At 50,Dungeons & Dragonsis more popular than ever and still misunderstood.
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Having survived, he ran away to Louisiana, where he resurfaced a month later.
(He committed suicide with a handgun the following year.)
The religious right called the game evil.
TSR couldnt keep up with demand.
This year,Dungeons & Dragonscelebrated its 50th anniversary.
Some 50 million people have played the game, according to its publisher.
(I was one of them; I currently act as dungeon master for two campaigns.)
A thoroughly decentD&Dfilm, starring Chris Pine as a hapless bard, appeared in 2023.
A live version of the latter show, coming in January, sold out Madison Square Garden.
The bizarre intellectual game, it seems, has finally gone mainstream.
Still,D&Dhas never quite resolved its relationship to reality.
This is a game that is fun, a 1982 rule book amusingly stated.
In truth, one never forgets one is playing a game.
Engrossment may be the goal, wrote Fine, but it is never total or continuous.
But its the constant thwarting of immersion that engrosses players most of all.
By the 20th century, the fantasy novel as we now understand it had begun to take form.
TolkiensThe Lord of the Rings,easily the most influential fantasy novel of all time.
The Ballantine series ended in 1973.
Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and other fantasy writers or else devise their own world.
Gygax thought this sounded like a game in its own right; his daughter liked the nameDungeons & Dragons.
The game was a massive success, especially among fantasy readers.
It is a world too much, wrote Tolkien.
It is notoriously difficult to explainDungeons & Dragonsto someone who has never seen it played.
Nearly anything can happen.
But conventional wisdom holds that talking about ones campaign is about as interesting as talking about ones dreams.
MostD&Dcampaigns are private affairs that leave few traces outside of scribbled notes and fond memories.
For this reason, it is difficult to develop a properaestheticaccount ofD&D.
It is less like reviewing a book and more like reviewing a book club.
We might begin with the idea of role-playing.
The earliest players approachedD&Dlike just another war game, blazing blithely from one dungeon to another.
This was easier said than done.
I once witnessed a player slit her own throat rather than be forced to betray a beloved friend.
FewD&Dplayers can shake the bittersweet sense that the imaginary world is always slipping away.
A proper session takes at least four hours, which makes scheduling a headache.
The games serial structure also means a single adventure may be stretched out over weeks or months.
But the world of a role-playing game must be summoned over and over by the force of collective intention.
(Remember that for Tolkien, a devout Catholic, even the real world was invented.)
I wish I had never seen the Ring!
DMs were advised to interpret wishes with utmost discretion, lest players ruin the game or break the world.
Such a world may not have been real.
But the wish always was.
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