Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (12 page)

When gamers share our war stories, we’re really sharing something about ourselves. “It doesn’t matter how radically different that character is from you,” says Rodney Thompson, a designer at Wizards of the Coast who works on the Dungeons & Dragons line. “You’re still investing it with some shred of your personality. That’s something that D&D does like no other game.”

1
. She’s now my wife. Spoiler alert: This story has a happy ending.

2
. “Evangelists travel the world proclaiming their devotion to a particular deity, pantheon, or religious doctrine. . . . While clerics and even druids can make powerful evangelists, few trade in their spellcasting abilities for the power this prestige class offers. Bards, naturally charismatic, may find religion and become evangelists.”
The Complete Divine,
page 39.

3
. “Disregard the lowest die roll and total the three highest ones. The result is a number between 3 (horrible) and 18 (tremendous). The average ability score for the typical commoner is 10 or 11, but your character is not typical. The most common ability scores for player characters are 12 and 13.”
Player’s Handbook,
page 7.

4
. “By means of this spell the magic-user is able to move objects by will force, by concentrating on moving them mentally. The telekinesis spell causes the desired object to move vertically or horizontally. Movement is 2˝ the first round, 4˝ the second, 8˝ the third, 16˝ the fourth, and so on, doubling each round until a maximum telekinetic movement of 1,024˝ per round is reached.”
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook,
page 82.

5
. “This is a short sword, similar in design and construction to the katana. Like the katana, the wakizashi may be named for some past deed or event. It holds almost as important a place in the samurai’s honor as his katana.”
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Oriental Adventures,
page 48.

6
. This is known in gaming circles as a “Monty Haul” campaign.

7
. “This spell functions like ‘alter self,’ except that you change the willing subject into another form of living creature. The new form may be of the same type as the subject or any of the following types: aberration, animal, dragon, fey, giant, humanoid, magical beast, monstrous humanoid, ooze, plant, or vermin.”
Player’s Handbook,
page 263.

8
. “These fearsome flying hounds glide low over the countryside at night, seeking likely prey. A yeth hound stands 5 feet tall at the shoulder and weighs about 400 pounds.”
Monster Manual,
page 261.

9
. “I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udun. Go back to the shadow! You shall not pass!” It gives me a nerdgasm every time.

L
ike a sleeping dragon, D&D was slow to get on its feet. Tactical Studies Rules sold the first “brown box” set of rule books at the end of January 1974, via mail order; the rest sat next to the furnace in Gary Gygax’s basement, on the side of his shoemaker’s bench. When Michael Mornard returned to Lake Geneva during his university’s winter break, he spotted the pallet of boxes and asked Gygax about them: “He said they’d printed a thousand copies,” says Mornard. “We thought he was out of his mind.”

D&D was the first and only fantasy role-playing game on the market, and Gygax’s hometown players loved it. But printing a thousand copies was a risky move, since it wasn’t entirely clear there were that many people in the game’s core customer base. “War-gaming was a very fringe hobby,” says Mornard. “Gen Con would attract three hundred guys . . . you could literally know almost all of the war gamers in the world.”

The quality of the product didn’t speak well for the game’s sales prospects, either. The printed text was rough and hard to read, and when you could make out the instructions, they were confusing and contradictory. “With all due respect to Gary and Dave, the original rules were incomprehensible,” says Mornard. “Unless you were an experienced miniatures wargame player—essentially, one of the three hundred—you would have no idea how to play it.”

Still, by the summer of 1974, TSR had sold around four hundred copies of Dungeons & Dragons, and Gygax was increasingly optimistic about its prospects. “
Sales are really quite good and we hope to do even better once we get some ads going,” he wrote that June in a letter to his friend Dave Megarry. “At the present, TSR has three partners and the company worth is about $6,000 or so. I’d say in a couple of years we should have that tripled at least.”

