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YOUâRE ALL AT A TAVERN
The day I met Abel, Jhaden, and Ganubi, we got arrested for brawling in a bar.
In our defense, we were fighting for a righteous cause. One of the regulars was six beers past tipsy when he started running his mouth and spouting the worst kind of reactionary politics. Abel and I found it offensive and told him to shut up; Jhaden isnât much for talk, so he hit the guy with a stool. Rhetorical became physical, and the four of us lined up on the same side of the dispute.
The cops must have been nearby, because the next thing I knew they were throwing us in the back of a wagon. We stewed in a cell overnight before Jhaden was able to use some kind of family connection to get us released. I donât know what happened to the drunk guy.
A thing like that will bond a group of young men pretty quickly, and soon we were spending most of our time togetherâsharing a couple of rooms in a cheap boardinghouse, working together on whatever freelance gigs we could find. The jobs werenât always on the books, but we felt like we were doing good work.
Jhaden was strong as a bull, Ganubi a natural charmer, Abel educated and clever. We got in our share of fights, but I had worked in a hospital, and when anyone got hurt, Iâd do my best to patch them up.
Iâd like to think I did my part in combat, tooâshooting searing rays of light out of my fingers, stunning enemies with thunderclaps of sonic energy. Sometimes Iâd summon a giant badger from the celestial planes and command it to do my bidding. Few things end a fight quicker than a magical weasel chewing on your opponentâs leg.
I am not a wizard, but I play one every Tuesday night. To be nerdy about itâand trust me, there is no other way to approach thisâI am a divine spell caster, a lawful neutral twelfth-level cleric. In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, that makes me a pretty major badass.
Dungeons & DragonsâD&D, to the initiatedâis a game played at a table, usually by around half a dozen participants. Itâs sold in stores and has specific rules, like Monopoly or Scrabble, but is otherwise radically different. D&D is a role-playing game, one where participants control characters in a world that exists largely in their collective imagination.
Even if youâve never played D&D, youâve probably heard of it, and when I admitted Iâm a player, your subconscious mind probably filed me under âNerds, Hopelessââunless you happen to be one of us. Role-playing games donât have a great reputation. In movies and TV shows, D&D serves as a signal of outsider status. Itâs how you know a characterâs a hopeless geek: A rule book and a bunch of weird-shaped dice is to nerds what a black hat is to the villain in a cowboy movie.
Most people know D&D only as some strange thing the math club did in the corner of the high school cafeteria, or the hobby of the creepy goth kid down the street. Even worse, they have the vague sense itâs deviant or satanicâdonât D&D players run around in the woods and worship demons, or commit suicide when they lose a game?
Admitting you play Dungeons & Dragons is only slightly less stigmatizing than confessing cruelty to animals or that you wet the bed. It is not to be done in polite company.
But I am immune to your scorn. I know magic.
Jhaden, Abel, Ganubi, and I are freedom fighters. The shared politics that brought us together in that bar are more profound than liberal or conservative; weâre all proponents of an active approach to humanityâs problems. We want to organize the workers of the world and to strike out against those who would hold us in bondage.
In contrast, our opponents fear change. They donât want to upset their comfortable bourgeois lives or take risks that might overturn the political order. Time is on our side, they sayâreal progress occurs slowly, over generations. They think we should wait and things will work themselves out.
Itâs so cowardly and stupid. You canât wait out vampires.
Letâs start with a brief overview, for the uninitiated: Dungeons & Dragons takes place within a fantasy world that is invented by its players but inspired by centuries of storytelling and literature. Books like J. R. R. Tolkienâs Lord of the Rings helped set the tone: heroic knights and wise old magicians battling the forces of evil. A typical D&D session might find a party of adventurers setting off to search an underground cave system for treasure and having to fight all the slobbering monsters lurking in the dark.
But D&D isnât a board game with a preprinted map and randomized game play (roll a die, move four spaces closer to the treasure, pick up a card: âYou got scared by a goblin! Go back two spacesâ). Instead, each setting is conceived in advance by one of the participants and then actively navigated by the players.
