It’s been fifty years since the release of Dungeons & Dragons. I listened to an interesting piece on NPR this morning talking about it’s cultural impact. It brought back a lot of memories.
I was too young to play when D&D first came out, but got introduced to it by my dad in the early 1980s. I soon found some friends at school who also knew about it. Since I was the “smart one” I was elected dungeon master. We played all throughout middle school and high school, ending the campaign the summer before we all went off to college.
I remember all the media attention on the hobby. It was entirely negative and opened my eyes to bigotry and ignorance. For us, it was a hobby that mostly involved a lot of reading, math, rolling dice, and playing pretend. To the bigots and ignorant, it was about gambling and deviltry. One of our moms eavesdropped on us at one point, and then later admitted her only complaint was us playing AC/DC and KISS (of course hard rock music was also suspect).
We all turned out okay, going on to advanced degrees and successful careers and businesses. And I think we’re all more tolerant of nonconformist thinking and lifestyles.
I’m interested to hear about how D&D and other pencil-and-paper roleplaying games has affected your personal lifestyle and the culture around you.
I learned about roleplaying games in 1988, at age 11, and instantly knew that was something I wanted to do. The next year, D&D was translated into my native language, and I went to town with it, DM’ing a group of nerds like myself.
The D&D phase didn’t last long, though, since there were many competing roleplaying systems I considered superior to D&D. Runequest, Warhammer FRPG, GURPS…these were available in English only, so I learned to read and comprehend several-hundred-page manuals in a foreign language not dumbed down as learning materials are. This directly fed into my English skills through elementary school and beyond.
I consider the language acquisition as the biggest impact roleplaying had in my later life. It also inspired and improved my storytelling abilities and drawing skills, but these are something I haven’t practiced for decades.
Would I have entered the re-enacting / historical crafts & skills movement without roleplaying? That is a good question. In my 20’s I no longer roleplayed, but I did the stuff fantasy roleplaying worlds were all about, outside magic and monsters - building and shooting bows and arrows out of wood, tanning skins for actual income, turning wood & bone on a lathe, trekking in historically accurate gear etc. etc.
The re-enacting stuff led me to a Master’s degree in Archaeology, where everything I had done up until that point gelled pretty nicely with the theoretical / academic framework.
I don’t know about affecting my personal lifestyle per se, but what are now termed “tabletop role-playing games” (TTRPGs) certainly offered both an escape from the stilted provincialism of small town Midwestern ‘culture’ and the neglect of indifferent, unengaged parents, as well as inspiring both creative instincts and an interested in mechanics and mathematical systems that led to education and career in engineering and physics.
I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons because it was the default game that the few other gamers all knew and loved, but I collected and sometimes played one-off scenarios in various games and systems including Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller/MegaTraveller, Gamma World, 2300 AD, Top Secret: SI, Rolemaster/Spacemaster, Paranoia, and and had the occasion to play others like the West End Games Star Wars D6, Tunnels & Trolls, James Bond 007, Space Opera, Star Frontiers, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. I didn’t get to actually play all that much but I read rulebooks, sourcebooks, and modules, and started learning frame out my own scenarios (albeit crudely and without feedback to really mature as a writer) and did a lot of worldbuilding. For scifi games like Traveller and 2300 AD I would spend time designing space ships (per their construction rules) and building planets and planetary systems, which inspired me to learn more about engineering and what was then known of planetology to actually improve and refine those systems. I did a PbM Runequest game for a while, although with a fortnight interval between turns it was obviously a pretty slow game even with the relatively quick and lethal combat and actions in Runequest.
I didn’t really do any roleplaying (or much gaming at all) in college because I was working full time while pursuing multiple degrees but I casually followed the general trends and developments in gaming, including the press for more narrative and ‘rules-light’ games like FUDGE (and later FATE), the decline of fantasy roleplay as a genre in favor of more urban fantasy and cross-genre games like Shadowrun and Rifts, the bizarre legal saga of TSR and Gary Gygax, the spastic system and setting changes, fracturing, presumed death, and more recent reemergence of old staples like Traveller and Runequest, and the entire “Old School Renaissance” movement that started as pure nostalgia for a more streamlined style of play with simple classic dungeon-crawling and sandbox exploration vice elaborate planned campaigns, and has evolved into an almost metatextual discussion of what “roleplaying” could or should be and how little or much one really needs explicit rules to govern play from basic adaptations of the BECMI system in Old School Essentials, purposeful dungeon crawlers like Shadowdark, and intentionally gonzo games like Dungeon Crawl Classics to improv-heavy gamemastering of Knave, the system toolkit build-your-own-world approach of games like The Black Hack and Whitehack, and the completely rules-focused Burning Wheel (which is barely an RPG at all insofar as you spend far more effort trying to stay alive and manipulate the system than actually doing character interaactions).
The modern revival and improvement of other ‘classic’ games such as Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, and Traveller, essentially using the same systems but with updates to make the rules easier to remember and use, with more consistent world-building and massively improved production quality, is really a boon for old-school non-D&D gamers, but of course Dungeons & Dragons (and its near clone of Pathfinder) still dominate the market and the public consciousness regardless of how much shitfuckery Wizards of the Coast and their massive corporate owner Hasbro get up to, and “D&D is certainly what the general public thinks of in terms of what they understand to be a tabletop roleplaying game, if they think about it at all. In terms of the general cultural impact, aside from Dungeons & Dragons as a brand that it occasionally licensed to make not-very-good movies or cartoons, I don’t think there is very much; it is definitely a niche hobby for ‘nerds’, and I suspect most people associate the term “roleplaying game” with computer games like Baldur’s Gate, Skyrim, Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Fallout, even though many of these are more first person shooters with a story arc than a character interaction focused game. Which is a shame because because TTRPGs are a type of structured social engagement that is broadly needed, and RPG-adjacent games like Fiasco are a great way to develop creativity and improv skills in a more casual setting than getting up on a stage and acting to a non-participating audience.
On the topic of this history of roleplaying games, Stu Horvath’s recent Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is a good comprehensive survey of gaming without getting as academic or technical as Jon Peterson or José Zagal, or else narrowly focused specifically on D&D and its tortured history, instead providing a broad overview of both common games and those that are less well known or come from less accessible traditions (in particular, the excellent Swedish RPG community which has some very unique games and playstyles. I’ve just been sampling the book here and there but it is quite accessible and encyclopedic, if perhaps not as deep as in some specific areas as I might hope, although at over 400 pages it would end up being multiple volumes with greater content.
Heh. One time while my friends and I were playing, my dad (divorced and noncustodial) came over. Another friend had a tape of Marilyn Manson with him, which we put on right before Dad came in, just to trigger him. Somehow, the man who thought Enya was Satanic never even noticed.
It’s definitely entered the culture. Nowadays, when my students find out that I play D&D, it’s not considered any more unusual than any other hobby, and many of them (all girls) play, too. Terminology like XP and alignments have become more-or-less mainstream.