Dungeons & Dragons, of course

No series of articles about my personal experiences with games would be complete without Dungeons & Dragons.  It would even fit into my series of smallest and oldest board games as probably the biggest game in history, by almost any measure.  Number of players times the number of books or number of pages?  Influence of the game?  Pick a measure, this game spans half a century now, with easily 100,000 pages of rule books and campaign settings and reference guides; it has the largest multiverse of any game or written series that I can think of, where every pantheon from human history can coexist in an eminently logical way; it has inspired more competing game systems and spin-offs than anything else I can think of.  It more-or-less created the modern RPG genre, evolving from a one book add-on for a table-top wargaming system - the leap that Gary Gygax made was "hey, what if we stop thinking about each piece representing an army, and think about individual characters?"  It was subversive, it was the underground thing for creative kids to do, then it seemed to fade into a background thing that we still played (with mostly hybrid, homebrew rules) but wasn't talked about much.  And now, we see this huge resurgence with the coming of Youtube, where thousands of creators now regularly make D&D content, from recorded game sessions and animated campaigns, from Gamemaster guides and reviews of every module ever written to monster ecology videos.  Celebrities are playing, Colbert tries to out-nerd guests about it, and it has found a huge new wave of life.

For me, I discovered the game not long after the classic AD&D hardcovers came out, probably about 1979.  We moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I didn't have any regular gaming group until we came back to NY in '83.  But I wrote my own module by then, sent it to TSR, got rejected and had no idea what to do with it after that.  It was a huge comfort reading the books, imagining the tales they could trigger.  Aside from reading the best sci-fi and fantasy I could find, D&D was probably the biggest influence on my own early writing.  Most of my character sketches for stories and potential novels started by rolling up some stats or using a freeform character sheet of some kind.

From Junior year to Year Two of college, I ran several campaigns, first D&D, then branching out into Rolemaster and Call of Cthulhu, but always with the D&D backbone, favoring that basic 3d6 and d20 dynamic.  I never had much money, but I built my own little library of game books, and filled some2-inch ring binders with rules for simulating everything, from odd creatures to spaceships.  I loved the numbers, the math, the percentages, the ability to codify almost anything, seamlessly merging different number ranges and power spreads from different systems.  And then came home computers.

My first adventures in computer programming in any new language would always be D&D rules: character generation, treasure tables, basic combat rules.

When I moved to California, I got to be a player off and on for another decade or so, and last played a session of 5e right before the pandemic hit.  I never could keep up with all the editions.  I actually never noticed that there was a 2nd edition of D&D, since I had such a mix of books, and 1e and 2e were so similar anyway.  I missed 3e, finally got a set of 3.5e books, had no players, missed 4e entirely, finally got a set of 5e books and a D&D Beyond account. 

Through it all, it's just the most wondrous multiverse.  The way the game engineered the dimensions so that every deity and creature humans ever believed in could all live in their own parts of alignment-related planes of existence actually had a profound effect on my ability to accept other cultures and religions.  On my lists of hobbies and interests, folklore and mythology always ranked about sixth down, so I voraciously read of world travels, the world's religious books, lives of the Saints, you name it.  It was inconceivable to me that people could go to war over differences like these, where the ideas can all fit together on a larger canvas.

Within those dimensions, there were the specific worlds which had dozens of books of settings and lore.  Greyhawk, Mystara, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Planescape (with its weird jargon-filled style).  I never got into the novels as much, but I will still grab a Kindle edition a few times a year and read it through.  To me, RPG resource books were a legitimate genre of their own: a thousand potential stories.  Read the stats and the challenges and mentally see how they will play out; read about the City State of the Invincible Overlord and all the wild and wacky NPCs inhabiting those places.  And Dragon magazine still comes out regularly, adding to the already epic semi-reality.

What's odd is that, aside from a few short articles here and there, I have never found a niche of my own writing RPG materials.  With 3e came the d20 system (more publishers with more great resource books), then the Open Game License, so there is a new wave of publishers putting out amazing materials.  Over 20,000 books and documents available on DriveThruRPG alone.  

For a stellar tour of all the D&D editions, check out this series from Matthew Colville, where he makes a fighter in every rule set and gets deep into the changes between them all.

For me, the game has just gotten more complex, though.  Hundreds of feats and subclasses and faults and powers, but still the same book of spells?  So I have been watching the OSR (Old School Renaissance) movement, where different producers have put out dozens of sets of Open License home rules, backward compatible with each edition of D&D, all of them probably happy to get new contributors and new materials.

So I may be writing posts on other RPG systems and books, in with the flow of games here.  It is not meant to be the main focus, and this is not meant to be a review site.  Just my experience with games, and I have now covered the elephant in the pool. 

My pick for monster ecology, D&D lore, world studies and other "deeply nerdy" topics, just visit AJ Pickett.  Look at all the amazing art that has been inspired: his videos gather such a gallery of gorgeous visions, and some of the most horrifying things that artists have ever dreamed up.

I will stand by my "Biggest Game in History" subtitle.