Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID EWALT: Thank you all for having me.
My name is David Ewalt.
I am a writer, I am a gamer, and I am a level-15 cleric.
That's usually a line I actually like giving to people
who aren't big gamers.
But I'm assuming being here at Google that there are more
than a few gamers in this audience and more than a few
D&D people.
So technically, I'm a level-16 character, a level-15 cleric,
and level-1 psionic warrior.
I see the glimpses of recognition in the audience.
You're my people.
You're the ones I'm going to be talking to today.
So I wrote this book about "Dungeons & Dragons" because I
played "D&D" and other role-playing games a lot when
I was a kid.
And the game was really important to me for a number
of reasons.
One was just because it was so much fun, but also because it
was the way that I met some of my very best
friends in the world.
If you've never played the game, it's social.
You're sitting down at a table with other people and looking
at them, and telling a story together.
So you tend to make friendships during the game
that last a long time.
So the game was really important to me.
I grew up, I kind of stopped playing it
when I went to college.
But then I realized this game was
something really important.
I started writing about technology and about games.
And when I would go meet people in the video game
industry, I would talk to designers and to executives of
game companies.
And I would say to them, so what made you want to make
video games for a living?
And over and over and over again, the answer they would
give me was, "Well, you know, I played a lot of 'Dungeons &
Dragons' when I was a kid."
So that made me start thinking, there's more to this
game than just the fun weekends I had with my
friends, in my friend Mike's basement, that kind of thing.
And so I started to delve into it further and figure out the
history of it, where the game came
from, why it's so important.
Why it influenced our culture, why it influenced our
industry, and just why it's so pervasive in the 21st century.
So what I want to do here is I want to share a little bit of
that history with you.
We're going to do sort of the fast, very beginnings, just
like where "D&D" came from.
But I want to save a lot of time for questions, both
because I know you might have some, but also because one of
the fun things about this game is sharing
stories with people.
So I'd love to know, if you want to come up and talk about
one of your favorite campaigns, or particular
things that you got out of the game, what you feel like the
benefits of playing "D&D" or other role-playing games were,
I'd love to talk about that kind of stuff.
So the kind of 60-second ancestry, before I get to
reading a little bit of the book, is that role-playing
games like "Dungeons & Dragons." I kind of trace
their origins all the way back to chess.
Which if you think about it, is really a war game.
It's an abstract simulation of a famous
battle from Indian history.
You've got the knights, you've got the king,
you've got the pawns--
and that was first sort of represented as war on a board.
And these little figures were kind of teaching concepts of
war, and even more importantly,
little bits of strategy.
Like the real idea was not just to go in and kill all the
other pieces, but to dominate the space, to dominate the
board, and sort of be in control of the battlefield.
Because it was designed to sort of have that martial
intent, the game remained popular, especially among
people in the military.
And over the centuries, chess sort of evolved.
It got more complex.
People added more squares to it.
At one point, there was versions of chess that
literally had thousands of squares on the board, and
sometimes hundreds of pieces.
As technology advanced, the people playing the game would
add in new stuff.
Suddenly there would be infantrymen.
There would be halberdiers.
There would be cannons.
And then the board with the little squares kind of went
away, and you started to see, really, war games for the sake
of war, where here we've got terrain, where there's islands
and there's rivers and there's hills, and even sculpted sand
tables sometimes, where you'd have little figures.
It's the kind of stuff you see in war movies, when General
Patton's got his stick and he's pushing a
tank across the board.
Those war games were an evolution
from things like chess.
In the early 20th century, the war games kind of became
popularized when HG Wells--
who you probably know as a science-fiction author--
he developed a mainstream version of these big
complicated work games called Little Wars.
And the idea was that you could take your own toy
soldiers, if you were a kid, and use these very simple
rules to play out a war game.
It was very popular in the UK and across Europe and started
to spill over to the US, especially after World War II,
where a lot of veterans from the wars came back to the
United States, brought some of these games with them.
And sort of, I think, to a little extent, wanted to
relive some of the thrill of being on the battlefield and
sort of reminisce with each other, and use the game as an
excuse to, let's sit around a table, let's talk about these
battles and sort of relive some of these days.
So around this community of gamers, there started to be
gaming groups all over the country.
And one of the largest gaming groups the country was the
Midwest Military Simulation Association, based in
Minneapolis-Saint Paul.
And that's where we're going to start the history itself of
"Dungeons & Dragons."
The Midwest Military Simulation Association was
founded in 1964 by a small group of amateur historians,
miniature modelers, and gamers.
They grew quickly as war games became more popular.
Before long, the meetings were crowded and increasingly
contentious, as the problem of bickering over
rules reared its head.
Now this is something that comes up again in role-playing
games, but also in war games.
I went to a convention out in Pennsylvania a couple years
ago where people were playing these big war games.
And we played for like six hours, a single battle, where
we were playing Napoleonic miniatures, and I was one of
the members of the Prussian army.
That six hours, I think probably four hours of it was
arguing over rules and historical arcana, and the
rest of it was actually rolling dice
and playing the game.
The solution these gamers found was in the form of an
80-year-old Army training manual, "Strategos: A Series
of American Games of War," published in 1880 by Charles
AL Totten, a lieutenant in the Fourth
United States Artillery.
Dave Wesely, an undergraduate physics student at Saint
Paul's Hamline University, unearthed the book in the
University of Minnesota library and rediscovered the
centuries-old idea of an all-powerful referee--
someone to sort of watch over the game and look at it and
say, you know what?
You've got it wrong.
He's got it right.
We're going to do what he said.
Or even to say, you both have it wrong.
This is how we're going to resolve whether or not that
cannon just blew up your entire infantry line.
By 1967, the association had about 60 members and had grown
so big that it fractured.
Wesely and the rest of the young war-gamer crowd
coalesced around the home of David Arneson, a University of
Minnesota student.
