For Dungeons & Dragons, the magic is in the memories
article by Lillian Barkley
In most games, crying isn’t a good sign. But my character, a young elf, had survived an enemy attack only after making a desperate bargain with an ancient and cruel being. In exchange for her life, she could never return home. With a magically assisted message, she was saying goodbye to her family — played equally emotionally by my friend 800 miles away — and my eyes were welling with tears of joy over it. Our friends, scattered in different cities, cheered on our call over a scene well done.
We’d been playing Dungeons & Dragons together for five years, starting because we wanted to keep in touch after graduating high school. None of us had played much before, but it didn’t matter. We learned together, navigating the rules and making each other laugh (and sometimes cry) with the story we created.
Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year. Over the decades since the game was created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, it has been transformed in the public consciousness from an image of social misfits playing in basements to a commercial behemoth. But the emotional bonds forged along the way are what players remember. We asked five of them to share a moment that stuck with them.
— Lillian Barkley, Opinions audience strategy editor
1970s: A miracle from my brother
(Anderson Cooper is a journalist and anchors “Anderson Cooper 360” on CNN.)
Fletcher, my elven thief, was dear to my heart. He wore a red cape and, in my mind, bore a close resemblance to D’Artagnan from “The Three Musketeers.” Fletcher and his fellow adventurers would slay monsters and collect treasure. Ever the magnanimous hero, he hosted a party for the townspeople using his windfall of gold.
I was around 11, and my older brother and I had started playing a new game. We had previously played with toy soldiers, staging elaborate troop movements through our house by following the rules from H.G. Wells’s “Little Wars,” so we had a history of having a joint fantasy in our head. This new game, Dungeons & Dragons, was a natural extension of that.
There were polyhedral dice, which were interesting, but it wasn’t a board game. It was a storytelling game. It was both happening in our imaginations and playing out in real life with our friends around a table. We were all in this fantasy together, a group delusion in which everybody bought into the reality. And it was extremely important to me.
My brother, Carter, two years older than I was, came to it first after our father died in 1978. It allowed us to lose ourselves together and gave us a brief respite from the sadness that had descended on us. When we were playing D&D, we weren’t stuck in the silences of not talking about him. We could talk about D&D.
I see us now hunched in a circle, waiting for this incredible adventure to begin. My brother set it up, hiding his papers behind a screen to keep the elaborate plans he’d made for us secret, and there was a palpable excitement as we wondered what magical world he had created.
This game gave me license to extend my childhood just a bit longer and permission to feel joy and excitement again. I was a sad boy, stunned and terrified by my dad’s sudden death, but playing D&D, I could dive into the table and emerge on the other side as a swashbuckling elven thief, slaying orcs and other monsters. But death found me even in D&D. The game may not have winners and losers like other games, but it does have loss. I dont recall exactly what happened, but in some underground lair, my character, Fletcher, was killed. I was stunned and inconsolable. I refused to accept the death of this imaginary alter-ego for whom I deeply cared. Thankfully, the game allows for miracles the real world does not. My brother, using the mechanics afforded to him in his omniscient role, prolonged Fletcher’s story by magically reviving him.
We stopped playing a few months later. My brother, Carter, was developing other interests and D&D no longer seemed so cool. He died by suicide when he was 23. In going through his things recently, I found his “Dungeon Masters Guide” and “Monster Manual,” along with a binder full of hand-written notes he’d made for our games and detailed maps of mazes he’d created for our characters to explore. I’m not sure what to do with them, but I can’t throw them away because they are such a part of who he was when we were kids.
The care and imagination my brother put into our adventures inspired in me a love of exploring and storytelling. I left high school early and rode in a truck across sub-Saharan Africa for several months, from Johannesburg to Bangui in the Central African Republic. It was the beginning of a lifetime of travel and adventure and learning to tell stories of my own.
1980s: A mythology of the mind
(Lev Grossman is the author of “The Bright Sword” and the “Magicians” trilogy.)
We started hearing rumors about it when I was in fourth grade. Nobody knew exactly what Dungeons & Dragons was except that it wasn’t quite a normal game; it was something weird and arcane and important, like sex or calculus. An older boy who’d played it showed me, furtively, a map hand-drawn in ballpoint pen on graph paper. I struggled to grasp the concept. Was it a board game? Like Sorry? But the pieces could go, like, in any direction? And there’s more than one board? “In D&D,” the boy said sagely, “there are many maps.”