Initial sales came mostly via mail order and through a handful of specialty retailers, including game shops and hobby stores. But Gygax was convinced that his receipts didn’t represent the game’s true market. “
Counting all of the illicit photocopies that were floating around, and the players who didn’t own their own set, it is a safe bet that no fewer than ten thousand persons then knew of and were enthralled by the D&D game,” he said. By November, TSR had sold out its first run of one thousand copies and ordered two thousand more.

D&D wasn’t TSR’s only product, but it was clearly its most promising. Tricolor, a book of rules for Napoleonic miniatures battles, proved about as popular as a grenadier at a garden party. Warriors of Mars, a war game set in the fantasy world of Barsoom, fared better—but the fifty-six-page rule book, written by Gygax and Brian Blume, was printed without permission from the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose John Carter novels had been plundered for the game’s setting. It was available for less than a year before TSR received a cease-and-desist letter and stopped selling it.

By the end of 1974, the company had generated about $12,000 in sales, mainly from Dungeons & Dragons and Warriors of Mars. “
Although this was not exactly a ‘hot’ reception, we were satisfied, for it was a start,” Gygax said. “Wargamers were not exactly flocking to fantasy role playing, but a few came into the fold, and we were recruiting players from outside the hobby.” Revenues were expected to triple in 1975. Tactical Studies Rules was ready to bloom.

TSR suffered its first major setback on January 31, 1975, when cofounder Don Kaye died of a heart attack. He was thirty-seven. Kaye’s wife, Donna, inherited his shares in the company and took over some of his duties, so the business kept moving; in the first quarter of 1975 TSR shipped several new products, including Star Probe, a space exploration game, and two tank-centric World War II war games, Panzer Warfare and the punnily spelled Tractics. But the loss of Kaye was deeply felt within the small company, particularly by Gygax, who’d lost both a childhood friend and his closest business partner.

In a letter to Dave Megarry, Gygax promised to uphold Kaye’s legacy by keeping TSR for gamers, by gamers: “
We will never allow TSR to become a company which is run by any outside group,” he wrote. “We may take others in as partners eventually, but we will never seek any non-wargamer capitalization. We will not grow as fast this way, but we will do very well nonetheless.”

It seemed at first that Gygax was right: By March, revenues were over $2,000 a month, and TSR had developed wholesale relationships with retailers across the country. But while sales of Dungeons & Dragons were accelerating, they weren’t living up to the promise of the game’s hugely successful play test. When new players had walked into Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson’s basement, they had walked out addicted: At one point, Gygax hosted D&D games several nights a
week, sometimes with more than twenty players, and had to deputize Rob Kuntz as co–Dungeon Master in order to meet demand. Why weren’t gamers around the country embracing the game as rabidly as they had in Lake Geneva?

The problem was that a mail-order purchase of the D&D box set didn’t ship with Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson. The rules taught a mechanism for play but did a poor job conveying the experience of role-playing. Without seeing the game in action, war gamers had a hard time making the mental leap from precise simulations of historical battles to creative fantasy adventures—and even if they did, they suffered from a lack of access to worlds as compelling as Greyhawk and Blackmoor.

The first step toward solving that problem came with the debut of
The Strategic Review,
a newsletter edited by Gygax and Blume and published by TSR. Available by subscription at the rate of $1.50 per year, or 50¢ per copy, the slim pamphlet primarily served as a marketing vehicle, listing games for sale and touting future releases. But each issue also included a few articles that fleshed out existing games and taught customers how to play them. The
Review
clarified D&D’s confusing rules (“
A magic-user can use a given spell but once during any given day, even if he is carrying his books with him . . .”), added new weapons and character classes (Jhaden can trace his ancestry to an article titled “Rangers: An Exciting New Dungeons & Dragons Class”), and shared more of the color that made Arneson and Gygax’s fantasy worlds compelling to their players. The very first issue introduced one of D&D’s most popular monsters, the mind flayer, in a section called “Creature Features”: “
This is a super-intelligent, man-shaped creature with four tentacles by its mouth which it uses to strike its prey. If a tentacle hits it will then penetrate to the brain, draw it forth, and the monster will devour it. It will take one to four turns for the tentacle to reach the brain, at which time the victim is dead.”

