to Dungeons & Dragons, and the money he made in
|
||
TSR’s fat years seems mostly to be gone, too. He continues to write
|
||
D\&D supplements with names like Gary Gygax’s Fantasy Fortifications,
|
||
but the market for such work is small: a third-party D\&D title is doing
|
||
well if it sells 5,000 copies. Gygax is still designing his own games,
|
||
too. He worked for a while on a fantasy role-playing game called
|
||
Dangerous Journeys, and now he’s working on one called Lejendary
|
||
Adventures, a rules-lite alternative to the behemoth that Dungeons &
|
||
Dragons has become. I haven’t played Lejendary Adventures, but to judge
|
||
from the rulebook the game seems to be haunted by the specter of
|
||
copyright infringement: characters are called avatars; classes are
|
||
called orders; experience points are called merits; the elf has been
|
||
renamed the Ilf. This despite the fact that elf is uncopyrightable: it’s
|
||
as if Gygax were still dodging Lorraine Williams after all these years.
|
||
And yet he doesn’t seem to feel much rancor, or much regret. Perhaps
|
||
that’s because, win or lose, Gygax has made a whole life of playing
|
||
games; and he is still playing. He has a weekly game of Metamorphosis
|
||
Alpha, a science-fiction RPG, with Jim Ward, the game’s author. He plays
|
||
old-fashioned D\&D regularly with his son, Alex, and Ward, and sometimes
|
||
with fans who make pilgrimages to Lake Geneva. And no one ever comes to
|
||
ask why he isn’t in school\! No wonder he laughs so often.
|
||
|
||
# THE TEETH OF
|
||
BARKASH-NOUR
|
||
|
||
Wayne and I took Gygax to lunch at an Italian restaurant on the
|
||
outskirts of Lake Geneva: an expensive place, Gygax warned us. Our
|
||
sandwiches cost six or seven dollars each. After lunch, we returned to
|
||
his house to play some Dungeons & Dragons. Wayne and I felt curiously
|
||
listless; it had already been a long day of talking; Wayne wasn’t sure
|
||
he remembered how to play; I would have been happy to go back to our
|
||
motel room and sleep. This happens to me often: I decide that I want
|
||
something; I work and work at it; and just as the object of my quest
|
||
comes into view, it suddenly comes to seem less valuable, not valuable
|
||
at all. I can find no compelling reason to seize it and often I don’t.
|
||
(This has never been the case, curiously, in role-playing games, where
|
||
my excitement increases in a normal way as the end of the adventure
|
||
approaches. Which is probably another reason why I like the games more
|
||
than the life that goes on around them, and between them.) I wonder if
|
||
we would have turned back, if Gygax hadn’t already gone into the house
|
||
and come back with his purple velvet dice bag and a black binder, a
|
||
module he wrote for a tournament in 1975. This was before the Tolkien
|
||
estate threatened to sue TSR, and halflings were still called hobbits.
|
||
So I got to play a hobbit thief and a magic-user and Wayne played a
|
||
cleric and a fighter, and for four and a half hours we struggled through
|
||
a wilderness adventure in a looking-glass world of carnivorous plants,
|
||
invisible terrain, breathable water, and so on. All of which Gygax
|
||
presented with a minimum of fuss. The author of Dungeons & Dragons
|
||
doesn’t much care for role-playing: “If I want to do that,” he said,
|
||
“I’ll join an amateur theater group.” In fact, D\&D, as DM’ed by E.
|
||
Gary Gygax, is not unlike a miniatures combat game. We spent a lot of
|
||
time just moving around, looking for the fabled Teeth of Barkash-Nour,
|
||
which were supposed to lie in a direction indicated by the “tail of the
|
||
Great Bear’s pointing.” Our confusion at first was pitiable, almost
|
||
Beckettian.
|
||
|
||
> GYGAX: You run down northeast along the ridge, and you can see the
|
||
> river to your north and to your northeast. So which way do you want to
|
||
> go?
|
||
>
|
||
> PAUL: The river is flowing south.
|
||
>
|
||
> WAYNE: Which is the direction we ultimately want to go, right?
