I’m a Comics Ninja and I haven’t played Dungeons & Dragons since high school. In fact, most recovering addicts I know haven’t rolled a twenty-sided die or worried about the frailty of a top-tier magic user in nearly a quarter of a century, but that doesn’t mean the game is yet to be played. do not hang up. us as a suit of chain mail plus three.
That being said, I have found it curious that despite D&D being deeply embedded in our shared popular culture, it has never gained the same level of acceptance as Star Wars or other popular fan boy nation staples. For example, in polite society it’s perfectly acceptable to play the Darth Vader March after scoring a touchdown or attribute an inexplicable one-night stand to a Jedi mind trick. But call someone a kobold or tell him you’re going to summon his meat golem and most of the time they’ll look at him like he has goblins coming out of his ears.
Exhibit A: Several years ago I was going through a tedious staff meeting. To make matters worse, I suddenly found myself called out despite my best efforts to hide behind my Chewbacca coffee mug (note, hot liquid on a Sasquatch head is considered perfectly acceptable in a professional setting). My boss Mr. Hitler (not his real name) was asking questions about data storage or something to which I felt he was giving sufficiently constructive answers.
Clearly, Mr. Hitler felt differently, stating his opinion simply as “no, unsatisfactory.” After the fifth “no” my skin officially cracked and I responded, to quote, “Well I don’t know Mr. Hitler, maybe we could store all the data in a magic bag.”
A perfectly reasonable answer in my mind, but the room was dead silent. Finally, a burly gentleman at the end of the table named Gandalf (real name… no, actually) began to laugh. I identified him as a fellow ex-D20 roller and shot him a smile. He returned a nod, which of course encouraged me.
“Maybe my third level thief could sneak around in Elvin boots collecting data from our staff?” I added hand gestures and a hunched shoulder for display purposes. More giggling from Gandalf, more gaping around the table, Hitler began to turn a dangerous shade of red. Never being one long enough to go, I continued.
Data demon!
“Maybe we could use our psionic abilities to send the data to the third level of hell. A lesser demon could keep an eye on it or something. Would that work, would that, you know, be satisfying?” Yes, too far, it was the time of the invisibility cloak, but I think you get my point.
My wacky behavior aside, I have to ask the question, where did D&D go wrong? Why was D&D forced into the dark corners of America’s collective bases? Maybe it was the whole pagan gods and witchcraft thing? Back then, people actually seemed pretty open to the idea that maybe Satan himself served as the grand master of the dungeons.
In my neighborhood, the DM was a skinny kid with glasses, marginal social skills, and a charisma of 8. If you squinted really hard, I guess he could have passed for the big cuckold, I mean, he tortured us with all that rolling. for picking the lock” every damn time.
However, in the heyday of D&D, some Christian groups went completely over the edge of reality and associated D&D with everything from witchcraft, suicide and murder to, worst of all, drawings of bare boobs. As a side note, let it be known here and now that D&D was cool enough on its own, add the boobs and I’m greeted. But seriously, associate D&D with witchcraft, murder, and suicide? Come on, the only thing that was killed was the poor player’s chance to hook up with a real girl. It was only fair to let them have the ecstasy of her hand-drawn boobies.
Regardless, no matter what the root cause of D&D’s second-rate social status has been and is, its devotees since the game’s inception in the late ’70s have continued to be portrayed, without fail, in popular culture and media. like the gatekeepers to geeks and, bless them, they don’t tend to help themselves. Take, for example, a quote from the late fantasy man Gary Gygax:
“You are not going to enter this world in the usual way, as you set out to become a Dungeon Master. Without a doubt, there are brave fighters, powerful wizards, cunning thieves, and brave clerics who will make their mark in the magical lands of D&D adventure.” However, you are above even the greatest, for as DM you will become the Shaper of the Cosmos. It is you who will give shape and content to the entire universe. You will breathe life into the stillness, giving meaning and purpose to all things. actions to be followed”.
Um, ok That being said, is it any wonder that even today people like politicians and others gleefully bash the misunderstood fantasists? Even during the 2008 presidential campaign, a McCain staffer named Michael Goldfarb felt it necessary to criticize the players on his blog when he wrote:
“It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to belittle a compatriot’s war memory from the comfort of their mother’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from memories of the men who suffered in his name. of others.”