They'd meet several times a week to play out traditional
Kriegspiel-style Napoleonic battles and board games,
including Avalon Hill's "Gettysburg," Parker Brothers'
war game "Conflict," Milton Bradley's Cold War simulator
"Summit," and a French game known in the US as "Risk."
In the fall, Wesely left the Twin Cities to attend graduate
school in Kansas.
Away from his gaming friends, he had months to plan
something memorable for his return home over winter break.
What he came up with was the first modern
role-playing game.
The scenario was set during the Napoleonic Wars in the
fictional town of Braunstein, Germany, surrounded by
opposing armies.
But Wesely didn't put the armies on the board.
Instead, he assigned each player a unique character to
control within the scenario.
Some players controlled military
officers visiting town.
Others took non-military roles, like the town's mayor,
school chancellor, or banker.
Wesely then gave each player their own unique objective,
forcing them to consider motivations for their actions
and to think beyond battlefield strategy.
The game quickly spun out of control.
Players wanted to do things Wesely hadn't planned for,
like duel each other, so he had to make up
rules on the spot.
They also wandered away from the table in small groups to
hold secret negotiations, which if you're the
all-powerful referee trying to run this game, people leaving
and not telling you what's going on, that does not make
your game work.
So Wesely returned to school thinking that
the game had flopped.
But the players felt otherwise.
Before long, they were begging Wesely for another Braunstein.
He obliged by designing new scenarios, like the one set in
1919 amid the Russian Civil War.
Another explored a Latin American dictatorship through
the eyes of student revolutionaries.
These innovations--
using a referee, assigning players, individual
characters, each who has their own unique objective, giving
each person the freedom to do what they want--
these lit a fire in the Twin Cities gaming community.
The Braunstein role-playing adventures appealed to players
who were tired of long, complicated war reenactments
and got them thinking about where games
could go from here.
So it wasn't long before other started to follow his example.
David Arneson was born in 1947 and grew up
in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
When he was a teenager, his parents bought him a copy of
Avalon Hill's "Gettysburg," and he got hooked.
Later, he moved on to the hardcore stuff, including
Civil War simulations and Napoleonic naval battles.
Upon enrolling at the University of Minnesota to
study history, he joined the Midwest Military Simulation
Association to further indulge the habit, and his basement
game room, which was just a small space within a big
Ping-Pong table in the middle, became the home base for this
war-gaming crowd.
So seated on a cushy couch "throne" at the head of that
Ping-Pong table, Arneson began making his own refinements to
traditional war game rules--
mostly by breaking them.
During one battle said amid the Roman conquest of Britain,
he got bored and decided to spice things up.
"I'd given the defending brigands a druid high priest,"
Arneson explained in a 1983 interview.
"In the middle of the battle, the dull battle, when the
Roman war elephant charged the Britons and looked like he was
going to trample half their army flat, the druidic high
priest waved his hands and pointed this funny little box
out of one hand and turned the elephant into so much barbecue
meat." Arneson removed the war elephant from the game,
explaining that the druid had killed it with a "Star
Trek"-style phaser gun.
"That was absolutely the only thing in the game that was out
of the ordinary, but the players weren't
expecting it," he said.
The players were nonplussed--
saved for the delighted commander
of the British druid.
But Arneson wasn't put off from sneaking elements of
fantasy into his games.
In December 1970, after a two-day binge of watching
monster movies and reading Robert H. Howard's "Conan the
Barbarian" books, Arneson invited his friends over under
the pretense of playing a traditional
Napoleonic war game.
Instead, he introduced them to the city of Blackmoor.
"They came down to the basement and there was a
medieval castle in the middle of the table," says Wesely's
friend David Megarry.
"And then Arneson says, 'We're going to do this instead.'"
The players, Arneson told them, had been sent through
time and space to a medieval city and had to control
original heroic characters, each with their own
attributes, powers, and goals.
"My very first character was a thief," says Megarry, "and my
nemesis was Dan Nicholson, the merchant.
His role was to try to get stuff into town and then sell
it, and my role was to try to steal his stuff and make my
money that way.
It gave us a framework of how to operate in this world."
Characters in place, Arneson sent the players to explore
the dungeons beneath the castle in town.
Inside, he hit them with another twist--
the subterranean passages weren't defended by human
soldiers but inhabited by fantastic monsters, like a
dragon, which Arneson represented on the table using
a plastic toy brontosaurus with a fanged clay head.
The fantasy role-playing game was born here.
At first, combat in the world of "Blackmoor" was resolved
using a clunky system of "Rock Paper, and Scissors." But
Arneson quickly to turned to the rules of a medieval
miniature war game called "Chainmail," paying particular
interest to two sections of its 62-page booklet--
"Man to Man," which explained how to manage individual
heroes amongst your army, and the fantasy supplement, which
included rules for casting magical spells and for
fighting hideous monsters.
"Chainmail" provided a framework that helped
"Blackmoor" develop from a novelty into a consistent
ongoing game.
But ultimately, the system proved too limited for
Arneson's growing fantasy world.
He began adding his own innovations--
rules for fighting in different types of armor,
lists of magical artifacts, and provisions for improving a
character over time.
Like any other passionate hobbyist, Arneson was excited
to show off his work with others.
So he decided to show off "Blackmoor" to
"Chainmail's" author.
Ernest Gary Gygax grew up playing games.
Born in Chicago in 1938, he knew pinochle by age five and
chess by six.
His grandfather would challenge him to matches,
checkmate him, start the game over at the point where Gary
had made his biggest mistake, and then repeat the process
until the boy's play was perfect.
When he was eight, the family moved out of the city, in part
because Gary had been involved in a 40-kid rumble, to the
quiet resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Gary passed his time there playing board games and cards.
At ten, he discovered Avalon Hill's "Gettysburg." "That
sealed my fate," he later wrote.
"For thereafter, I was a war-gamer." As an adolescent,
he got hooked on military miniatures battles and built
his own sand table.
