Dungeons & Dragons. Brainchild of Gary Gygax. Cornerstone of an industry. Progenitor of an entire hobby. Widely recognized as the first modern-day tabletop roleplaying game.
It’s also, more likely than not, the first tabletop RPG anyone reading this ever played. It was certainly mine.
A Four-Decade Legacy
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Dungeons & Dragons gave tabletop gamers the very hobby they enjoy today. Originally created back in 1974 by Gary Gygax and David Arneson as an offshoot of the military wargame title Chainmail (Linda Whitson tells us all about Chainmail here), the original D&D took the idea of running mock combats and instead turned it into taking on the role of an open-ended character in an open-ended gameplay experience. Sure, the expectations of how “roleplaying” was meant to work back then might have been different from the standards of today, but D&D was, and is, the giant on whose shoulders everyone else has since stood.
And what a giant. Dungeons & Dragons is so well known that it’s practically synonymous with the hobby itself. (How many of us have ever had to utter a sentence like “It’s like D&D but with Star Wars” to a family member or non-gaming friend?) It is by far the most popular and best-selling game of its kind, and over forty years later, not only are people still playing it, it’s still getting new content, with the latest edition having come out just last year.
Why? What is it about Dungeons & Dragons that has made it such a timeless juggernaut, still roping newcomers into the hobby today?
A Whole New World
I still remember my very first D&D experience: it was the early 80s, I was probably no older than 7 or 8 years old, and my older brother, my cousin, and their friends (all roughly 5 years older than me or thereabouts) were running through some dungeon crawl module and I wanted to get in on it. At one point, we came across some strange glowing cube that I decided to throw my shortsword at, resulting in the entire party being blinded for five minutes. I think that was when they stopped letting me play.
Later on, when I was 11 or so, my friend from up the street came over, excitedly carrying his copy of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition. I was the only player, and my first fight was against a carrion crawler (which, as I recall, coughed up a few copper pieces for my efforts). Sometime later I was impaled by a wyvern’s tail and died. It was epic.
I decided at once that I needed to be part of this hobby. I asked my dad if he could take me to the store to pick up the rulebook. He was hesitant; after all, this was the late 80s, we were a Respectable New England Family™, and at the time, cautionary tales, wild accusations, and sensationalist media like Tom Hanks’ Mazes & Monsters were linking D&D with everything from social maladjustment to outright Satan worship.
Still, my father has never been an unreasonable man, so he at least took me to the store and talked to the teenage sales clerk about the game, and after being extolled with the virtues of the Ravenloft setting, my dad decided that, while perhaps not liable to lead me to worshipping the literal Devil, the game and its themes might be a bit mature for an 11-year-old, and so I left instead with a Forgotten Realms book: Shadowdale, the first installment of (what was then called) The Avatar Trilogy. Still, I always remembered, and a faint curiosity lingered.
First-Time Allure
My first D&D experience probably isn’t too different from a lot of other people’s: somewhat childish, not yet fully grasping what the game and its open-ended nature can really do, but enthralling all the same.
Most people probably discover very early on whether tabletop RPGs are for them or not. If you were the sort of person who played lots of make-believe games with siblings or friends, if you were a big reader (even willingly reading books your elementary school teachers didn’t assign to you, gasp!), or if you were really into high fantasy–all of these things, I feel, help contribute to how well something like D&D can get its hooks into a prospective new hobbyist.
Part of what makes Dungeons & Dragons itself such a good entry game, too, is the fact that the themes are ones most of us are familiar with: resplendent fantasy worlds where dashing heroes fight evil wizards and slay dragons, forests populated by beautiful and mysterious elves, and–of course–hoards of treasure for the plundering. Now, over the past forty years, part of why so many of us know these things is because of D&D, but the fact remains that the basic image is one people already have in their heads, and if you’re the sort of person whose imagination immediately begins to fill in the colors and details of that image in your head, this is probably the hobby for you.
Still, it takes more than a fondness for Lord of the Rings and an imagination to make one game into the most common means of entry into an entire expansive hobby.
Hook, Line, and Sinker
Flash-forward to college, sophomore year. My roommate invites me to be in a D&D campaign his best friend is about to start running. The setting is Birthright (alas, a setting that has since fallen by the wayside), and I roll up a paladin who is also regent of his domain.
After I’ve finished rolling up my character, the GM takes me out into the hallway, out of earshot of the other players, and addresses me for the first time, in-character, as an NPC. I am dumbstruck and flabbergasted. What am I supposed to do? Why oh why did I ever say, “Sure, I’ve played D&D before”?
