By John Ruch
Photo: A typical act of humanity depicted in the original D&D "Player's Handbook." (John Ruch)
Dungeons & Dragons is the greatest game in history, largely because it’s barely a game at all. Rather, it’s a loose set of rules for deconstructing commercialized fantasy fiction into DIY storytelling.
With 2014 being D&D’s 40th birthday year, its influential genius is rightly receiving nostalgic tributes far and wide. The great gaming writer Ethan Gilsdorf penned the best encomium, a Salon piece titled, “All I Needed to Know About Life I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons.” Among those lessons learned at the gaming table, he recalls, are “Diversity rocks” and “Collaboration is better than competition.”
This is all fine and fitting, but it’s also looking through rose-colored translucent polyhedral dice. The fact is, the gaming table has always been an irresistible lure to pricks, control freaks and other bad influences, a problem so fundamental that it’s actually addressed in the original “Dungeon Master’s Guide.”
I recently got a refresher course in this truth when I joined a session of the rival RPG Pathfinder here in metro Atlanta. The DM blew in late, mocked my character’s Welsh name and kept forgetting her gender, and served as enabler to a gang of players whose collective behavior would have got them held back in first grade.
Then there’s the reason I was playing Pathfinder in the first place. These D&D paeans always look not just back, but wayyyyyyy back to the 1970s—a confession by omission that modern D&D has been so corrupted by moneygrubbing suits that nobody actually plays it anymore. In Atlanta, I can choose from at least four open Pathfinder gaming groups; zero D&D versions. At least year’s Dragon Con, somebody probably played D&D, but Pathfinder had a giant room and kept expanding into more.
As a D&D malcontent, I stand in solidarity with the game’s own co-creator, the late Gary Gygax. Forced out running the D&D company by paper-pushers, he remained forever embittered. In my own epic quest 10 years ago, I went to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and knocked on Gygax’s door to shake his hand and thank him for his life-changing game. The first thing he did was to ask me whether I played the then-current Third Edition of D&D—in a tone that suggested if I said yes, he would immediately blackjack me with his dice bag. (I equivocated and he gifted me with a book he wrote for a different gaming company.)
D&D, and the friends I made playing it, changed my life. In some ways, I think it remains underappreciated as an unheralded act of 20th century literary genius. I started playing with First Edition (1E), and I was a play-tester for its forthcoming Fifth Edition. I love it enough to be honest about it.
So let’s face it: D&D also taught us that a lot of people behave like dragons and belong in a dungeon—or worse, would drop you into one in a millisecond, smiling the whole damn time.
Here are some ways that D&D taught me all I need to know about misanthropy.
Racism is a handy, valid system for stereotyping people.
The most unsettling legacy of D&D, persisting throughout modern RPGs, is its use of the term “race” in defining characters and their inherent abilities.
The game is not racist in a KKK sense; it refers to the entire “human race” as compared with fantastical “races” such as elves and orcs. But in terminology and application, the racial system does echo 19th century white (and male) supremacy to a disturbing degree.
As 1E put it, your character must come from a certain “racial stock.” A couple of mixed-race options are available, described in the shockingly Civil War-era terminology of “half”-ness. For example, a character with a human father and an elven mother is branded a “half-elf.”
The racial choice often comes with quantifiable, inherent limits on what social roles the character can play, and can limit their inherent abilities—including their intelligence. The human race “is superior to the others,” the 1E “Player’s Handbook” states.
Furthermore, your race could well determine and limit your friendships with other characters. The same 1E book included a “Racial Preferences” chart, presented as a non-optional system for how well characters of various races got along. The reaction could include “strong hatred of the race in question.”
D&D was invented by young white men. It is notable that their “superior” human race is depicted throughout the early D&D books exclusively as white Europeans. There is no sense that people of other ethnicities might play the game and find this, not a fantasy, but a horrific reminder of the bullshit they live with in reality.