He also loved fantasy.
When Gygax was a boy, his father, a Swiss immigrant, put
him to bed every night with tales of wizards and warriors.
He picked up "The Brothers Grimm" as soon as he could
read, mastered Poe before he was 10, and devoured the
amazing stories in pulp magazines like "Weird Tales,
"Argosy," and "Blue Book." Gygax found a favorite in the
works of Robert E. Howard.
Bright and highly literate, Gygax had little interest in
formal education and dropped out of high school in his
junior year.
Later, he attended junior college classes and toyed with
the idea of becoming an anthropologist, but his
childhood interest had instilled an undeniable
ambition to write and design games.
He took a job as an insurance underwriter to support his
gaming habit and then a growing family.
In 1958, he married an attractive redhead named Mary
Jo Powell, and they eventually had five kids.
In 1966 Gygax became a founding member of the United
States Continental Army Command, a club whose
impressive name belied the fact that its members were
actually engaged in a play-by-mail campaign of the
strategic war game "Diplomacy." A year later, the
group changed its name to the International Federation of
Wargaming and its focus to promoting the hobby.
So to that end, Gygax decided to organize a war-gaming
convention.
He rented out the Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall for $50,
and on August 24, 1968, he welcomed friends and IFW
members to "Gen Con," a double pun referring to both the
rules of war and the event's location.
Admission cost $1, and the show made just enough money to
cover the rental.
In August of 1969, Gygax held the event again.
This time, IFW member Dave Arneson drove from Saint Paul
to check out the action, and the two gamers spent a lot of
time together.
"Since we're only talking a couple hundred people at that
point, we pretty much ran into each other all the time,"
Arneson said.
"We were both interested in sailing-ship games." Arneson
had developed new rules for naval warfare simulations, and
so he showed them to Gygax.
And after the convention was over, they stayed in touch via
phone and letters, and shared ideas about how to make that
sailing game better.
In 1970, determined to make a career in gaming, Gygax quit
his job as an insurance underwriter and took a
part-time job writing and editing rule books for Guidon
Games, a tiny publisher based in Evansville, Indiana.
To supplement the meager income, he learned how to
repair shoes and practice cobblery out of his basement.
Guidon Games lasted barely as long as a new
pair of leather soles.
But before it went belly-up, it produced two games of
particular importance, 1971's "Chainmail," which was written
by Gygax and his friend Jeff Perren, and which provided a
starting rule set for Dave Arneson's "Blackmoor"
campaign, and also 1972's "Don't Give Up the Ship!,"
which was authored by Gygax, Arneson, and their war-gaming
friend Mike Carr, which was the result of their ongoing
discussion about naval warfare.
So based on his use of "Chainmail" and the successful
collaboration they had on "Don't Give Up the Ship!,"
Dave Arneson knew what to do after he created this weird
new fantasy role-playing game.
He shared it with Gary Gygax.
In the four decades that have passed since David Arneson and
Gary Gygax began their most important collaboration,
various geek pundits have attempted to describe, by way
of analogy, the nature of their momentous and fateful
partnership.
I've heard them described as Paul McCartney and John
Lennon, James Watson and Francis Crick, even--
and this is true--
John the Baptist and Jesus.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: Here's my attempt, which hopefully
resonates a little bit more with the Google crowd.
Two young men meet in the late 1960s, and they bond over a
shared love of a nerdy pastime.
They both belong to the shared hobbyist's club and they start
making things to share with the members.
Before long, they're working together on
something new and exciting.
One of them is the engineer.
He invents new ways of doing things.
The other is the visionary.
He realizes the potential.
The product they create could not have existed
without both of them.
And when it's released, it launches a brand new industry
and changes the world.
The story's the same whether you base it in the
International Federation of Wargaming or the Homebrew
Computer Club, where Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
jump-started the personal computer industry by founding
Apple Computer.
Wozniak, the engineer, designed the hardware and made
the computer function.
Jobs, the visionary, made it user-friendly and something
people wanted.
Arneson visited Lake Geneva in the fall of 1972 to show off
his "Blackmoor" game, but what he really delivered was
innovations.
Every player at the table controls just one character.
Those character seek adventure in a fantasy landscape.
And by doing so, they gain experience
and become more powerful.
Gary Gygax then took those ideas and
turned them into a commodity.
Over the next two months, Gygax labored at a portable
Royal typewriter crafting the rules for a new kind of game,
where players roll dice to create a hero, fight monsters,
and find treasure.
By the end of 1972, he'd finished a
50-page first draft.
He called it the "Fantasy Game".
The first people to play it were Gygax's 11-year-old son,
Ernie, and 9-year-old daughter, Elise.
Gygax had created a counterpart to Arneson's
"Blackmoor", which he called "Castle Greyhawk," and he
designed a single level of its dungeons.
One night after dinner, he invited the kids to roll up
characters and start exploring.
Ernie created a wizard and named in Tenser, an anagram
for his full name, Ernest.
Elise least played a cleric called Ahlissa.
They wrote down the details of the characters on index cards
and entered the dungeon.
In the very first room, they discovered and defeated a nest
of scorpions.
In the second, they fought a gang of kobolds.
And then they found their first treasure, a chest full
of copper coins--
but it was too heavy to carry out.
The two adventurers pressed on until 9 o'clock, when the
Dungeon Master put them to bed.
Fatherly duties completed, Gygax returned to his office
and designed another level of the dungeons.
The next day, the play tests continued.
Ernie and Elise were joined by three players plucked from
Gygax's regular war-gaming group--
his childhood friend Don Kaye and local teenagers Rob Kuntz
his brother Terry.
He also sent the manuscript to a few dozen war-gaming friends
around the country, requesting feedback.
"The reaction was instant enthusiasm.
They demanded publication of the rules as soon as
possible."
The local gamers also clamored for more.