Embarrassed, I finally just ask: “Wait, what am I actually supposed to do?” The GM smiles, adopts a very reassuring demeanor, and says, “Just go with it. Say what your character would say. Don’t be nervous; it’s okay.”
That seems simple enough. I go with it.
Within the first five or ten minutes of the session proper, any hesitation or nervousness is gone. We’re all in the same boat, all of us pretending to be our characters, and it is one of the most fun things I can remember doing in a long time. My earlier anxiety out in the hallway seems so silly now, almost completely forgotten. Am I just a natural at this, or is it actually this straightforward to play make-believe as an almost-adult?
The campaign itself peters out within the semester, but by then, I’m in other campaigns. First, it’s more D&D. Next, it’s Rifts. The semester after that, it’s Shadowrun.
I am officially hooked.
No Limitations
As adults, we often consider “make-believe” the exclusive realm of children’s play; if you’ve cut your teeth on tabletop roleplaying, however, you know how gratifying, exciting, and even freeing it can be to do it as an adult. Just because something is “for pretend” doesn’t mean it has to stick to kiddy themes or ideas, and just because it’s a game doesn’t mean that you need a way to ‘win’ beyond everyone having a fun time.
Part of what D&D teaches newcomers, almost right away, is that there really are no limits other than your imagination (well, and the rules, but we’ll come to that). You can be young, you can be old, you can skinny or fat, friendly or feisty, and anything in between. You can tell sweeping, expansive stories over months or years, or you can do one-off adventures with high mortality rates. There isn’t any right or wrong. You decide.
There’s a word for this: agency. Agency is the ability to meaningfully impact the situations around you, and the make-believe worlds of tabletop roleplaying allow people to have agency for situations they’d likely never have in real life. Heck, most of us have a hard enough time having agency in getting our bills paid in a stress-free manner, let alone in saving a kingdom from a rampaging dragon, and that’s one of the big things games like D&D offer. Rather than “never being too old” for escapism, one might argue that the drudgeries of adulthood are when we need it most.
The Proud, Basement-Dwelling Nerd
By my last year of college, we were literally gaming in the basement of one of the campus dorms. Few people ever went down there, and there were big, huge rooms full of tables and chairs that could fit very large groups.
About ten of us got together for a huge campaign once the new hotness dropped: Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition. There were two GMs, each responsible for handling one of the two “factions” the PC group had been broken into (the GMs had been reading this book series I was unfamiliar with, but the campaign setup had something to do with the PCs eventually getting sent as criminals to some place called “The Wall” to be pressed into joining some group called the “Night’s Watch”).
This was when the true, full storytelling potential of tabletop roleplaying finally hit me. It didn’t need to be a game about the players trying to “beat” the Dungeon Master at his own game–it could be a collaborative storytelling effort, and while it might have been the dice that determined whether you succeeded or failed, lived or died, now it was all in service to the worlds and stories the group was creating.
I’m pretty sure my fondest memories of my last days in college are intrinsically tied to that basement, and the lessons I learned there–about how to be a good player and how to be a good GM–have stuck with me ever since. I even stole the “two GMs” trick for my longest-running campaign ever: a Star Wars: Saga Edition game that ran a full six years. And yes, they hit Level 20, the one time I’ve ever made it happen.
Welcome to Our World
Dungeons & Dragons isn’t the end-all or be-all of the tabletop roleplaying hobby, but as an introduction, it certainly presents anything and everything someone needs to know about how the hobby itself works (except, perhaps, for the fact that you don’t need to limit yourself to Tolkienesque high fantasy tropes and settings).
People have been getting into RPGs starting with D&D for years and years, and it’s looking like they’ll continue to do so for years to come. Of course, not everyone does, and maybe it’s not the best or only game to be someone’s first, but it does have that history, and (for better or for worse) that reputation. And there’s one thing that’s a lot harder to argue: this hobby and this industry wouldn’t be where it is today (or possibly be here at all) without D&D and what it’s done.
Some of us have played this game literally hundreds or even thousands of times. Some of us started as kids, some of us didn’t get into it until young adulthood or even later. Some of us are sick to death of it and play other things, some of us still swear by it, and still others like to come back to the Grandaddy of Gaming itself once in a while as a sort of homecoming, getting back to our roots. And still some of us have never played a tabletop roleplaying game in our lives–and if you happen to be one of those people, let me just ask you this:
Have you heard that there’s a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons out?
Kevin Frane
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