Then one day my friend Ben called and said his brother had a copy of the game. Did I want to play? I did. I hung up the phone — it was a rotary phone, the kind that’s firmly attached to a wall — and solemnly announced to my family: “This is the greatest day of my life.”
It wasn’t, but it was a very good day. We probably played the Village of Hommlet, which came standard with the Basic Set. Ben’s older brother was the dungeon master. I played a magic user, so I didn’t wear armor, and my only weapon was a dart. I cast my one first-level spell — magic missile, obviously — and then I died. I loved it.
I was raised with no particular religion, and the suburb of Boston where I grew up was an arid, unspiritual place. D&D supplied me with something I was desperately missing: a mythology. I was overflowing with surging pre-pubescent feelings that were beyond my ability to manage or understand, but D&D activated in me vast, hitherto dormant realms. I was learning how to navigate the dungeons of my own subconscious, with their many maps, where the dragons lived, and how to survive there.
As much as I loved it, when it came to the actual playing of D&D, I was awful — both at playing it and to play it with. On some level I still didn’t get the concept of D&D because all I wanted to do was win it. If I’m being charitable, I might say that I cared too much. I would do anything to keep my character from dying: lie about my dice rolls, conveniently forget rules, invent other rules and argue legalistically with the DM about them. My more imaginative friends would role-play as their characters, act out the scenes and do the voices. I just tried to get all the treasure I could.
As I got older, my tastes evolved. Reading the rulebooks gradually replaced the pleasure of actually playing D&D. I drew vast unplayable maps and combed through the books for bizarre minutiae — the “Players Handbook” contained a reference to a weapon called the Bohemian ear spoon, and I spent hours speculating about the nature of this cruelest of pole-arms. I sought out the more obscure and bizarre modules, like the infamously unbeatable “Queen of the Demonweb Pits.” Much of my adult sexuality is probably rooted in my contemplation of the alluring drawing of Tlazolteotl, Aztec goddess of vice, in the “Deities and Demigods” handbook.
It didn’t last forever. Eventually, my attention wandered — like Jackie Paper, I got interested in other toys. D&D offered many pleasures but not the pleasure of feeling cooler and cleverer than other people, and I, a callow teenager, went off in search of games that were easier to win.
But the dragons would have the last laugh. Years later, when I grew up and became a writer, I initially chose the path of conventional literary fiction — I wanted to write books that were respectable, full of my caustic, clear-eyed observations about good old-fashioned social reality. But I didn’t have much success at it, and it was a long time before I realized I wasn’t a literary writer at all. It wasn’t until I changed horses and wrote a novel about people who cast spells and explored a magic land that I found my voice and had my first success.
I didn’t belong in the surface world, with the cool and clever people. My place was down in the dungeons, where the dragons lived. That’s where the treasure was all along.
1990s: A good dungeon master is a good collaborator
(Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an actor, writer, director and the founder of HitRecord.)
It was something like 1994. I was 13. My friend Nick was coming over later, and I was getting ready. We had agreed that I would be dungeon master that day. I was behaving a bit like a screenwriter outlining a movie and a bit like a kindergartner playing pretend. I paced around my room, absorbed in thought, a pad of graph paper and pencils ready at hand somewhere on the carpeted floor. And then, I had an idea. I imagined a flood, not a real flood, a magic one, an unrealistically massive amount of water. The currents far too powerful to swim, the threat mortal; our main character would need to escape — somehow. But how? He would have to use his shield! He’d ride the deluge like a medieval boogie-boarder all the way to safety. I’m not saying it was a brilliant idea, but I was totally sold at the time. Our adventure’s climax firmly in mind, I felt ready to play.
Not long after Nick’s mom dropped him off, we sat down on the carpet and got to it. How does the game begin? Do you turn something on? Do you deal cards? Do you start at Go? No, none of the above. As the DM, I just started talking to Nick in the second person, describing his character’s experience. “Okay so, you’re at a tavern,” I might’ve begun. That’s where a lot of adventures started, us young adolescent dudes fantasizing about what it might be like to go to a bar.
At the tavern, Nick’s character met a mysterious thief who knew of a hidden dungeon containing unknown treasures and needing a partner with whom to make the dangerous but potentially lucrative journey. On their way, they probably met a few orcs or wraiths they had to fight, Nick and me rolling dice, doing arithmetic, erasing and re-penciling numbers on graph paper to determine the outcome of the combat. Once in the dungeon, I used a new sheet of paper to map the labyrinthine passageways and specify the locations of other monsters that needed fighting. The whole while, of course, I was thinking about my predetermined climax.