As they got farther into the depths of Castle Greyhawk,
they faced greater challenges and began to feel like they
were part of a legend.
Thanks to Dave Arneson's innovation of persistent
characters, the dungeons had a living history.
If Tenser killed a pack of kobolds on Tuesday, someone
else might find the corpses on Thursday.
It was a brand-new way to create a story.
Gygax began running regular sessions of the "Fantasy Game"
for a growing group of players.
And simultaneously, Dave Arneson tried out the rules
with his "Blackmoor" players in Saint Paul.
Arneson and Gygax spent a year testing the "Fantasy Game"
with their respective gaming clubs and then discussing what
did and didn't work.
"I don't know if any game has ever been play-tested as much
as this game," says Michael Mornard, who was the only
person to play a regular character in both Gygax's
"Greyhawk" campaign and Arneson's "Blackmoor".
Gygax's early "Greyhawk" sessions were understandably
surprising to players like Mornard, who'd never seen this
brand-new thing called a fantasy role-playing game.
But they would also look different to today's
experienced D&D players.
There was no common gaming table.
The players sat together, and Gygax sat alone at his desk.
The way his study was arranged, he had a desk with a
filing cabinet right next to it, and he would pull out the
drawers on the filing cabinet and hide behind them, so when
you hear his voice, it was kind of like the voice of God
coming out of nowhere to issue you instructions.
All the action took place entirely
inside everyone's heads.
If you wanted a map, you had to draw one.
Gary wasn't about to give you one.
And there wasn't much talking, either.
Each party had a caller who spoke for the group.
Players quietly discussed their actions and then told
the caller, who called Gygax.
If anyone talked too much, they risked missing an
important announcement from behind the filing cabinet.
There were no set adventuring parties.
There was nothing like Frodo's Fellowship of the Ring.
During play-testing, Gygax ran the game for three to five
players each time, but they were drawn from a pool of
about 20 different people.
They were adventurers who occasionally banded together.
There was much more mercenary.
There was no, "We're all in this together, this is our
group, we're sticking with this."
There were also no piles of rule books, and not just
because they hadn't been written.
Gygax wanted his players to learn the game through
experience.
And because the game was so new, players never knew what
to expect from their Dungeon Master or from their cohorts.
Gygax was learning the game alongside his players and
changing the rules based on their actions.
Night after night, small groups of players pushed the
boundaries of what was possible.
Their actions shaped Gygax and Arneson's work and decades of
games that followed.
After the better part of a year spent playing in Gary
Gygax's "Fantasy Game" play tests, Mike Mornard moved to
Minneapolis to start college at the
University of Minnesota.
So naturally, he made friends with the local gamers and soon
found himself in Dave Arneson's basement.
Perhaps because the "Blackmoor" players were more
often college-age and less often neighborhood children,
Arneson's games were less playful than Gygax's.
"Blackmoor was a much grimmer, grittier place than Greyhawk,"
says Mornard.
"In Greyhawk, if you were killed, the other players
would drag your body home.
But in Blackmoor, there was no honor amongst thieves.
You'd be looted before your body hit
the ground." [LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: The game played a little differently, too.
"It was a different way of interacting," says Mornard.
Arneson liked to use miniatures, while
Gygax rarely did so.
Arneson used to draw maps for his players instead of
insisting they do so themselves.
And he made people write up their moves on little pieces
of paper instead of shouting them out or
talking over each other.
Based on feedback from play tests in "Blackmoor" and
"Greyhawk" and from war-gamer friends across the country,
Gygax completed a 150-page revision of the "Fantasy Game"
in the spring of 1973 and sent it out to
more friends for testing.
"The reaction was so intense that I was sure we had a
winning game," he wrote.
"I thought we would sell at least 50,000 copies to
war-gamers and fantasy fans.
I underestimated the audience a little."
So the demand was there.
The game worked.
The only thing missing was a name.
"Fantasy Game" was a fine working title, but too bland
for a final product.
So Gygax created a list of words that related to the game
and wrote them in two columns on a sheet of paper--
words like "castles," "magic," "monsters," "treasure,"
"trolls," "mazes," "sorcery," "spells," and "swords."
He read them aloud to his players, including Ernie and
Elise, to gauge their reactions.
The young girl's delight at two of the words, an
alliterative pair, confirmed the choice.
The game would be called "Dungeons & Dragons."
So now they only had to print it.
In the summer of 1973, Gygax called Avalon Hill, which was
one of the big gaming companies at the time, and
asked if they were interested in publishing his game.
"They laughed at the idea, turned it down," Gygax wrote.
Most of the gaming establishment wanted nothing
to do with Arneson and Gygax's weird little idea.
"One fellow had gone so far to say that not only was fantasy
gaming 'up a creek,'" wrote Gygax, "but if I had any
intelligence whatsoever, I would direct my interest to
something fascinating and unique--
the Balkan Wars, for
example." No matter.
The Dungeon Master want to choose his own adventure.
Gygax had aspirations to run his own company--
he just didn't have the time and money to
start printing books.
His income was still coming from repairing shoes in his
basement, and Arneson was a security guard.
So neither one of them really had the start-up funds to get
this going.
And remember, this is 1973 Wisconsin.
This is not Silicon Valley.
There's no venture capitalists running around, offering to
buy out your game.
So the solution was found in the place where the whole
project started.
In August, the annual Gen Con convention--
now in its fifth year and bigger than ever--
was held in several buildings on the campus of George
Williams College, up the road from Lake Geneva in a town
called Williams Bay.
Members of Gygax's ever-growing "D&D" play test
flocked to the con and caught the eye of one
of Gygax's old friends.
"Don Kaye saw the turnout, noted the interest in the
fans," wrote Gygax, "and after the event was over, asked, 'Do
you really think you can make a success of a game publishing
company?'"
Kaye didn't have cash to invest, either.
But after seeing the crowds at Gen Con, he was convinced
"D&D" was a salable product.
