50 years of Dungeons and Dragons

No save... but lots of fun.

This is the year of golden anniversaries. On the heels of 50 years of Savage Sword of Conan comes a half century of a game that meant and still means a hell of a lot to me. It’s a game in my past, but I might play it again. Hell, I bought my first comic book/illustrated magazine in 33 years, Stranger Things could happen (<=intentional D&D reference inserted here).

I can’t begin to tell you how much fun I had with Dungeons and Dragons and other role playing games. But mostly, with D&D.

I still have all my old core materials. All/most of the AD&D 1E, 2E, and 3.5 hardbacks, plus Moldvay/Cook B/X and the Mentzer sets through Immortals. Approximately 60 modules, and at least 100 issues of Dragon and Dungeon. Once in a while I take them off the shelf, thumb through for the illustrations and the quirky and rich Gygaxian prose.

D&D was my gateway to the RPG hobby. I don’t know the precise year I began but it was definitely in elementary school in the early 80s. The Tom Moldvay basic set was the first RPG I ever owned. I still own those same battered, careworn books.

I remember playing Traveler in elementary school with the black books during lunch. I was fascinated by the crunchiness of the game and the fact that you could die(?) with a series of unfortunate rolls during character creation. I went on to play other RPGs as well, but always came back to Dungeons and Dragons.

This picture paints a thousand words.

We spent many years not playing “right,” misinterpreting rules and playing Monty Haul ultralevel characters that slew demons and devils and collected artifacts and relics like I collect battered S&S paperbacks. Murder-hoboing our way through The Keep on the Borderlands. But having a blast all the while. I remember the excitement when a magic-user would level up, unlock a new spell level, and spend hours agonizing over whether to memorize “Polymorph Self” or “Wall of Ice.”

Eventually our games got more refined as our grasp of the rules improved. Middle school was a step up. Some of my fondest memories of those awkward years were walking home from school with a few friends where an afternoon of adventure awaited: A ping-pong table with hundreds of painted lead miniatures. I was obsessed with the game at this time, carting off piles of books on family camping trips, vacations, and Boy Scout retreats. I created worlds on lined notebook and graph paper in three-ring binders. I painted miniatures, including a skeleton army. I vividly remember the blast I had running a group through A4, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, in which the party starts out as loinclothed prisoners deep in the caverns of the wicked slavers and must rely on their wits and pluck to escape to the surface. 

I even got to play D&D during school, during a Friday afternoon 7th period elective in eighth grade. How cool is that?

As an adult I returned to the game I loved, and played for more than 10 years with a new group of friends  made while rolling D20s together. And lost one of those friends, far too early.

I once wrote to Gary Gygax, and to my eternal amazement he wrote me back. I remain indebted to Gary’s work co-founding TSR and am inspired to pick up a good general history of the hobby, possibly Game Wizards or Slaying the Dragon. If you have any recommendations let me know.

For a while I thought computer RPGs would kill off this great old game. Back in the day I loved games like Wizard’s Crown and Ultima and Phantasie and The Bard’s Tale, but these were in the end fairly primitive graphics-wise, a little clunky in their execution, and most of all greatly limited compared to what you could do at the game table. Which was (and is) essentially, limitless, contained only by the imagination of the players and DM. CRPGs have gotten far better, richer, and freeform since, but that hasn’t seemed to hamper the growth of traditional tabletop RPGs. They seem as healthy or perhaps even healthier than ever, at least from my vantagepoint as a casual observer.

Today (and despite some recent missteps by Hasbro) I don’t believe D&D will ever die. It fulfills a need all humans have, for good company and shared storytelling around the table. 50 years ago D&D was created by enthusiasts who recognized this need and married it to their joint love of wargaming and fantasy fiction. The result was magic. I remain forever grateful.