Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (16 page)

But fantasy gaming is popular all over the world, not just in its place of birth. D&D’s true appeal goes deeper than international borders, class, or creed: It connects directly to the structure of our psyche.

Because they have a narrative form, role-playing games frequently echo Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the classic hero’s journey. Campbell saw that the same basic story kept repeating, across time and cultures: “
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” He believed that variations of this story keep appearing because it springs from the collective unconscious, the deep structures of the mind that are present in all human beings. The classic examples of the hero’s journey are the myths of Prometheus, Osiris, and Moses; modern audiences might recognize it in
Star Wars, The Matrix,
and Harry Potter.

Stories that follow the form of the monomyth resonate because they tickle something deep in the unconscious mind. So imagine what happens when you’re not watching or reading that adventure—you’re experiencing it. That’s what D&D does: It doesn’t just tell a story, it puts you in it. You become “the hero with a thousand faces.” The experience penetrates deep to the core of your being.

And it’s therapeutic too. Because the players are active participants
in a story, role-playing games produce many of the same benefits as psychodrama, a psychological treatment method that uses dramatic reenactments to provide insight into its actors’ lives. “
I see role-playing as an opportunity for people to learn more about themselves,” physician Leonard H. Kanterman
⁴
wrote in a 1979 issue of the game magazine
Different Worlds.
“By exploring the possibilities of different courses of actions, even to the point of different morality systems, through the ‘safe’ medium of fantasy, people can learn who they are and why they think and act the way they do.”

Role-playing games provide a chance for people to work out different aspects of their personality, and no one needs to do that more than an adolescent kid. I think that’s a big reason why I spent so much of my childhood addicted to D&D and games like it.

Of course, I was also a big nerd, which doubtless contributed to the attraction. Some research suggests smart kids are drawn to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons because they need them the most: In
a 2011 study of middle and high school students, education researchers Gregory Harrison and James Van Haneghan reported that gifted children experienced higher levels of insomnia, anxiety, and fear of death than their peers. The researchers also found that encouraging these students “to engage in fantasy game play such as Dungeons & Dragons” could be an effective therapy, allowing them to work out their problems “in stimulating and enjoyable ways.”

When morning came, we hid and watched as Ganubi approached the city gates. We sent him alone, wearing the protective magic amulet, because he’s the most diplomatic—and charming—member of our group.
If the creatures in the city were friendly, he’d be the best person to make contact. If they weren’t, he’s light on his feet and could run like hell.

He approached the gate and, just as Graeme had described, stopped about sixty feet from the city walls. A black-clad figure slowly floated down to greet him. They stood there for some time, not moving . . . perhaps conversing? We couldn’t tell.

Several minutes passed. Jhaden nervously palmed the hilt of his sword. Then the city gates opened, and Ganubi and his new friend walked inside. As he entered, he gave us a subtle wave. Friends, not foes.

Still, I couldn’t help but worry. Hours passed, and Ganubi did not return. As we hid, roasting in the desert sun, Graeme and I debated our options for entering the city in case we needed to rescue our friend. Jhaden napped, unperturbed.

Finally, as dusk fell, the gates opened, and Ganubi emerged—alone, and smiling.

Dungeons & Dragons players dread facing psychic-powered creatures—probably because they prey on the thing we value the most.

It’s obvious why role-playing game fans might respect brains over brawn: D&D is a cerebral game, after all, played almost entirely in your head, and as established, the hobby tends to attract smart people. But the connection between intellect and role-playing goes deeper than the disposition of its audience. Smart people play D&D because D&D makes people smart.

If you think that sounds like an excuse for getting addicted to role-playing, you’re not off the mark. When I was in high school, I convinced myself to not feel bad when I didn’t get invited to the cool kids’ parties, because I was doing something more important: “Sure, they get to drink and have sex, but when the apocalypse comes they’ll wish they’d spent more time role-playing disaster scenarios
and mastering urban combat strategy. The zombies will eat the jocks while the nerds are busy building fortifications, and
then
we’ll have the cheerleaders all to ourselves
.
”

Obviously I was delusional,
⁵
but I was right that my hobby had educational value. Games like Dungeons & Dragons require and encourage study; you have to learn the rules, of course, but you also must learn real-world skills in order to understand them—particularly math, statistics, and vocabulary. “I got a perfect score on the SAT verbals in high school in part because of D&D,” Morgan told me. “One of the questions involved the word ‘comeliness,’ and I knew the word because it had turned up in a D&D book, as an optional stat.”
⁶

Morgan also says that D&D has helped him advance his career in advertising. “The thing about being a DM is that it forces me to improvise,” he says. “It’s not possible for me to plan for every contingency. So when you ask me a question about some aspect of the world that I have no idea about, I just have to come up with something. I find myself doing that same sort of thing in business meetings—actually noticing that I had to come up with an answer, on the spur of the moment, based on the narrative that we’ve created for a business. And I thank my D&D experience for that.”

I feel the same way. Every time I had to figure out how to reach a goal in an adventure, it helped me develop real-world problem-solving skills; all the time I spent playing with friends taught me how to collaborate with colleagues at work. And as the games grew more complex, so did the lessons: There have been times in my career when I’ve
been overwhelmed by the size of a project, but then I remember the Shadowrun campaign where Everett Meyer and I spent months perfecting a plan to invade and conquer Seattle. No magazine story will ever require that much work.
⁷

“Doing an adventure for your friends is actually a relatively rigorous undertaking, especially for young people,” says Jerry Holkins, writer of the web comic
Penny Arcade
. “You have to essentially give a three-hour extemporaneous speech—and that’s in addition to the calculations and the planning and all the narration. There is a ton of work to be done in sustaining a universe.”