So he borrowed $1,000 against his life insurance, and that
October he and Gygax became equal partners in a new
company called Tactical Studies Rules.
It was based out of Kaye's dining room.
There were still problems.
$1,000 wouldn't print enough copies of D&D to meet the
anticipated demand.
So Gygax decided to publish a different game first--
"Cavaliers and Roundheads," a set of rules for English Civil
War miniatures battles cowritten by Gygax and his
"Chainmail" partner, Jeff Perren.
They published "Cavaliers and Roundheads" hoping the sales
of the booklet would generate sufficient income to afford to
publish the D&D game.
They knew that "D&D" was going to be the horse to pull the
company, but "Cavaliers and Roundheads" only
raised $700 in sales.
But then the last piece fell into place.
Another local gamer, Brian Blume, had also been to Gen
Con, seen the crowds of people, and "badgered Gary
into letting him in at the ground-floor." Blume was 23,
divorced, and worked as a tool-and-die maker's
apprentice at a company owned by his dad.
In December, he borrowed $2,000 from his father and
became a full partner in Gygax and Kaye's company.
A week later, Gygax sent his manuscript, now broken into
three small booklets called "Men & Magic," "Monsters &
Treasure," and "Underworld & Wilderness Adventures," to
Graphic Printing in Lake Geneva.
He paid $2,300 to print 1,000 sets.
In January 1974, Tactical Studies Rules made its
creation public.
It cost $10 and came in a hand-assembled cardboard box
covered in wood-grain paper.
A flyer pasted to the top lid featured a drawing of a Viking
warrior on a rearing horse--
art which was stolen from a Doc Strange comic book.
Gygax and Arneson's names were also on the cover, and above
that was the title--
"Dungeon's & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval
Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and
Miniature Figures."
So this is the beginning of the history.
And it is an extremely convoluted and important one.
The game blew up.
Within a year of it coming out, it was the biggest thing
in the war-gaming community.
People around the country were playing it, but it was still
kind of a niche hobby thing.
Within a few years, the game started to leak out of that
little war-gamer community, and a lot of college kids
everywhere played it.
And something happened where a kid who was a fan of the
role-playing game suffered from severe depression and
disappeared from college.
He ran away, basically.
But local law enforcement authorities, when they went to
figure out, well, what happened?
Where'd this kid go?
They found these weird books in his dorm room that had
pictures of demons and monsters on them.
And this was a brand-new game.
No one had ever seen anything like it before.
So they said, this must be it.
He's playing this Satanic game.
He was driven to kill himself.
That sad event is actually kind of blew "D&D" up into the
mainstream.
It was very negative press for TSR and for "Dungeons &
Dragons," but it was national news.
And within a couple of years, "Dungeons & Dragons" was one
of the most-played games in the country.
Avalon Hill tried to come back and at that point, say hey, we
want to buy "Dungeons & Dragons" from you, at which
point Gary Gygax probably not so politely
told them to get lost.
And the game went on to influence
things like video games.
Some of the very first video games were attempts to codify
"Dungeons & Dragons," to take the pages of rules and charts
and the manual die-rolling and make it automatic, make it
simpler to have that adventure, that experience of
wandering through a dungeon and fighting things.
So this is where I come in, as a kid who picked up this game
and had never seen anything before like it, and said,
"This is awesome.
I want to play this." And this is where I assume a lot of you
came in, too.
Because "Dungeons & Dragons" is one of those things that
was not only sort of a seminal game and a cultural force in
the '80s and '90s, but the game appeals to a certain
group of people.
There's a certain kind of geeky personality that
definitely responds to the math, the logic, the fantasy
setting, the rules.
And so people like me really got into it, and it
meant a lot to us.
And we met our friends that way.
And for many of us, it also shaped our careers.
So what I want to do now is I want to open this up to
questions, whether you want to ask about the history of "D&D"
or of other role-playing games.
But I'd also love to hear your stories if you did play "D&D"
What were your characters like?
What did you get out of it?
You know, I had one friend who told me it helped him get into
college, because he knew a vocabulary word.
He knew the word "comeliness" because it appeared in
"Dungeons & Dragons," and then it showed up on the SATs.
So if you've got stories like that to share, come up to the
mics at either end.
We are simulcasting this talk to other offices, so make sure
you use the mic so people elsewhere can hear you.
And so let's chat.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you.
I was curious, as you were looking into the history of
"Dungeons & Dragons," did you look at the history of other
story games that, at least at the present, sort of are a
response to "D&D" but are much more about the personal story
and much less about, say, the math or the combat?
DAVID EWALT: Yeah, absolutely.
Because of sort of the nature of publishing, this book is
very focused on "Dungeons & Dragons." But there's such a
rich world of role-playing games that grew out of this.
It's important to remember that "D&D" wasn't just sort of
the first game of this type.
It was the first role-playing game.
No one had ever done that--
you play a person and you pretend to
be a different person.
And there were some really interesting responses to it.
There were games like "Bunnies & Burrows," which was a
role-playing game based on the novel "Watership Down." You
actually played a bunny and sort of acted out
some Marxist politics.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: There were role-playing games based on
spy novels, things like "Top Secret." And a lot of the
games had a different focus.
It was less about the rules and the numbers and more about
this idea of, OK, if you're going to play a character,
what's going to be interesting here is to flesh that out and
to see where you can take the person.
More modern incarnations of that--you know, White Wolf did
some great games in the 1990s that I played a lot, games
like "Vampire: The Masquerade," where it was
really more about sort of acting out the character.
And the politics between players--
I'm a vampire, I belong to this one clan, you belong to a
different one.
The game's not going to be about us fighting.
It's going to be about, how does my clan relate to yours?
How can I manipulate you to get the political goals done
of my clan.
And modern role-playing games today, if I can generalize,
have sort of branched out in two directions.
There are the ones which are sort of very rules-light and
where the point is really to explore character.
