Playing Games Part 1: Dungeons and Dragons

These are chits. You had to cut them out yourself.
No wonder old gamers are so angry.

I started playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with my step-brother at the age of 12. Prior to that, I owned a copy of the Basic Dungeons and Dragons rules (what we now call the “Holmes” rules), including the box with B1, In Search of the Unknown, but no dice. Only chits. And to a new player, trying to puzzle through the rules on my own, there was nothing more perplexing and also deeply unsatisfying as drawing chits from a small paper Dixie cup. There’s no way to make that activity cool. Not in 1980. Not now. Not ever.

This boxed set ended up in my possession because my step-father was an avid reader and loved fantasy and science fiction, which was certainly one of the areas that allowed us to get along despite the awkwardness of being a step-dad and a step-son. He brought home the game one night, very excited to play with the family, which meant me and his kids, who were five and seven years younger than me. What the hell, I was up for it. The cover art, which looks so dated now, was a colorful portrait of wonderment; the wizard with the pointy hat. The fighter in plate mail. The dragon! On a horde of gold! This was not Monopoly.

It’s hard for anyone under the age of 50 to remember when there weren’t video games. When there weren’t decades of movies with incredible special effects. There was only Jason and the Argonauts, and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and a handful of other fantasy epics, mostly in the sword and sandal sub-genre. Dungeons and Dragons was initially an attempt to simulate the action and adventure and scope found in books.

Hard to believe this goofy-looking
game changed the world, but it did.

My step-dad was smart enough to be in MENSA. But this rule book baffled him. We played (sort of) for about fifteen minutes, and then he got lost looking up something, probably wandering monsters and how that was supposed to work. It was just weird if you didn’t see anyone playing it, or have it explained to you by someone who had. We never got into the dungeon proper that night. The game migrated into my room, where I read the rules over and over, especially the example of play, trying to link up what the script portrayed with all of these charts and tables.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how much this game felt like contraband. There was a seductive crudeness of presentation—a smaller game box, the—let’s call it “charming”—artwork, the lack of components, and so on. It was a game, specifically supposed to fire your imagination, but there weren’t TV commercials for it (not yet) and there wasn’t any photography of weird-looking kids in turtlenecks, laughing as they played the game (again, not yet). This was something else, man. This article gives you a concentrated set of examples that defined my initial D&D experience, right here. 

Dave Trampier's Harpy from
the AD&D Monster Manual.

The artwork fascinated me, as well. Someone online opined years ago that the early artists served as illuminators rather than illustrators in that they weren’t trying to convey the exact monster, but rather the idea of the monster. I like that a lot; there was certainly room for my own imagination to work with what they showed us. And back in the early days, it meant boobs. All of the woman-monsters, like the harpies and the Lamia and the succubi, had boobs with nipples on them. Granted, given the art capabilities of some of the first round of TSR artists, it was about as far away from “sexy” as you can get, but at the age of 11, I really thought I was getting away with something.

When I finally started playing AD&D, I most frequently took on the mantle of Dungeon Master. This suited me fine, as I liked the theatrics and also the creativity of making dungeons, playing NPCs, and all of that fun stuff. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I had a core of folks to play with and we rolled dice whenever we could. Somewhere along the way, my Greyhawk campaign turned into Lankhmar, and then I put it aside for other things. Second edition Dungeons and Dragons was coming out, and I didn’t like THAC0, or the 3-Ring Binder Monster Manual. Mostly, I was tired of playing what I thought of as generic fantasy and wanted a break. This took me into a number of other games that I played over the years, games like Call of Cthulhu, Villains & Vigilantes, Champions, Justice, Inc., Cyberpunk, Chill, and many others. At the tender age of 25, I thought I’d left D&D behind entirely.

Boy, was I wrong about that.