|
||
>
|
||
> PAUL: We have to wend in the direction of the tail of the…
|
||
>
|
||
> PAUL, WAYNE: “Great Bear’s pointing.”
|
||
>
|
||
> PAUL: But we have no idea which way that is.
|
||
>
|
||
> WAYNE: Tail of the Great Bear’s pointing. Maybe we should go north.
|
||
|
||
The sky clouds over; raindrops fall; the clouds part and the light turns
|
||
rich yellow. The screen porch smells of cigar smoke. I want to go
|
||
outside, to walk by Lake Geneva in early May, to follow the beautiful
|
||
woman Wayne and I saw walking by the shore, to meet a stranger, to live.
|
||
But I can’t get up. I roll the dice. I’m not tired anymore; I’m not
|
||
worried about making a fool of myself in front of Gygax, who obviously
|
||
couldn’t care less. And something strange is happening: Wayne and I are
|
||
starting to play well. We climb a cliff by means of a magic carpet; we
|
||
bargain with invisible creatures in an invisible lake. We steal eggs
|
||
from a hippogriff’s nest; we chase away giant crabs by threatening them
|
||
with the illusion of a giant, angry lobster.\[[41](#footnote41)\] The
|
||
scenario was designed for a group of six or eight characters, but by
|
||
dint of cooperation and sound tactics (basically, we avoid fighting any
|
||
monster that isn’t directly in our path) we make it through, from one
|
||
page of Gygax’s black binder to the next. So we come to the final foe,
|
||
the Slimy Horror, which turns our two spellcasters into vegetables; my
|
||
hobbit thief and Wayne’s fighter don’t stand a chance against it. “That
|
||
was pretty good,” Gygax says. He lets us read through the scenario,
|
||
noting all the monsters we didn’t kill, all the treasure that was never
|
||
ours. The Teeth of Barkash-Nour are very powerful: one of them increases
|
||
your character’s strength permanently; another transports you to a
|
||
different plane of existence. We were so close\! So close, Wayne and I
|
||
tell each other. We did better than we ever expected to; in fact, we
|
||
almost won.
|
||
|
||
# POSTSCRIPT
|
||
|
||
I would like to tell you that playing D\&D with Gary Gygax lifted
|
||
whatever spell I was under, and that when we left Lake Geneva, I
|
||
embarked on a new life, unhaunted by the past. But here, outside the
|
||
cave, things are rarely so simple. I still eye my weatherbeaten copy of
|
||
the Players Handbook, with Gygax’s face all over the cover, and think
|
||
about how much fun it would be to go in one more time. Wayne has moved
|
||
to another city, but he and I are talking about meeting up at Gen Con
|
||
this summer. In the meantime, we both have work to do. Maybe that’s all
|
||
the peace you can make with the past: you agree that it can come back,
|
||
but you make it meet you for just a weekend, at a convention center in a
|
||
city far from your home. Or maybe that’s just my way of making peace.
|
||
|
||
I talked to Gary Gygax again in March of this year, to ask, among other
|
||
things, if there was any truth to the rumor that he was diagnosed with
|
||
stomach cancer in the early 1980s, and that he moved to L.A. because he
|
||
didn’t want to spend the last six months of his life fighting with the
|
||
Blume brothers in Lake Geneva. “No,” he said. “I have an abdominal
|
||
aortic aneurysm, though.” He told me that he’d found out about it in
|
||
January; the doctors tell him it’s inoperable. One day it will rupture
|
||
and that will be the end. “I’m in no hurry,” he said. And indeed, here
|
||
he was, telling me about Elastolin plastic miniatures, and a hobby-shop
|
||
owner named Harry Bodenstadt, who used to run a game called the Siege of
|
||
Bodenburg, in order to sell miniature castles to war gamers in Wisconsin
|
||
in the 1960s. From which you could conclude, I guess, that games are
|
||
everything for Gygax, or that everything is a game; but I don’t think
|
||
that would be quite right. I think that he has found a way to live.
|
||
|
||
> Thanks to Michelle Vuckovich and Jennifer Estaris for their help
|
||
> researching this article, and of course to Wayne, for being a part of
|
||
> it.
|