So Long, Dungeon Master

The e-mail from my friend was simply a stark subject line: "Gygax is dead." The co-creator of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, E. Gary Gygax—the man who made possible my countless (I'll say it before you do) nerdy all-night sessions of battling bugbears and kobolds with graph paper, miniature lead figures and polyhedral dice—was gone. My first self-defensive reaction was to reply with an easy crack about Gary losing his "saving throw" roll or whiffing a necromancy spell on himself, but his passing quickly brought out a weird melancholy in me. I'll be honest: I really liked D&D, and I miss playing it with my friends.

Role-playing games—particularly ones in which Elvish might be spoken sans irony—are much-maligned and mocked by those who know of them. But I would argue that those who've at least crawled through a handful of imaginary castle keeps would recognize the appeal of an open-ended story played out with friends. For the uninitiated, table-top fantasy games fundamentally involve creating "characters" on paper with qualities and skills and reacting to situations described verbally by another player (the "dungeon" or "game master") as part of a greater adventure (the "campaign"). Each quality and skill has a numerical value taken from a roll of the dice—and those numbers define your character's chance of success or failure at tasks. You don't "win" at D&D—the storytelling interplay between you, your companions and the Dungeon Master is the point. Although there is a fair amount of make-believe gold hoarding and drooling over make-believe magic weaponry that goes on.

The complicated evolution of Dungeons & Dragons from a modest three-volume set of books in 1974 to a vast array of glossy, expensive "open game content" "d20 system" fantasy games shelved in your local big-box bookstore indicates somebody is still buying this stuff. What's more, D&D is at the root of modern videogames: what is World of Warcraft or blazing through Halo 3 on Xbox Live, if not playing a role? And hey, "coach," you and your fantasy sports team may have stemmed from rotisserie baseball, but your time spent adjusting your roster bears a noticeable resemblance to picking out spiffy chain mail and a nice "plus one" sword for a paladin. Just saying.

Gygax had his share of troubles with TSR's management (Tactical Studies Rules, the company he cofounded to produce the game) in the mid-1980s, and sold out his remaining interest. While he had critical success with subsequent creations, the niche games he produced never reached past the core audience of table-top game enthusiasts. Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, now runs the Dungeons & Dragons brand after having acquired TSR, and D&D 4.0—the fourth edition of the game—is due for release spring and summer of 2008.

So I've asked my colleagues Carl Sullivan, Patrick Enright and N'Gai Croal to fess up to our gaming past and present—maybe even our future—in the wake of the original Dungeon Master's death, and walk our readers through various aspects of the widespread cultural legacy of Dungeons & Dragons. Bonus points for naming your first campaign. Mine: the classic 1979 "Keep on the Borderlands," module B2 ...

Carl Sullivan: Wow, Rolf. I'm impressed you remember the name of an actual campaign! My memories from the early '80s, when I played D&D for several years, are much more vague. What I do remember is the easy escape into hours of being holed up in a friend's bedroom, rolling strange-looking dice on the floor and keeping track of our adventures with pencil and paper. It's hard to explain to the uninitiated the appeal of this decidedly low-tech game where your imagination does all the work. We didn't even have the game pieces to represent our individual characters when we played, though my friend Mark did really cool drawings of what each of our characters looked like. My character was a human fighter (you could also choose to be an elf or dwarf, and either a wizard or cleric). I named him Sir Martin, and he had high strength, dexterity and charisma, but average intelligence (all of these abilities were determined at the beginning of the game by rolling the dice, and they could increase or decrease depending on what happened to you in the game). We'd meet at the home of our Dungeon Master (the player who runs the game) once a week or so for ongoing adventures, where we'd meet monsters and acquire treasure. Sir Martin eventually found a talking sword which sometimes offered advice in sticky situations. D&D was so fascinating because it presented ethical dilemmas where your choices had consequences for the other players. I loved watching how the other players made decisions and the sense of working together as a team. And for the awkward teenage me, the chance to inhabit someone else's skin was very appealing.

Patrick Enright: You guys are such nerds, and I say that with the greatest affection. Is it that much of a surprise that a kid whose mother picked out his clothes and cut his hair until he was 17, a kid who scarfed up Piers Anthony's fantasy novels and the Dragonlance books like Jolly Ranchers—that that nerdy, nerdy kid was into 20-sided dice and die-cast models of monsters? I came to D&D kind of late, in the mid-'80s, when I was in fourth or fifth grade. But my friends and I spent uncountable sunny afternoons huddled in dark rooms rolling dice and telling each other tales of swordplay and spell-casting. Partly the appeal lay in the fact that the landscape of D&D was totally foreign to us Southern California boys (and yes, we were all boys); you couldn't get much further from the sun-baked San Diego beaches we grew up on than dark, wolf-infested forests or ominous, cloud-shrouded mountains. And partly it was just an excuse for us to make up stories. (By the way, Carl, I was always a physically weak but mentally astute mage. Read into that what you will.) We never worried too much about strictly following the rules, and we traded off on who got to flip through the Monster Manual and guide the rest of us through our adventure. Sometimes we rolled dice to see how badly one of us was mauled by a giant spider or a bog monster, and sometimes we didn't, but we made sure to each have our own hand-sewn cloth bag holding a dozen of the multicolored acrylic polyhedrons. Ah, memories. I also blame/thank Mr. Gygax for my current love of wizard- and sword-themed heavy metal.