Holkins started playing D&D regularly when he was a teenager, and tried without success to get his friend Mike Krahulik—now
Penny Arcade’s
artist—into the hobby. But years later, after their comic became a hit with gamers, Wizards of the Coast paid the two men to play D&D as part of an advertising campaign, and Krahulik was instantly addicted.

“I had played one game of Dungeons & Dragons, then I started my first game as Dungeon Master,” Krahulik says. His games—documented in a series of blog posts on the
Penny Arcade
site—soon reached epic levels of creative effort: In one session, he built a tabletop puzzle that required his players to navigate their miniatures through a maze of actual working laser beams. For another, he constructed and painted a series of 3-D “planets” out of Styrofoam and had the players jump their minis back and forth between the orbs as they “floated” through space.

“I joke with my players that the reason we play D&D is so that I can go to Michael’s every weekend and buy Styrofoam,” Krahulik says. “Some sessions were superelaborate—I spent a month, at least, on one of my games.”

Educators caught on to the benefits of role-playing games quickly: During D&D’s heyday Gygax was invited to speak at teacher’s conventions, and many schools launched extracurricular D&D clubs. Steve Roman, a librarian at the public library in DeKalb, Illinois, has hosted a role-playing game program for teens for over a decade and seen the benefits firsthand. “I use it as a gateway into the reading programs and the book discussions,” he says. “I tell them, ‘If you really like this, try reading
The Hobbit
.’ ”

Roman says it can be a challenge getting kids raised on video games to understand open-ended games like D&D, to accept that they can do whatever they want and aren’t limited to a set of preprogrammed interactions. But when they get it, the kids blossom. “They challenge each other,” he says. “They encourage each other to be creative by example.”

As he is sometimes wont to do, Ganubi described his venture into the desert city with an impromptu bardic song.
⁸

Way down through the mountains past the zombie scene

Way back up in the desert where the worms are mean

There stood a walled city where the fortune’s good

Graeme couldn’t get inside but Ganubi could

He never ever worried that it wouldn’t go well

Just walked up to the door like he was ringing a bell

Go go, Ganubi go go

Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go

Ganubi did good

The creatures that lived there spoke inside his head

But he had a magic necklace so he felt no dread

Oh, their skin was pink and slimy and their eyes were white

Tentacles round their mouth made them quite a fright

The creatures passing by would stop and say

They’d like to probe his mind, but he said no way

Go go, Ganubi go go

Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go

Ganubi did good

His new friend told him they had never seen a man

And took him to the leader of their monster band

The big boss welcomed him to the town

And said Ganubi’s friends could all come round

The humans won an ally in their vampire fight

’Cause Ganubi did good that night

Go go, Ganubi go go

Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go

Ganubi did good

The tentacled denizens of the desert city—Las Vegas, if you haven’t figured that out—were Morgan’s variation on the classic D&D creatures known as illithids, or mind flayers. Usually, they’re evil beings bent on eating people’s brains; in Morgan’s world they were friendly, though worryingly interested in “tasting” Ganubi’s thoughts.

Because his game is set on postapocalyptic Earth, Morgan had to figure out a way to fill the world with D&D’s customary fantastic creatures. I’ve always admired his solution: Vampires wanted to make the world outside their pens inhospitable to escaped humans, so they released a magically enchanted virus that mutated ordinary flora and fauna. It’s a neat trick that lets him use classic D&D tropes but subvert them in interesting ways—like putting mind-reading monsters on the streets of Sin City.
⁹

It’s that kind of storytelling that keeps me addicted to Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s what attracts my friends too. “Role-playing appealed to me because I always liked to tell stories,” Phil says. “Even before I was in kindergarten, I was making stuff up. I always got caught in a lie, because if I told the truth it was kind of boring, but if I told a lie—elephants were stampeding, there’s a comet that hit the earth, and didn’t you notice it was dark for the last three days?”

Phil says the narrative nature of the game drew him in, but it also reinforced his interest: The more he and his friends played, the more they learned about what makes a good story, and the game got better and better. “They don’t teach you until high school about things like rising exposition and falling action . . . but if you’re [a role-player], you’re familiar with it because you’ve been creating stories, more than being formally taught.”

A good D&D campaign is like a mini storytelling workshop. Novelist Neal Stephenson played D&D in college and it helped him on the path to becoming a writer: “I think it dovetails quite naturally,” he says. “Dungeons & Dragons is fundamentally a procedure for collaborative storytelling. You can do it in a purely mechanical way, just rolling the dice and consulting the rules. But the games that people
really get involved with and really enjoy are ones that have legitimate narrative—storytelling, good characters, good situations, plot twists, and an interesting world. The better Dungeon Masters are the ones who have legit storytelling and world-building chops and are able to create a fun experience for the players by improvising good narratives in real time.”

Pendleton Ward, creator of the animated television series
Adventure Time,
says D&D helped him develop a unique narrative style. “I like seeing characters move through a fantasy world in a realistic way,” he says. “I mean, if I was in a dungeon full of gold, I would stop and pick up some of that gold. So whenever [
Adventure Time
protagonists] Finn and Jake are following a story through a dungeon full of treasure, I try to have them stop and pick some up, even if it interrupts the story. Jake loots corpses in an episode . . . but Finn tells him that it’s wrong.”

After spending a day with the illithids, Ganubi lost his taste for plundering their city. He told us they didn’t know about the treasure buried beneath the pyramid, because it was considered a holy place. He said its subterranean passageways were forbidden and that it would be wrong to desecrate a temple. He said if we proceeded, we’d be stealing from friends.