D&D’s founders essentially took white supremacist myth and pseudoscience and inflated them into a fantasy of human supremacy. It is not racist to desire believable depictions of culture clashes or to put some limits on the magical powers of fantasy characters. But using a racial system to do so is remarkably thoughtless and offensive. It both dismisses real racism and indirectly validates its fictions.
D&D taught me why racism persists—stereotyping people is a convenient way of rendering social decision-making to be artificially simple, and for making the limits a system imposes on people appear to be inherent to them.
Then again, I had kinda already picked up on that from all of American history and Nazi fucking Germany, too.
You are what you earn.
D&D is fundamentally about killing things for their treasure. That’s certainly valuable training for modern life. But 1E D&D went even farther. The value of the seized treasure, in gold pieces, converted directly into your character’s experience points—the quantified measurement of how your character’s abilities improve over time. Simply by possessing 500 gold pieces, your character could become stronger, smarter and faster.
In short, you are what you earn. This was fair warning for a world populated with an incredible number of depraved jackasses who actually believe that.
Adults are just giant, idiotic children.
Until you have seen a grown man, 50 years old and fully bearded, leaping to his feet at a gaming table and screaming about how unfair it is that a dice roll did not go his way—shouting and whining until his DM buddy caves and fudges the results for him—until that awkward moment, you do not truly understand how the U.S. Congress works.
Subcultures are a slightly cooler version of mainstream culture, not an escape from it.
Rejected, brutalized and lied to by every social authority as a kid, I discovered geek subculture and naively assumed I had found sanctuary. I soon learned that being treated like crap by someone 99 percent like you is often worse than being treated like crap by a total mainstream square.
D&D culture is still largely white dude culture with all of its arrogances. Guys, if you want to know what women are treated like at hardware stores and guitar shops, go into a gaming store without knowing who played the first Doctor Who or six different catchphrases from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
I’m the sort of person who feels genuine relief when the Dungeon Master who shows up appears to be a total social misfit, awkwardly chubby, gender indeterminate, wearing prison-issue clunky glasses and a never-in-fashion polo shirt. My people! And then they’re instantly horse-laughing over the fact I’m a dude playing a girl character. Shit, even George W. Bush would pretend to like me for 180 minutes.
At least I’m still a dude. Women often retreat from the world that thinks they belong in the kitchen, only to find a game room that thinks they belong in a chainmail bikini.
Still, it was priceless for me to learn that any social structure, sub- or no, is ultimately about power and abuses thereof. Subcultures don’t automatically give you tolerance and kinship; they just nudge the percentages more in your direction.
Everything you love will be sold out by corporate whores.
Just like hip-hop and punk, everything started going wrong with D&D when the cash started rolling in.
The formation of TSR, a corporation controlling D&D, soon led to the aforementioned dumping of Gygax. Already pushed out of the game’s creative direction, he also lost control over the very characters he had created for DIY fun in his basement.
That same era saw the company cave to insane Christian agitators and scrub the words “demon” and “devil” from all its materials, replacing them with absurd faux-alien terms. Giant corporations are the only entities that believe kowtowing to conspiracy theorists will make them buy your product.
Over the years, D&D has changed corporate hands and now nestles in the pocket of Hasbro, alongside G.I. Joe and the ultimate game of evil roleplaying, Monopoly. Its trajectory has consisted of getting progressively stupider and more expensive, a pairing familiar to any student of subculture cash-ins.
The 1E D&D was a hit, not despite being overcomplicated and verbose, but because of it. It had the quirky, individual charm of a witch’s grimoire. It was inspiringly weird, unabashedly smart, deliberately melodramatic.
By contrast, the game reached its nadir with the current Fourth Edition, written like a “D&D for Dummies” with all the wit and charm of an assembly instruction sheet for an Ikea coffee table.
The corporate strategy is to publish new “editions,” or revised rules, for the game frequently—as this requires players to buy a whole new set of the three core rulebooks at a total cost of around $100. Then follows a series of optional rulebooks notable for increasing cover prices and decreasing page counts.