What what? Look, neither I nor anyone else understood anything that Mr. Goldfarb was trying to say, but what you understand is that it had a negative connotation and I guess because these people were playing D&D in their basements. Now, regardless of whether I supported Obama or McCain during the last election, I am strongly in favor of my mother’s basement, so to you, Mr. Goldfarb, I say play along, someone take the lead.
Moving on, as recently as January 26, 2009, the Associated Press published an article titled Game over! A convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Wisconsin has lost his legal battle to play Dungeons & Dragons behind bars. As you can imagine, this article caught my attention. The Associated Press article said:
“Kevin T. Singer filed a lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin’s Waupun prison after a policy was initiated in 2004 to eradicate all Dungeons and Dragons game materials due to concerns that playing it promotes gang-related activity.
Singer, 33, is a devoted player of the fantasy role-playing game that involves recruiting others to play as a group. He argued that his First Amendment rights were being violated and demanded the return of the Dungeons & Dragons material confiscated from his cell. But the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Monday that the prison policy was reasonable.”
Wait, player bands? Guys with the force of 9 are roaming prison yards throwing up gang signs? Have they adopted nicknames like Owlbears or Mind Flayers? Are they entering the territory of the Bloods, Crips and the Brotherhood? This actually sounds like the makings of a great late-level campaign, but I digress.
Some readers may point out that Mr. Singer, a D&D devotee, is serving a life sentence for beating another human to death with, according to my subsequent research, a sledgehammer. To that I say, it was a sledgehammer. If he had used a proper D&D weapon like a mace, polearm, or crossbow, then we’d have something to take a closer look at. Case closed, more or less. On another note, if Mr. Singer had used a lightsaber to do his dirty work, he’d bet my bag of dice that everyone would have given him a nod of understanding and moved on.
Now, my personal campaigning days are over even before the full onset of puberty, but that’s only because something else called GIRLS came along. Before I knew what had hit me, it was time to retire Sir Galahad, my 7th level knight (in hindsight, I may have lacked originality at that age), and I began aiming my, ahem, magic missile at another part.
Even with that enlightening information, I’m not saying I wouldn’t enjoy going back to a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl one day. In fact, I think it would be great. At my age and considering the company I keep, the activity would inevitably include beer and, as we all know, beer makes a lot of things better. By the end of the night, the boys would be flirting with Medusa, attacking the Platinum Dragon just for the sake of it, and storming the Fortress in the Borderlands on the off chance that the tavern was still open.
I think the reason D&D is still relevant to me after all these years, the reason gaming culture hasn’t faded away like so many other fads, is because me and the other ex-players haven’t given it up. In the late 70s and early 80s, when gaming really hit, me and the rest of Gen X were growing into teenagers and D&D was an escape and sometimes social life for misfits, dreamers, geeks and maybe too studious. The geeks, castoffs, and tweens of society had a subculture with its own language, heroes, and references that were never quite cool.
1982 Shippensburg College Dungeons and Dragons Summer Camp.
Star Wars clicked on so many different levels with so many different people that it became mainstream. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but being part of the D&D underground was a real badge of honor and it still ranks among both senior and not-so-senior devotees.
According to an article I recently read, Liz Schuh, the D&D Brand Director, states, “When we look at our player base and beyond our fan base, we see 24 million people in the US 13 to 45 [years old] who played D&D at one point”.
That’s a pretty big group of people who like to put on the boots of a second level dwarf from time to time or can name, off the top of their head, every spell a fourth level Cleric has available. Furthermore, that is a very large subculture with a social stigma that drives them down the river from a seat at the cold table. It was and is a punk movement in its purest sense, before all those punks showed up with their regulation Doc Martens and perfect Mohawks.
So yes, the force is with me and my Star Wars figures still have a reverential status, but I’ll also keep my punk side and drop the occasional reference to the Fiend Folio here and there just to remind myself of who I am and if you have the slightest idea of what a Fiend Folio is, maybe there’s a place waiting for you in the Owlbear gang too.
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