And there's also a really cool phenomenon that people
describe as old-school gaming, where it's much more about,
let's roll some dice.
Let's get back in that dungeon and kill a bunch of kobolds,
and just have that classic sort of rolling through.
I find value in both of them.
It's really fun to put yourself in another character
and to explore who that person is.
And it's therapeutic in a lot of ways, too.
You start to think about, well, how do other people act
and respond to stimulus that I don't usually
have to deal with?
Are there more questions?
Somebody else want to jump up?
AUDIENCE: Hello there.
DAVID EWALT: Hi.
AUDIENCE: So I just want to say, first, a statement that
leads to the question, that I've always found the greatest
value in the role-playing games, any of the D20 tabletop
games, is in the true malleability of the story that
no other medium can capture.
A book, a movie have one story, no matter how many
times you read it.
A video game will have maybe finitely many, but still, you
can go through them all.
But this is the only game where as you go, as, say, a
player figures out a twist in your plot, you can, before you
reveal that twist, change the twist so that
they're still wrong.
You can constantly change the game to fit the kind of
players you have.
But I can't help but find that in games like mine, where the
story is even more than the combat, that the mechanics
sometimes still drags down the game.
So the question is, with the now pervasiveness of cheap
technology like Chromebooks and tablets, the ability to
play with people who aren't sitting at the same table as
you, like Hangouts, do you see perhaps another revolution in
this industry as it starts to unite with technology?
The ability to have a malleable story, but not
necessarily all the math and dice?
DAVID EWALT: I do, in a couple of different ways.
One is purely the mechanical.
So when I'm playing with my friends-- we have this
campaign that's been going on now for a couple years, that I
write about in the book.
And I'm a 15th-level cleric, so sometimes I cast a spell,
and the way that "Dungeons & Dragons" calculates spells
becoming more powerful over time, is for some of them, if
you're level 15, you're going to roll 15-,
6-, or 8-sided dice.
And so that breaks up the narrative.
It's also, now you have to scrounge around the table, see
if you can find enough dice.
You probably only find five of them.
Then you have to roll them, add them up, roll
them add them up.
It takes you out of it.
So one of the simple technological innovations we
have is everybody's got their Android phone or their iPhone.
And there's a million apps that go on these things.
So just something as simple as automating the dice-rolling,
having a pre-programmed button that rolls 15 D6, really keeps
the narrative going.
Things like these virtual tabletops and things that
exist online where you can loop in friends and play long
distance, I think those are great.
I've got a friend who runs an entire campaign where
everybody's in a different city.
It allows you to keep having that social connection with
those people, and to play a game that's much more about
the people involved than you might find playing "World of
Warcraft." You actually can see people's faces and change
the story based on people's reactions.
One thing I will also tell you about, that's sort of related
to this, is what we're trying to address, a lot, with these
technological innovations is like you say.
We don't want the rules and the mechanics to take away
from the thrill of the game, from the narrative.
There's a new game that came out in the last couple years.
It's an indie role-playing game that goes in the exact
opposite direction.
Instead of going high-tech to try and get you on the story,
this game goes extremely low-tech.
It's called "Dread," and it's a survival-horror
role-playing game.
So the idea is really like you're going
into a horror movie.
It's like "Friday the 13th." It's a bunch of teenagers
going into an abandoned house, and a monster comes, starts
chasing them.
But there's no dice and there's no rules that the
players see.
All you have is on the middle of the gaming table, there is
a stack of "Jenga" pieces.
And as you get deeper into the story, every time you do
something that would require a die roll-0- like you try to
pick a lock or you try to break down a door, you take
one of the "Jenga" pieces out.
And it actually works brilliantly, because this is a
horror game.
And as you get further into the story, the "Jenga" tower
starts getting wobbly, and your decisions--
you start getting, physically--
I mean, you've played "Jenga." You have this physical
manifestation of, like--
reinforces all the tension and fear in the narrative through
this incredibly simple mechanical device.
Anybody who's a role-player, I recommend it.
But because it's got no rules, it's also great.
Like we've played it with lots of people who've never
role-played a game before.
So it's just interesting to see the two different ways
that people try to address narrative and to
keep it in the story.
They're going by super high-tech or super low-tech.
Another question?
AUDIENCE: First of all, thanks for telling the story and
writing your book.
This is a purely historical question.
I remember--
and subsequently could never find, but apparently it's
somewhere in my parents' basement, but they insist they
didn't throw it away--
there was a first printing, second edition of "Deities &
Demigods" that included Gray Mouser and
Fafhrd, Elric of Melnibone.
And subsequently, there was a reprinting, and they
disappeared.
What happened?
DAVID EWALT: So there's a little bit of back-story here,
which is that, as you can see-- you know, I told you how
the first box of "Dungeons & Dragons" had a stolen piece of
artwork on the cover?
TSR, over its first few years, had a couple of different
legal run-ins.
One of the earliest was they printed a war-gaming board
game based on the big climactic battle in "The
Hobbit." They didn't have permission from JRR Tolkien's
estate, but they printed a war game based on "The Hobbit." So
they got sued and told not to do that.
They also printed a war game based on the Barsoom novels
and got sued based on that.
It was the same thing with the "Deities & Demigods" book.
This was a big book where they were collecting--
I mean, it was literally deities and demigods.
It was lists of, like, if you have a super high-level
character, you might run into a god.
You might run into Thor.
Or just if you're a cleric, this is who your deity is.
And they included some fictional characters, things
like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and
also the Cthulhu mythos.
And they didn't have the rights to any of those.
So they put the book out, and they got a couple of
cease-and-desist letters from various rights owners, and had
to very quickly withdraw what they had and release new ones.
And this is actually one of the things, you know, as "D&D"
has become more popular over the years, and now as people
are looking back on it in nostalgia, if you happen to
have one of these old hardback "AD&D" books, especially the
ones with the Cthulhu mythos and with the Gray Mouser
stories, those are worth a lot of money now.