The geeksploitation created a market for Pathfinder, which essentially duplicates and preserves the last acceptable edition of D&D in a single, lower-priced core rulebook.
D&D is now trying to hose the shit off its golden brand name with water from the well of 40th birthday nostalgia. Will this year’s Fifth Edition be a return to the good old days? My own play-testing tells me it’s at least a step in that direction. But my experience with corporate whores is that they never really get a DIY culture. Things DIY are wild animals that don’t survive in zoos.
It’s a lesson Pathfinder sure learned.
Humans are power-mad.
A game built around fantasies of adventuring conquests has always been acutely aware of power-tripping—though it varies in how much it restrains or caters to that. Much like our government, D&D has gone from a system of intricate checks and balances to an embrace of lavish displays of power. In the early days, a 9th level character would be rare; today, it’s an overpowered game built on fast-tracking you past 20th level, or near-godhood.
Back in the real world, the gaming table is often home to bullies and control freaks of all sorts. My latest gaming session involved dudes casting spells on my character without consent, the sort of fantasy assault that hints at a troubled mind.
Creative people are underpaid and treated like serfs.
Gygax is now ancestor-worshiped by the successor corporation to the one that fucked him over, as corporations always do when nostalgia can be mined for still more cash. But make no mistake, gaming remains a brutally exploitative world to the very souls it relies upon for its allure.
I recently spoke at length with one well-known fantasy artist who did important work for D&D. He described how, after the works became successful, he was quickly dropped by the company in favor of less experienced, and far cheaper, artists.
Then there’s Dave Trampier, whose work defined the look of 1E. His dealings with D&D's parent company in the 1980s were such that he found driving a cab in Carbondale, Illinois preferable to ever working for them again.
Most people are cowards who will censor anything to maintain their delusions.
The 1980s moral panic over D&D, in which it was accused of brainwashing kids into Satanism and murder, is the stuff of jokes today. The immense hypocrisy of the Christian nuts behind it, with their own slaughter-inspiring book of fantasy monsters, can now go without saying.
Still, I saw this up-close and learned formative lessons. As a D&D-playing teen, I attended a church that handed out pamphlets decrying D&D as Satanic. I laughed at the time, but I also saw how cowardly and ignorant everyone in that church was, and how much they wanted to destroy anything that spoke real truth to their kids, or simply empowered them. Every social evil I’ve seen since then, from music censorship to nonsense wars to homophobia to the PATRIOT Act, has been powered by cowardice.
Creative people go creatively nuts.
That being said, I actually did know someone who went crazy on a D&D theme. He was a kid in my school who I was slated to game with. Before that could happen, he had a bad day, and ran away into the woods with his hunting bow, leaving a note saying he was off to hunt down the “Elven King.” My mom told me to stay at home in lockdown until the state cops tracked him down.
Of course, D&D provided the flavor rather than the cause of his craziness, and I can safely say few commentators would even claim otherwise today, when such a tale would make national news. But the corollary lesson I learned still holds true: Society will blame everything except its mainstream self. I see it after every school shooting: blame guns, blame mental health systems, maybe (though rarely) blame the parents. No one ever asks what was wrong with the school—because then we’re all on the bloody hook.
I have no idea what the Elven King Hunter’s home life was like; crappy, probably. But I know what our school was like. It was a minimum-security-prison-style cesspit of violence, stupidity, bigotry and child molesters. In my day, it also produced a mass murderer and a violent rapist, both of whom I knew in classes, and both of whom were treated like shit in them.
I would have to be on a crazy fantasy trip of my own to think schools are any different today. Who wouldn’t rather go find the Elven King? You’d be crazy not to.
Life really is a game.
Most everyone I see is playing a fake role in a complicated system run by incompetent Dungeon Masters. Thank you, D&D, for at least making it a conscious process for me.
