Dungeons & Dragons

My Dungeons and Dragons journey began in third grade when I overheard the words 'magic missile' on the bus ride to school. I remember being concerned that someone was improperly mixing fantasy and science fiction. Nick, the fourth-grader who cast the spell, remains my friend four decades later. The game – always just D&D – has worked that same magic throughout my life. Many of the friends I made playing D&D when I was a kid are still my friends as an adult. Most of the friends I've made as an adult were made playing D&D. It all started with those magic words on the bus.

There was a version of D&D released in 1974. I've never seen an original copy. The first version of the game I bought came in the box shown on the right. It was released in 1977. The box is still on my shelf today. It came with dice I'd never seen before in the shapes of all five Platonic solids. The indented numbers, lacking any highlighting color, were hard to read. The twenty-sided die repeated zero through nine twice, offering no way to distinguish a one from an eleven. A year later, in 1978, the box would have included an adventure called B1: In Search of the Unknown, but my box just had some unlabeled dungeon maps called geomorphs. We'd eventually get visible numbers on the dice and the eleven through twenty on the twenty-sided die, but that would be years later.

D&D is a structured kind of make-believe. Kids are naturals at it. The game is a conversation. One of the players is the Dungeon Master (DM). The DM presents a scene to the players and includes some hints about things the players might want to do. The players tell the DM what they'd want to do and the DM tells them what happens when they try. The cycle repeats. When something the players want to do is dangerous or risky, D&D provides rules for figuring out whether it works. It usually involves rolling dice.

The core of the game is the conversation. The more creativity and wonder the DM and the players bring to the game, the better the game gets. I played countless hours of D&D before I really understood the rules. In the beginning, we didn't really need the rules.

I did eventually learn the rules. When I was in eighth grade my family moved to Albuquerque, NM for a year. D&D was there in the desert waiting for me. My mom found a group for me to play with on Friday nights. That group played by the book, so I finally mastered the rules. I was prepared to return to Virginia and embark on the high school stage of my D&D career.

While my high school involvement with D&D was entirely positive, the culture of the 80's did not always favor it. There was a time, now known as the Satanic Panic, that America became fascinated with the idea that dangerous satanic cults lived among us doing terrible things. D&D had devils and demons in its lore. Somehow this associated D&D with cults in the public imagination. In my experience, when demons or devils showed up in a D&D game, they were dangerous villains that the players tried to defeat. So, the public concern never made sense to me. I guess that's what made it a panic. For a while, there was a stigma attached to playing the game. It led to an entire version of the game that never mentioned devils or demons. They were still in the game, but not referred to in that way.

In 1982, a made-for-TV movie staring Tom Hanks, Mazes and Monsters, premiered in prime time. It was based on a tragic real-life incident involving a troubled kid. His community wanted to find some way to explain something they couldn't understand and D&D was the thing they settled on. There were books and movies based on the event. It wasn't great for the public perception of D&D. Like rock and roll music, history has made it clear that D&D doesn't corrupt the youth.

In 1989, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition was released. It was a big deal. The 2nd Edition represented an attempt to consolidate and simplify the rules. And to sell books, but that didn't really matter to us. My high school D&D friends gathered to travel via subway across DC to a store called Dream Wizards. They were going to be the first to get the new edition onto their shelves. We descended into the depths of a Metro station and travelled underground to a far off destination. It was an epic quest like the ones we'd been pretending to have for so many years. I have fond memories of that day.

I continued to play D&D through college. Mostly, with friends from high school who went to Virginia Tech. A little in graduate school with some members of my fraternity Alpha Phi Omega. Less after getting my degrees and starting to work. My wife, Tina, introduced me to some people she knew from high school who had active D&D games. They were kind enough to include me in their games and I made more D&D friends.

The pandemic, while terrible for the world, was great for D&D. Before the pandemic struck, most of the D&D games I had been part of were put on hold. We all had children to raise. Most of the friction in playing as adults is distance and scheduling. I had tried, for a while, to sell my friends on playing using online tools, but with no success. The pandemic provided the motivation for people to finally give online play a try. Pre-pandemic, if you'd asked me if I'd ever get to be part of a weekly D&D game again in my lifetime, I'd have said it was very unlikely. I got to play in two weekly games during the pandemic. One has continued to play almost every week for three years. The characters are 16th level and getting ever closer to the bottom of Halaster Blackcloak's famous Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

D&D is now in its fifth edition. I think it's the best version so far. D&D is a billion dollar industry. There was a good D&D movie: Honor Among Thieves – don't bother with the earlier movies. I have fond memories of the animated 80's Saturday morning animated series which finally got a conclusion in a 2019 Brazilian car commercial. D&D was featured in a controversial episode of Community that I think did a great job of conveying the feeling of playing in a game. The 2023 release of the Baldur's Gate 3 is the closest a video game has ever gotten to feeling like playing actual game. There are people (The Adventure Zone, Acquisitions Incorporated, and Critical Role) that make their living by streaming their games of D&D. I play D&D with the children of life-long friends that I made playing D&D. There has been no better time to give it a try. The magic persists.