There's a really big collectible market for these
"D&D" errata.
And if you have them stuck in a basement or in a box in your
parents' closet, go dig them out, because they're really
valuable nowadays.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious about the sort of family tree with
collectible card games and role-playing games.
I'd always sort of assumed when they came out, like when
I was made aware of them, in "Magic: The Gathering," that
it was a way to commercially sort of make more money on
something similar to role-playing games.
But I wonder, now, with the history of more rule-intensive
battle stuff sort of forking from the-- like if it does
actually meet the family tree somewhere?
DAVID EWALT: Sure.
So collectible card games are things like "Magic: The
Gathering," which were in fact directly inspired by "D&D."
The guy who invented "Magic: The Gathering," his name is
Richard Garfield.
He's still designing games.
In fact, he has a brand-new sort of computerized
collectible card game out.
He had played "D&D," and this was an attempt to sort of come
up with a new mechanism for, how can we have these fantasy
battles, but do it based on pieces of paper?
And a big part of the idea is the mechanism of
deck-building.
It's a less about, I build a character and I go into a
dungeon to climb levels.
It's more about, I buy these pieces and I put them together
in very smart ways to have them battle.
When those games first came out, when "Magic: The
Gathering" was first introduced, it was published
by a company called Wizards of the Coast.
"D&D," at the time, was still published by TSR.
It was kind of a shadow of its former self.
This the early '90s we're talking about.
And "Magic: The Gathering" just ate "D&D"'s lunch.
Like, nobody was buying "D&D" anymore. "Magic: The
Gathering" was hugely popular, in part because of this really
smart and insidious mechanism of, you want to be better?
Go to the store and buy more cards.
TSR tried to replicate that.
They released their own collectible card game called
"Spellfire: Master the Magic." It was not successful.
Piles of it sat in their warehouses and actually
contributed to their eventual downfall.
The company, because of all this unsold inventory and
because of other financial problems, went bankrupt, went
up on the block, and was purchased by Wizards of the
Coast, the "Magic: The Gathering" company.
Wizards of the Coast still owns "D&D" today.
They're owned, in turn, now by Hasbro.
But "Magic: The Gathering" is still very, very popular.
"D&D," in some sense, is still a little bit of a smaller
cousin, at least in terms of revenue, to "Magic: The
Gathering." If you go to game stores on any given night,
you're probably more likely to find people playing these
collectible card games then you are "D&D."
AUDIENCE: So along the note that we were just discussing,
the reputation TSR had in the early '90s and late '80s, the
impression I got, just vaguely, was that they were
totally incompetent managing money.
And there's apparently stories about them printing books that
literally, the price, even if they sold them at the exact
price, they would still lose money in every single sale,
because they put way too much effort, the hardback
books and the like.
Now how much of that is true?
And how much of that's just, they were dealing with, people
don't rebuy the same books over and over again for the
same edition of D&D they have?
DAVID EWALT: A surprising amount of it is true.
I already drew the comparison between Arneson and Gygax and
Wozniak and Jobs.
And there are lots of comparisons between this sort
of gaming culture and this startup, versus the start-up
of the computer industry.
But what you see here, and a lot of the stories I tell in
the book, are kind of like, this is what happens on the
bad side of the equation.
Like, it's great when you get people who are passionate
about their product, people who are hobbyists, who say, I
want to create an operating system.
Or I'm going to put this gadget together in a garage.
And when they turn that into a big product, that's great.
Just as often, the people who come into that, the problem
is, they're domain experts.
And these guys were gamers.
They were not experienced businessmen.
So TSR wasted a lot of money on really stupid things.
And that's the reason why the company eventually got bought
out, and why Gary Gygax, at one point, gets kicked out of
the company.
It's because they were doing stuff like--
and some of the stories I refer to--
TSR got really rich.
The game was super popular.
Tons of money are coming in.
They didn't know what to do with it.
Instead of spending it responsibly, they did things
like, they purchased a company that did needlework kits.
They released tons of "D&D"-themed merchandise,
everything from coloring books, but also like beach
towels and just like tons of worthless crap that nobody
really wanted.
My favorite story of this sort of corporate excess was that
for a while, the management of TSR
considered buying a railroad.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: The place where TSR was based, which was Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin, was a resort town sort of during the
1920s, like the Al Capone days.
It was a big resort town.
So all the rich people from Chicago would take the train
up to Lake Geneva.
After that age ended, the train got shut down.
There was nobody running on that train line.
So the makers of TSR was like, well, what if we bought this
train line?
And we could set up trains, and instead of a conductor in
each car, you would have a Dungeon Master.
And people would get on the train, and by the time they
made it from Lake Geneva to Chicago, they'd have done a
full adventure.
Well, thankfully, they never spent the money on that.
But probably the reason why they never spent that money
was because they got kicked out of business for doing
stupid stuff like thinking about buying a railroad.
AUDIENCE: So you were talking about video games, which are
getting more and more high-fidelity, and collectible
card games, and "Dungeons & Dragons" still being a smaller
part of Wizards of the Coast.
Do you think that there's a lot of future in this hobby?
Or is it more of like a nostalgic phenomenon for
people kind of in their 30s and older who started with
these things?
Because I don't see people playing it anymore very much.
You know, you see game stores closing around the place.
And I just wonder what your opinion on that is.
DAVID EWALT: I think there is definitely a future for
"Dungeons & Dragons," and I think we're actually in the
early stages of a big revival of the game.
I think this is happening for two reasons.
One, which is as you identified, there's a
nostalgia for the game.
I mean, you've got people who played it
when they were a kid.
And now they're grown up, and they have money, and they want
to reconnect with their friends.
They want to do something social.
And this is a great way--
I mean, it's like having a weekly poker night.
Come sit down with your friends, play
a game for a while.
And people really remember that fondly and
want to do it again.