Photo: A typical act of humanity depicted in the original D&D "Player's Handbook." (John Ruch)
Dungeons & Dragons is the greatest game in history, largely because it’s barely a game at all. Rather, it’s a loose set of rules for deconstructing commercialized fantasy fiction into DIY storytelling.
With 2014 being D&D’s 40th birthday year, its influential genius is rightly receiving nostalgic tributes far and wide. The great gaming writer Ethan Gilsdorf penned the best encomium, a Salon piece titled, “All I Needed to Know About Life I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons.” Among those lessons learned at the gaming table, he recalls, are “Diversity rocks” and “Collaboration is better than competition.”
This is all fine and fitting, but it’s also looking through rose-colored translucent polyhedral dice. The fact is, the gaming table has always been an irresistible lure to pricks, control freaks and other bad influences, a problem so fundamental that it’s actually addressed in the original “Dungeon Master’s Guide.”
I recently got a refresher course in this truth when I joined a session of the rival RPG Pathfinder here in metro Atlanta. The DM blew in late, mocked my character’s Welsh name and kept forgetting her gender, and served as enabler to a gang of players whose collective behavior would have got them held back in first grade.
Then there’s the reason I was playing Pathfinder in the first place. These D&D paeans always look not just back, but wayyyyyyy back to the 1970s—a confession by omission that modern D&D has been so corrupted by moneygrubbing suits that nobody actually plays it anymore. In Atlanta, I can choose from at least four open Pathfinder gaming groups; zero D&D versions. At least year’s Dragon Con, somebody probably played D&D, but Pathfinder had a giant room and kept expanding into more.
As a D&D malcontent, I stand in solidarity with the game’s own co-creator, the late Gary Gygax. Forced out running the D&D company by paper-pushers, he remained forever embittered. In my own epic quest 10 years ago, I went to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and knocked on Gygax’s door to shake his hand and thank him for his life-changing game. The first thing he did was to ask me whether I played the then-current Third Edition of D&D—in a tone that suggested if I said yes, he would immediately blackjack me with his dice bag. (I equivocated and he gifted me with a book he wrote for a different gaming company.)
D&D, and the friends I made playing it, changed my life. In some ways, I think it remains underappreciated as an unheralded act of 20th century literary genius. I started playing with First Edition (1E), and I was a play-tester for its forthcoming Fifth Edition. I love it enough to be honest about it.
So let’s face it: D&D also taught us that a lot of people behave like dragons and belong in a dungeon—or worse, would drop you into one in a millisecond, smiling the whole damn time.
Here are some ways that D&D taught me all I need to know about misanthropy.
Racism is a handy, valid system for stereotyping people.
The most unsettling legacy of D&D, persisting throughout modern RPGs, is its use of the term “race” in defining characters and their inherent abilities.
The game is not racist in a KKK sense; it refers to the entire “human race” as compared with fantastical “races” such as elves and orcs. But in terminology and application, the racial system does echo 19th century white (and male) supremacy to a disturbing degree.
As 1E put it, your character must come from a certain “racial stock.” A couple of mixed-race options are available, described in the shockingly Civil War-era terminology of “half”-ness. For example, a character with a human father and an elven mother is branded a “half-elf.”
The racial choice often comes with quantifiable, inherent limits on what social roles the character can play, and can limit their inherent abilities—including their intelligence. The human race “is superior to the others,” the 1E “Player’s Handbook” states.
Furthermore, your race could well determine and limit your friendships with other characters. The same 1E book included a “Racial Preferences” chart, presented as a non-optional system for how well characters of various races got along. The reaction could include “strong hatred of the race in question.”
D&D was invented by young white men. It is notable that their “superior” human race is depicted throughout the early D&D books exclusively as white Europeans. There is no sense that people of other ethnicities might play the game and find this, not a fantasy, but a horrific reminder of the bullshit they live with in reality.
