Roll a D20 and the Author Dies

PAUL BUDRA

Some years ago a friend of mine would drive downtown every Sunday afternoon to play Dungeons and Dragons. The "dungeonmaster," the person running the game, was a professor of literature at a prestigious university. All the other players had at least one graduate degree, and several were doctors of law or literature. They would spend up to six hours at a time pretending to be elves, half-elves, gnomes, halflings, or exotic humans negotiating the complicated fantasy world that the dungeonmaster described. My friend played a "dark" elf, a character who, though both a warrior and a magic user, was shunned by the society in which she was raised and so fled to the woods to commune with animals. My friend is an animal lover in real life, and the characters the other participants played were often reflections of their own personalities or professions: for instance, the characters played by lawyers almost never chose to battle monsters; they would attempt to negotiate with them. All the players became deeply involved with their characters. It was not uncommon for a player to leave the game sobbing if her character "died" during the game. And sometimes it was difficult to return to reality when the game was over for the day. At the conclusion of one of these sessions, the band of characters that the participants were playing "found" a treasure of gold and exotic jewels, a pleasing conclusion to an imaginary adventure. But after the session had dispersed for the day, one of the players got in her car and thought to herself, "Thank God. Now I can pay the phone bill."

My friend's adventure with, and in, Dungeons and Dragons sheds light on a gaming subculture that is rarely discussed and yet has a pedigree that is over a hundred years old. "In 1811, Herr von Reiswitz and his son, a Prussian artillery officer, modified a version of a game called War Chess, which had been created some thirty years before.... Herr von Reiswitz conceived the new version of the war-strategy game, christened Kreigsspiel, as an aid to educate young Prussian military officers" (Mackay 13). This game used counters to represent troop formations. The counters were moved on a miniature battlefield and the outcome of a battle was settled through the rolling of dice and the adjudication of an impartial referee. In the early twentieth century, H. G. Wells adapted this concept in his game book Little Wars. By the mid-twentieth century, many complex, commercially produced war games, most played on elaborate cardboard terrain maps, were available. In 1971 E. Gary Gygax produced a war game called Chainmail that capitalized on the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy by including nonhuman combatant characters – dwarves, elves, monsters, etc. – in such a war game. Shortly after, Gygax teamed up with Dave Arneson, a game designer who proposed having game players take on the roles of individual combatants – characters – rather than troops. Their collaboration resulted in Dungeons and Dragons, the first of the "tabletop role-playing games," so designated to differentiate them from video role-playing games.

Unlike most games, Dungeons and Dragons is collaborative rather than competitive. The group that sits down to play works together to create a story for the characters they perform. Daniel Mackay has called the game "an episodic and participatory creation system that includes a set of quantified rules that assist a group of players and a gamemaster in determining how their fictional characters' spontaneous interactions are resolved" (4–5). Those interactions create the story. The gamemaster not only adjudicates the rules of the game, but also performs minor characters and fills in any necessary description. An individual role-playing game can continue literally for years: "players can continue to play the same character through many role-playing game sessions. These many sessions, when considered together, form a continuous, often complex narrative concerning a stable cast of characters in a consistent, interactive, fictional environment controlled and created by the gamemaster" (Mackay 7).

The logic of the game world and characters is determined by rule-books and mathematical formulas applied to complex dice rolls. While the original Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks enabled the gamemaster to create a fantasy world that resembled that in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, many role-playing games set in other fictional worlds have appeared since the 1970s. There are games set in the Star Wars universe and that of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The game Call of Cthulhu is based on the horror fiction of American writer H. P. Lovecraft while the game Cyberpunk draws on the science fiction imaginings of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Not only are the imaginary environments of each game different, each game has its own rules for the creation of the characters that the players perform. Most follow the basic Dungeons and Dragons formula and describe the characters through a set of characteristics: strength, wisdom, charisma, agility, etc. Each of these categories is given a numeric value that influences game play. So, a character with a high strength number will have an advantage when he "performs" certain strength-related deeds in the fictional environment. In addition to these basic characteristics, characters can have specific skills (say, lock picking) and be capable of performing certain feats ("battle frenzy," perhaps). As the game progresses, characters also (in most games) acquire "experience points." These points accrue and allow the character to evolve, gaining new skills or increasing the numeric advantage of a characteristic. But there are many other systems, including one called the generic universal role-playing system (GURPS) that is designed to be compatible with any gaming environment.

What little scholarly work that has been done on role-playing games has tended to be sociological. Gary Alan Fine has studied role-playing games as a "contemporary urban leisure subculture" (1) in which the gamers create alternate, usually fantastic, imaginary cultural systems. The majority of the essays in the collection Gaming as Culture, edited by Williams, Hendricks, and Winkler, have a sociological bent, focusing...