The person who does all the prep work is called the Dungeon Master, or DM. Itâs his job to dream up a scenario, something like âArchaeologists have discovered a pharaohâs tomb in the desert, and the players are grave robbers who have to break in and steal the hidden treasure.â He also has to sketch out the details, like making a map and deciding where the traps are, where the treasure is, and what monsters are guarding it.
This act of creation gives the players an unknown world to explore and keeps each game session different from the last. Itâs sort of like sitting down to play Monopoly, except you canât see the names or costs of the properties until you land on them.
An experienced DM takes game design even further. He might decide the players should start out in a Bedouin camp near the tomb and negotiate with the sheik to buy a couple of camels. He could plan for them to be waylaid by desert raiders on the way to the tomb. And once theyâve found the pharaohâs treasure, he may ask them to make a moral choice: The treasure carries a curse, and if itâs removed from the tomb, the region will suffer ten years of famine. The players will have to weigh getting rich and letting thousands die against leaving empty-handed and protecting the innocent.
At this level, setting up a role-playing game becomes something like writing a screenplay or novel. And just as fantasy fiction may include all kinds of different settings and plots, a fantasy role-playing game does not have to be constrained to a standard medieval setting.
Vampires have always hunted man, but we were not always in their thrall. For millennia they hid in the shadows, keeping their numbers small, feeding only on humans who wouldnât be missed. The few stories that betrayed their existence were dismissed as urban legend or lazy fiction.
But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, something changed. Vampires were tired of hiding, of letting weaker humans ruin the planet. So they gathered, and they plotted, and one dark night, they struck.
Most humans died without ever knowing their enemy. The vampires had magically bound our leaders to their will, and on their command, the armies of the world exploded upon one another. Those who survived the first strike had nowhere to hide: A magically enchanted retrovirus mutated ordinary animals and plants, turning them into monsters that overran both ruined cities and poisoned wilderness.
What few shreds of humankind remained were easily rounded up, brought to a dozen vampire-controlled cities, and locked into pens, like cattle. Our species survived, but only as a food source for Earthâs new masters.
We call the time the vampires took over the Nightfall. The Dawn is when humans fought back.
Most people who play Dungeons & Dragons donât just sit down for a single, self-contained session, like they would with a board game. Instead, they join a âcampaign,â a group that meets on a regular basis and uses the same characters in the same world, building on past actions. One week, the players raid the pharaohâs tomb, and the next, they pick up where they left off, facing the consequences of their decisions.
As these campaigns go on for weeks and months and even years, the successes and failures of past sessions provide history and context and suggest new challenges. If the players stole the pharaohâs treasure and cursed the land with famine, a DM might design a future session where theyâre hunted by vengeful farmers.
Players are both audience and author in D&D; they consume the DMâs fiction but rewrite the story with their actions. And as authors, theyâre free to make their own decisions. If a troll is trying to eat you, you can hit him with a sword, shoot him with an arrow, or run awayâitâs up to you. For that matter, you could sing him a song, try to recruit him into Scientology, or lie down for a nap. Your choice might be a dumb one, but itâs still yours to make.
Unlike board games, which limit the player to a small set of actions, or video games, which offer a large but finite set of preprogrammed possibilities, role-playing games give the player free will. As long as it doesnât violate the integrity of the fictional universeâproclaiming that up is down or suddenly transmogrifying into Abraham Lincolnâyou can do whatever you want.
The resulting game play is rather different than other pastimes. In a game of Clue, you are asked to solve a murder mystery but must do so by moving a token around a board and looking at playing cards. If Clue was played like D&D, you could grab the lead pipe, beat a confession out of Colonel Mustard, and have sex with Miss Scarlet on the desk in the conservatory.
There are rules, of course. Books and books of rules, sold at $19.95 each, which inform a playerâs decisions and determine their success. Attacking someone with a lead pipe? Thatâs armed combat with an improvised weapon, and page 113 of the Dungeons & Dragons Playerâs Handbook explains how to figure out if you hit your target and how much it hurt. Seducing another character might require a Diplomacy check (page 71), a Will save (page 136), and maybe an opposed Sense Motive roll against your Bluff skill (page 64). Itâs not romantic, but it works.
