So Long, Dungeon Master

Ebeling: Personally, I've favored rangers of the half-elf ilk—skulking around forests, night vision, fancy archery gear. Think Viggo Mortensen crossed with Orlando Bloom in "The Lord of the Rings" movies, all icy stares and ridiculous accuracy.

I too was introduced to D&D in elementary school. I can remember sitting outside my third-grade classroom "rolling up" characters at recess—cheating on key traits, of course—and frankly, getting stalled right there. No one really knew how to run a game properly, and it wasn't until high school that my various friends with similar interests (science fiction, comic books, the wit and wisdom of Conan the Barbarian) coalesced and decided to avoid the tedium of parties and girls and start serious plundering exploits into the Tomb of Horrors. My best friend Ryan—our regular DM—was a skilled organizer and storyteller, and we spent many afternoons and evenings together in each other's houses with our regular crew of brainy misfit pals, eating too many Skittles and arguing about hit dice tables. We were so out of control.

However, we did leave D&D behind ... for other games. In the mid to late '80s, new genres of RPGs [role-playing games] came on to the market, and we were off investigating mysteries in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu (based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft) or battling it out with a Russian invasion force throughout a postapocalyptic Texas in Game Designers Workshop's Twilight: 2000 (think John Milius's "Red Dawn" with a healthy dose of Tom Clancy novels). Ryan and I still joke in detail about bizarre, had-to-be-there moments in games we played more than 20 years ago. It's also fair to say my brief flirtations with screenwriting were a direct result playing or running games—they were a great tool for learning the mechanics of plot and pacing.

Postcollege—and on into marriages and kids and all-consuming jobs on opposite coasts—my friends and I have had to settle for occasional sojourns into the digital firefights of Xbox Live as our only means of replicating the golden gaming years (for a brief and very fun time, we managed to wrangle a group together to play and drink beer, but the complexities of real life managed to break up our band of brothers). We looked into Warcraft, but like N'Gai, the digital descendents of D&D have not caught our imagination. To date, they've lacked the deeper socialization at the core of table-top games, and my friends and I have all gravitated primarily to online action titles. Sure, we catch up on each other's lives via headset while we frag and clear the enemy's bunker, but it's not the same as laughing at each other's dumb jokes in person around a fold-out card table. Now I'm left to snicker knowingly at the occasional pop-culture reference to Gygax's work, from "live-action role-playing" viral video classics to "The Sarah Silverman Program" to the unbelievably density of geek-lore that is "The Venture Brothers".

As Stephen Colbert put it at the end of his show last night, we'll roll a 20 missing Gygax. Wait a minute. Let's see—between us, we've got a human fighter, a mage, a ranger and a Dungeon Master ... Gentleman, I'll bring the dice, and Carl, make sure Sir Martin brings that talking sword.

© 2008