D&D’s founders essentially took white supremacist myth and pseudoscience and inflated them into a fantasy of human supremacy. It is not racist to desire believable depictions of culture clashes or to put some limits on the magical powers of fantasy characters. But using a racial system to do so is remarkably thoughtless and offensive. It both dismisses real racism and indirectly validates its fictions.
D&D taught me why racism persists—stereotyping people is a convenient way of rendering social decision-making to be artificially simple, and for making the limits a system imposes on people appear to be inherent to them.
Then again, I had kinda already picked up on that from all of American history and Nazi fucking Germany, too.
You are what you earn.
D&D is fundamentally about killing things for their treasure. That’s certainly valuable training for modern life. But 1E D&D went even farther. The value of the seized treasure, in gold pieces, converted directly into your character’s experience points—the quantified measurement of how your character’s abilities improve over time. Simply by possessing 500 gold pieces, your character could become stronger, smarter and faster.
In short, you are what you earn. This was fair warning for a world populated with an incredible number of depraved jackasses who actually believe that.
Adults are just giant, idiotic children.
Until you have seen a grown man, 50 years old and fully bearded, leaping to his feet at a gaming table and screaming about how unfair it is that a dice roll did not go his way—shouting and whining until his DM buddy caves and fudges the results for him—until that awkward moment, you do not truly understand how the U.S. Congress works.
Subcultures are a slightly cooler version of mainstream culture, not an escape from it.
Rejected, brutalized and lied to by every social authority as a kid, I discovered geek subculture and naively assumed I had found sanctuary. I soon learned that being treated like crap by someone 99 percent like you is often worse than being treated like crap by a total mainstream square.
D&D culture is still largely white dude culture with all of its arrogances. Guys, if you want to know what women are treated like at hardware stores and guitar shops, go into a gaming store without knowing who played the first Doctor Who or six different catchphrases from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
I’m the sort of person who feels genuine relief when the Dungeon Master who shows up appears to be a total social misfit, awkwardly chubby, gender indeterminate, wearing prison-issue clunky glasses and a never-in-fashion polo shirt. My people! And then they’re instantly horse-laughing over the fact I’m a dude playing a girl character. Shit, even George W. Bush would pretend to like me for 180 minutes.
At least I’m still a dude. Women often retreat from the world that thinks they belong in the kitchen, only to find a game room that thinks they belong in a chainmail bikini.
Still, it was priceless for me to learn that any social structure, sub- or no, is ultimately about power and abuses thereof. Subcultures don’t automatically give you tolerance and kinship; they just nudge the percentages more in your direction.
Everything you love will be sold out by corporate whores.
Just like hip-hop and punk, everything started going wrong with D&D when the cash started rolling in.
The formation of TSR, a corporation controlling D&D, soon led to the aforementioned dumping of Gygax. Already pushed out of the game’s creative direction, he also lost control over the very characters he had created for DIY fun in his basement.
That same era saw the company cave to insane Christian agitators and scrub the words “demon” and “devil” from all its materials, replacing them with absurd faux-alien terms. Giant corporations are the only entities that believe kowtowing to conspiracy theorists will make them buy your product.
Over the years, D&D has changed corporate hands and now nestles in the pocket of Hasbro, alongside G.I. Joe and the ultimate game of evil roleplaying, Monopoly. Its trajectory has consisted of getting progressively stupider and more expensive, a pairing familiar to any student of subculture cash-ins.
The 1E D&D was a hit, not despite being overcomplicated and verbose, but because of it. It had the quirky, individual charm of a witch’s grimoire. It was inspiringly weird, unabashedly smart, deliberately melodramatic.
By contrast, the game reached its nadir with the current Fourth Edition, written like a “D&D for Dummies” with all the wit and charm of an assembly instruction sheet for an Ikea coffee table.
The corporate strategy is to publish new “editions,” or revised rules, for the game frequently—as this requires players to buy a whole new set of the three core rulebooks at a total cost of around $100. Then follows a series of optional rulebooks notable for increasing cover prices and decreasing page counts.