Still, the fantasy game of Dungeons & Dragons was incomplete until the publication of its first fantasy world. In the spring of 1975 TSR released
Dungeons & Dragons Supplement I: Greyhawk,
a fifty-six-page book full of rules and details from Gygax’s home campaign. The expansion included improved rules for managing combat, replacing a wonky system adopted from Chainmail; added a variety of spells, creatures, and magical items; and introduced two character classes, the paladin and the thief.

It also taught, by example, how to create your own adventures. You might, the book suggested, include a magical source of monsters (“
Greyhawk had a fountain on its second level which issued endless numbers of snakes,” Gygax explains in the text) or a trapped room where all the furniture has been enchanted to attack the players—chairs that kick, stools that trip, and rugs that smother (“
Ours is known as the ‘Living Room’ ”). These details helped bridge the gap between players who learned the game at Gary’s table and those who picked it up in a hobby store. Instead of just explaining how to play a game,
Greyhawk
showed its readers how to make a world.

Greyhawk
’s impact didn’t stop there: Its most important innovation may have been that it was published in the first place. By releasing an optional expansion to Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax introduced the idea that the game should evolve and grow. It suggested that players add, remove, and personalize, and made it okay for different groups to use different rules. You can’t open up a Monopoly box, throw out all the money, invent rules for military conquest of properties, and still call it Monopoly. But D&D players are encouraged to change the game, expand it, and mold it in their own image.

As a result, the game offers infinite playability. If I get tired of fighting vampires in Morgan’s postapocalyptic world, I can find another group running a traditional adventure in the world of Greyhawk. If that game has too much combat for my taste and not enough role-
playing, I can move on again. The system encourages long-term engagement, and it’s one reason why D&D fans are particularly devoted to their hobby.

It also suggests a solution to a problem that’s plagued game makers for centuries: You can only sell a game once. I bought a Monopoly set fourteen years ago, and I’ll probably still be using it fourteen years from now—barring a house fire or theft, or, more likely, that I destroy the board in a bankruptcy-induced fit of bad sportsmanship. Parker Brothers got twenty bucks from me, and that’s it. But D&D is different. With the publication of
Greyhawk,
it became clear that if you kept adding on to the rules, you could keep selling stuff to players. The key to TSR’s success would be found not in a single set of rules but in a whole universe of stories, settings, and color.

By the summer of 1975, sales of Dungeons & Dragons were rapidly accelerating. It took eleven months to sell the first thousand D&D box sets, but the second thousand flew off the shelves in four, and the third thousand in less than two. In June TSR ordered a third printing of 3,300 sets; because the company was low on cash, the printer took payment in the form of the odd 300 copies and sold them directly to stores.

In its first year, D&D had sold mostly through mail order and direct sales to game shops. TSR did very little wholesale business and only had relationships with three ersatz distributors—small companies who made the lead miniature soldiers used in war games, so they had existing relationships with hobby stores. But now that D&D was really starting to move, Gygax and Blume were able to secure deals with several major distributors.

They also started thinking about selling products overseas. Historical war-gaming had deep roots in Europe, and there were lots of
small hobby groups and newsletters. So Gygax sent copies of D&D to all the influential European gamers he could find.

One of those D&D box sets arrived at a small flat on Bolingbroke Road in West London, headquarters (and home to the founders) of a tiny company called Games Workshop. War-gaming buddies Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, and John Peake started the company in early 1975, selling handmade wooden games like Go and backgammon. They printed up a newsletter,
Owl & Weasel,
to promote the company and sent it to everyone they knew in the game business—including Gary Gygax, who sent back a copy of Dungeons & Dragons, hoping for a positive review.

“John thought it was horrendous,” says Livingstone. “It had quite unintelligible rules . . . you had to interpret them, and ad-lib a lot. But Steve and I were immediately hooked, from day one . . . it unlocked worlds of the imagination.”