All this free will can wreak havoc with the gameâs continuing story. A DM might spend weeks designing a complex network of caverns to explore, filled with clever traps and new monsters to fight. But if the players stop at the mouth of the cave and decide theyâd rather go back to town and get drunk, they are free to do soâand theyâll derail the story in the process.
In order to keep freedom of action from leading to chaos, a good DM will usually weave a primary conflict into his story. This often takes the form of a classic heroic quest: a wrong to right, an enemy to destroy, or a world to save.
For a century after the vampires came to power, they imprisoned and fed on what was left of the human race. Stuck in the pens and denied the use of modern technology, humanity lived in fear, never knowing when their masters would descend from the city to feed.
But the undead were arrogant, and humans adapted. They watched the vampires cast spells and copied their actions, developing their own knowledge of magic. These secrets were shared and used to communicate with other pens. Together, humanity planned its escape.
And one day, as dawn swept across the globe, the people of the pens rose up and fought. The vampires were taken by surprise, but their power was still great. Many humans were recaptured, and many more died. But some escaped and returned to their abandoned cities, where they constructed defenses to keep the vampires at bay.
In the generation since the Dawn, both human and vampire have rebuilt. We hold a handful of cities, but they do too, and thousands are still captive in the pens. Beyond the walled cities, there is wilderness, filled with monsters.
But weâre not hiding, and we do not rest. We learn, and we prepare, and we plan for the day we can take our planet back.
Frodo Baggins needed the help of three hobbits, two men, an elf, a dwarf, and a wise old wizard to save the world. So nobody expects a role-playing nerd to go it alone. Uniquely among tabletop gamesâand especially uniquely among activities enjoyed by teenage boysâDungeons & Dragons is cooperative, not competitive. Players work together to advance the story and solve problems, not to beat each other to a finish line.
This means thereâs rarely a real âwinnerâ in a D&D game; no single player comes out on top. In fact, winning is something of an alien conceptâmost campaigns never last long enough to reach their dramatic conclusion. Itâs more about the journey than the destination, to invoke that old clichĂ©, and about developing your part in the story.
A player in a game of D&D doesnât just push a premade plastic token around a board. Instead, they create a âplayer character,â or PC, a unique persona to be inhabited like an actor in a role, imbuing it with motivation and will and action. Itâs like Avatar, but with knights instead of weird blue cat people.
Of course, D&D is not a playacting exercise. At the most fundamental level, a PC is defined by a bunch of numbers written down on a piece of paperâthe DNA of an imaginary person. (Itâs no coincidence that so many people who play the game also happen to be keen on math and science.)
At the start of a new game, players roll a handful of dice to determine their PCâs basic attributes, following the directions set out in a rule book. Some of these attributes define the character physically: how strong they are, how dexterous, how hardy. Others measure personality traits, like whether they are perceptive or oblivious, strong willed or weak. Each score is recorded by the player and kept for future reference.
Over the course of a game, a player will continually refer to these attributes to measure their success in different actions. Want to pick up a heavy rock and throw it at the barbarians invading your castle? Thatâll require a high strength score. Trying to dive under the trellis gate before it closes? Sorry, your dexterity is too low.
Next, a player has to select one of about a dozen character classes. This is something like choosing a profession and has a profound effect on the role a PC plays in the game. Classes are best explained within the context of The Lord of the Ringsâas the most mainstream example of the fantasy genre, LOTR references come up all the time in Dungeons & Dragons.
Aragorn, the scruffy hero who turns out to be heir to the kingdom of men, would be a ârangerâ in a D&D campaignâat home in the wilderness, an expert tracker, equally comfortable with a bow or a blade. Legolas the elf would be a ranger, too. Boromir and Gimli the dwarf would probably be âfightersââmasters of brute-force combat, emphasizing power rather than a rangerâs finesse. Gandalf? They call him a wizard, but D&D âwizardsâ have to study a lot, write their spells in a book, and use magic ingredients to make anything cool ha...