The geeksploitation created a market for Pathfinder, which essentially duplicates and preserves the last acceptable edition of D&D in a single, lower-priced core rulebook.
D&D is now trying to hose the shit off its golden brand name with water from the well of 40th birthday nostalgia. Will this year’s Fifth Edition be a return to the good old days? My own play-testing tells me it’s at least a step in that direction. But my experience with corporate whores is that they never really get a DIY culture. Things DIY are wild animals that don’t survive in zoos.
It’s a lesson Pathfinder sure learned.
Humans are power-mad.
A game built around fantasies of adventuring conquests has always been acutely aware of power-tripping—though it varies in how much it restrains or caters to that. Much like our government, D&D has gone from a system of intricate checks and balances to an embrace of lavish displays of power. In the early days, a 9th level character would be rare; today, it’s an overpowered game built on fast-tracking you past 20th level, or near-godhood.
Back in the real world, the gaming table is often home to bullies and control freaks of all sorts. My latest gaming session involved dudes casting spells on my character without consent, the sort of fantasy assault that hints at a troubled mind.
Creative people are underpaid and treated like serfs.
Gygax is now ancestor-worshiped by the successor corporation to the one that fucked him over, as corporations always do when nostalgia can be mined for still more cash. But make no mistake, gaming remains a brutally exploitative world to the very souls it relies upon for its allure.
I recently spoke at length with one well-known fantasy artist who did important work for D&D. He described how, after the works became successful, he was quickly dropped by the company in favor of less experienced, and far cheaper, artists.
Then there’s Dave Trampier, whose work defined the look of 1E. His dealings with D&D's parent company in the 1980s were such that he found driving a cab in Carbondale, Illinois preferable to ever working for them again.
Most people are cowards who will censor anything to maintain their delusions.
The 1980s moral panic over D&D, in which it was accused of brainwashing kids into Satanism and murder, is the stuff of jokes today. The immense hypocrisy of the Christian nuts behind it, with their own slaughter-inspiring book of fantasy monsters, can now go without saying.
Still, I saw this up-close and learned formative lessons. As a D&D-playing teen, I attended a church that handed out pamphlets decrying D&D as Satanic. I laughed at the time, but I also saw how cowardly and ignorant everyone in that church was, and how much they wanted to destroy anything that spoke real truth to their kids, or simply empowered them. Every social evil I’ve seen since then, from music censorship to nonsense wars to homophobia to the PATRIOT Act, has been powered by cowardice.
Creative people go creatively nuts.
That being said, I actually did know someone who went crazy on a D&D theme. He was a kid in my school who I was slated to game with. Before that could happen, he had a bad day, and ran away into the woods with his hunting bow, leaving a note saying he was off to hunt down the “Elven King.” My mom told me to stay at home in lockdown until the state cops tracked him down.
Of course, D&D provided the flavor rather than the cause of his craziness, and I can safely say few commentators would even claim otherwise today, when such a tale would make national news. But the corollary lesson I learned still holds true: Society will blame everything except its mainstream self. I see it after every school shooting: blame guns, blame mental health systems, maybe (though rarely) blame the parents. No one ever asks what was wrong with the school—because then we’re all on the bloody hook.
I have no idea what the Elven King Hunter’s home life was like; crappy, probably. But I know what our school was like. It was a minimum-security-prison-style cesspit of violence, stupidity, bigotry and child molesters. In my day, it also produced a mass murderer and a violent rapist, both of whom I knew in classes, and both of whom were treated like shit in them.
I would have to be on a crazy fantasy trip of my own to think schools are any different today. Who wouldn’t rather go find the Elven King? You’d be crazy not to.
Life really is a game.
Most everyone I see is playing a fake role in a complicated system run by incompetent Dungeon Masters. Thank you, D&D, for at least making it a conscious process for me.