The other reason, I think, actually has to do with the
expansion of video games.
And "D&D" almost got killed by video games, but I think now
it's coming back.
Because for one thing, video games are everywhere now.
Everyone plays video games.
Young, old, male, female--
I mean, you've got grandparents who are playing
"Angry Birds" on their phone.
So "D&D" is no longer as weird as it once was.
Like it was hard, in the 1980s, to go to someone who
didn't game and explain to them, here's this thing where
you pretend to be a paladin, and you're
going to kill some--
they couldn't-- it was a difficult mental leap to make.
Now when you're playing games all the time, it's much easier
to understand and to make the leap.
And it's also less scary, because you're not going to
think of it as, like, gaming?
That's some weird, nerdy thing that I would never do.
You're like, well, I do play this.
I play "World of Warcraft." Why not?
So I think the game is going to have a revival.
And I think particularly, as our lives are becoming more
digital, I think people really value that--
I get to sit down at a table.
And even if they don't want to sit down at a table with their
friends, they can get online with them and use some of
these online tools and have a face-to-face connection.
So the game's not going away.
Another question?
AUDIENCE: Hey, Dave.
Just wanted to do also ask a question based on where the
future and where you see the next revival going.
I know that--
I'm not an MMO guy.
The biggest leap forward I've seen is "Eve," and how you see
this great community of people, doing
these massive battles.
And then they're covered as, like, televised events.
And I was seeing if you knew something like that.
What would the next evolution be?
You know, taking something like that and having that kind
of connection to tell these stories and to actually have
the kind of narrative power?
DAVID EWALT: Sure.
Well, there's two interesting things happening.
One is, so you talk about online games, and sort of
hinting towards the idea of eSports, where people are
televising these events of like, OK, we're going to have
a "League of Legends" finals.
Like, these things are huge now.
If you play the games, people log on to sites like Twitch
and millions of people watch, live, other people
video-gaming.
There is something sort of like that with D&D. The guys
who draw the webcomic "Penny Arcade" and do the Penny
Arcade Expos, they have an ongoing game that they record
as podcasts.
And when they do one of their Expos, they play on stage.
And people watch and people cheer and people laugh.
And they record them as video podcasts and put them online,
and they're really popular.
So I can see even "D&D" becoming sort of a spectator
sport and evolving in that way.
In the other sense, in terms of just MMOs more
specifically, the problem we face-- the strength that "D&D"
has right now, as opposed to MMOs, something like "World of
Warcraft" or "Eve" or anything else, is that the D&D game can
go anywhere.
It's up to the imagination of the players.
You're not limited by everything the programmers
planned for, and the designers.
If the designers in a video game didn't think the player
might want to do X, the player's not going to be able
to do X.
MMOs are going to get smarter and faster and more complex,
and there'll be more processing power, and they
will come closer and closer to offering the true freedom of
choice that "D&D" does.
But it's going to be a long time.
I mean, you want to get really nerdy here, you have to have
true artificial intelligence before you can have a game
smart enough to react the same way a human Dungeon Master
would react to his players.
AUDIENCE: So no White Wolf RPG coming out?
No MMO for White Wolf?
Would you say that ship has sailed?
DAVID EWALT: I mean, there's some really cool MMOs coming
out, and there's a lot of great video games.
I mean, "Skyrim," just in the last year or two, "Skyrim" was
very much the D&D experience.
And millions of people loved that game.
But none of them, for now, are offering anything that's truly
revolutionary or that can really compete with the
freedom of choice for "D&D." I think
we'll do one more question.
AUDIENCE: So if you multi-class cleric/psychic
warrior, you've clearly played either 2nd or
3rd edition, or both.
What are your thoughts on the other editions of "D&D" that
you have played?
DAVID EWALT: So this is one of the most controversial
arguments in all Nerd-dom.
This is right up there with, like, could a Star Destroyer
beat up the "USS Enterprise"?
But it's important, because the quick answer is, over the
years, TSR had to find a way to get people to
keep buying the game.
If I buy a box of "Monopoly," I've got "Monopoly." I don't
have to buy a new one.
Same thing was true with "D&D." So what would happen is
every few years, TSR would release a new edition.
They would change the rules, with new supplements.
It was a way to get people to be, like,
oh, this one's better.
It's still "D&D," but it's done a different way.
So there's all these different editions of the game.
I do play, with my gaming group, we played 3.5 edition,
which is really massively nerdy and great, and I love
it, because it's so detailed.
But there are other versions which are simpler.
4th edition, which came out not too long ago, a lot of
people complained it was sort of video-game-y, that it
limited your choices.
I've had, especially while reporting this book, I have
had fun playing every version of "Dungeons & Dragons." 3.5
might be my personal favorite, because that's what I play
with my friends.
If we had started out playing basic "D&D," the 1983 rules,
that would probably be my favorite.
I will say that Wizards of the Coast is currently working on
a brand-new edition, which they will probably
release next year.
Next year's the 40th anniversary of "Dungeons &
Dragons." They've been play-testing this thing for
almost a year and a half now.
And I've been in the play test.
I've talked to other people that have been in them.
And it's a lot of fun.
I think what they're trying to do is get rid of a lot of this
sort of edition war politics, make it less about the rules.
Why should we get wrapped up on whether spells are cast
using a system of spell points, or whether they are
cast based on what you memorized in the book?
Like, that's not what's important to us having fun.
And so what they're trying to do with this new version is
make it really about the fundamentals of "Dungeons &
Dragons." Make it about exploring.
Make it about telling a story.
And make it about hanging out with your friends.
And so far, I think they've been successful with that.
So we'll see, when the final product comes out.
It might be one that everyone can agree on.
So I want to thank everyone for your time.
This is the book.
A lot more history about this in here.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID EWALT: And if it gets you interested,
go look up the game.
There's game stores and groups everywhere around the country.
You can always reconnect with people and
start playing again.
Thanks for coming.