It is fifty years since Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) first appeared and I have enjoyed playing it since I sat down at a school table sometime in the mid-1980s to take the role of Arocken, a hunter and scout. Arocken and his fellow adventurers were exploring the cavernous lair of an infamous wizard and I was intrigued by the snippets I had overheard. I was invited to join and was handed a sheet of paper with Arocken’s details on it.
I don’t remember Arocken’s fate—it was probably ignominious, as many characters fell foul of the menaces infesting the dungeons of the time: there were insidious traps, lurking hazards and other monsters than dragons. Even experienced players might find themselves “rolling up” a new character at short notice due to an unlucky dice roll at a critical moment, as many published games encouraged an adversarial atmosphere at the table.
I was hooked, and started looking out for the game in Bagnalls, my fondly remembered local games and toy store which is sadly long gone, but I was put off by the cost of the books (they were imported from the USA by Games Workshop, and carried a high price), so I contented myself with the home-grown Fighting Fantasy books, written by the progenitors of Games Workshop Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, until I asked for, and got, the Basic D&D boxed set (also known as the Red Box) for Christmas.
I have played D&D and its cousin Pathfinder as often as I could with friends and later on with my step-sons and their friends. There were the early forays into the Palace of the Silver Princess and the Isle of Dread, a stay in the bucolic Village of Hommlet that led to an ominous moat house where an unfortunate spider incident took place and on to the depths of the Temple of Elemental Evil. There were expeditions to the Barrier Peaks, to the shadowy depths of Undermountain, and to the brooding pinnacles of Castle Ravenloft (whose master wants you to join him for dinner without specifying who will be dining). We have explored the great pyramid and vast emptiness of the Desert of Desolation (the scene of another unfortunate incident with an exploding pineapple) and uncovered the sinister secret of Saltmarsh. I’ve played goblins and hobgoblins, giants and dragons, princesses and paupers, shining champions of righteousness and loathsome infamous villains, innkeepers, incubi and imaginary folk of all sorts and it’s been immense fun.
Roleplaying games are fundamentally an exercise in shared storytelling, rather like a murder mystery game. A murder mystery’s outcome is predetermined like a play with a script for each player. There is some scope for improvisation but one’s role and participation are fixed. The story told in a roleplaying game is limited only by the imaginations of the players.
One player in D&D (and many similar games) is the referee: the grandly titled “Dungeon Master” or DM, who begins the game by setting the scene, describing the location where the group is and any other people and creatures present (effectively the extras in the scene).
The DM then asks the players what they want to do and the game becomes a conversation where the responses of the players trigger further information from the referee and so on, building a shared story. The polyhedral dice and thick books that are so much a feature of these games come into play when there is doubt over the outcome of a player character’s activity—jumping over a chasm or hitting a recalcitrant troll, for example. The dice determine the outcome which is then jointly narrated by the referee and the players. No board is required, though devotees often spend a fortune on miniatures, terrain and appropriately sized floorplans to help visualise the game.
Over five decades, D&D has evolved from its roots in wargaming and has adopted concepts and philosophies from other roleplaying games, so that the early combative and competitive nature of the game has mellowed into a more collaborative approach that emphasizes storytelling over crude mechanical details. It is now in its fifth edition with an update due this year, though Wizards of the Coast have continually protested that it’s still 5th Edition, a stance that rather resembles Microsoft’s assertions that Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever which lasted right up to the point when Windows 11 appeared. The game has also moved technologically and Wizards’ online tool D&D Beyond provides the basic rules for free, though a subscription unlocks more comprehensive access. Huge battle maps and armies of miniatures are even less necessary when it can all be shown on a screen, and the virtual tabletops became indispensable during the pandemic.
The game has grown outwards from its nerdy roots and is now a part of mainstream culture thanks to appearances in shows like Stranger Things (where the antagonist creatures have been drawn from the game’s wide variety of potential adversaries) and the Big Bang Theory. There are actual play series on YouTube and Twitch such as Critical Role, which now boasts nearly 350 episodes across three series of adventures (campaigns in the parlance), each episode being anything from 3 hours to 5 hours long. Wizards of the Coast have generally been more open to this sort of thing than their antecedents TSR and have involved themselves in actual play series such as Acquisitions Inc, which stars a rotating cast of players and referees and generally promotes the latest product release from Wizards, and the excellent “Dice, Camera, Action!” which is now defunct. Several movies have been released under the Dungeons & Dragons name: generally rather poor sword and sorcery flicks, though the recent one with Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Regé-Jean Page was a pretty good representation.
It’s impossible to last fifty years without some missteps, and D&D has had its share, from the early years where the game’s demographic was largely white teenagers and what the game designer Ken Hite describes as “doughy white guys” and it showed, to recent controversies over racial stereotypes and poor commercial decisions. The game now embraces people of all cultures and heritages, and I believe the designers try hard to show respect for the cultures that inspire their work.
I’ve played other roleplaying games: Call of Cthulhu, the Lovecraftian horror game, and Traveller—the grandaddy of sci fi adventuring—and to a lesser extent Ars Magica, Shadowrun and the World of Darkness games, but D&D is a familiar friend and I look forward to many more years enjoyment. Wizards have recently announced an updated version of the very first game I played: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (good luck with the pronunciation). It’ll be interesting to revisit the caverns after so long.
Links
- Visit the official D&D site at Wizards of the Coast.
- Find out more at D&D Beyond.
- Visit the Critical Role site.
- Visit the Fighting Fantasy site.
- The BBC News website has a few articles: Dungeons and Dragons at 50, Dungeons & Dragons ‘helps people with social anxiety’, The enduring appeal of Dungeons and Dragons.