Nick’s character did have a shield because I had surreptitiously persuaded him to spend some of his gold on one before the adventure began. Everything was going according to plan. Then, once the time was right, I brought in the flood. “You hear something,” I told him. “A rumbling. It’s getting closer. And louder.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“You can’t tell, but it’s getting really loud now. Do you want to run?” I prompted him.
“No, I want to see what it is,” he said.
BADOOSH! The magic water exploded into the dungeon’s chamber, the door flying off its hinges. The Chaotic Evil Mage from whom our heroes had stolen was exacting his revenge. Nick’s character ran. Now he just needed to flip over his shield and ride the rushing water. But he didn’t.
Uh-oh. I tried to coax him into it.
“The water’s gonna pull you under; you gotta do something.”
“I swim hard!” he said, not knowing what else to do.
But that wasn’t what I was looking for. The idea I’d started with was not coming to pass. The climax of our story would have to become something else. And that, dear reader, is what makes Dungeons & Dragons unique. A good DM can imagine literally anything and make that part of the adventure, but once the game begins, they also have to be flexible, ready to come up with new ideas in response to the equally limitless imaginations of their players.
This is the crux of collaboration.
I wish I could remember exactly how my adventure with Nick ended that day. I do know it didn’t end as I expected. And as I’ve grown from a 13-year-old D&D player into an adult in the working world, that spirit of collaboration has only revealed itself to be more and more valuable. These days, I put much less weight on my own ideas and much more on what becomes of them once other people join in the game.
2000s: A community of my own
(Matthew Mercer is a voice actor and co-founder of Critical Role, where he serves as chief creative officer and game master for the company’s flagship show, “Critical Role.”)
One by one, they stopped coming to play. Folks who had never tried it canceled at the last minute, feeling awkward about joining something they didn’t understand. Experienced players who were looking forward to making characters and building a story together struggled to explain to their partners why they needed to spend hours away with their “work friends” to play make-believe. The D&D campaign I had poured myself into fizzled to nothing. I wasn’t angry at my friends, but I was worried about the death of this passion that had meant so much to me.
I was a kid whose heart sat in high fantasy, so D&D was very much an experience I felt drawn to. I spent countless afternoons after high school in the ’90s at the Collectors Asylum in Westlake Village, Calif., the local comic shop that also sold tabletop role-playing books and “Magic” cards. The Satanic Panic of the ’70s and ’80s still lingered like an albatross, while TV shows and films endlessly made us the butt of nerd jokes, playing up stereotypes of ultimate geekdom. The zeitgeist perpetuated the idea that “to play D&D was to be an outcast.”
The stores were my first taste of this colorful and creative world of gamers. The back corners were consumed with groups gathered around card tables, inventing their own stories together. These were the places I used to go on my lunch break, my little escapes when I had a moment, even if I didn’t buy anything. These were our social spaces. It felt like I walked into a community of my own.
In the 2000s, however, video games like “World of Warcraft” became cultural juggernauts, and “pen and paper” games started to fade. Many of the game stores I frequented shut their doors. It had all these signs of an extinction. I felt like this joyful pastime of mine was dying on the vine.
So after each group fell apart, I just tried to find fresh folks who might want to engage in that new journey. It largely ended up being friends who trusted me, were newer to the game and were curious to try it out. Preaching of the joys of rolling dice and playing make believe, I hoped that things could turn around.
We started video streaming our private game in 2015 and it became the web series “Critical Role,” which has inspired fans around the world to start their own games. I am so thankful I didn’t give up.
2010s: A character’s journey — and my own
(Ally Beardsley is a comedian and actor in the Dropout series “Dimension 20.”)
I was an aspiring comedian in Los Angeles and had just landed a salaried job at the comedy website CollegeHumor. My co-worker and friend Brennan Lee Mulligan was looking for six comedians to create a show that would be like an at-home game of D&D. Why not? “Dimension 20” became a weird punctuation to my day.
I remember there being too many rules to remember. I kept turning to my friend, Brian Murphy, to ask which dice I should be rolling. I wasn’t paid overtime, but I loved the group and was having a lot of fun.
For the second season, I had my sea legs. I created a character for the campaign who was transgender. I had started going by the gender neutral they/them pronouns at work and among friends, but sourcing hormones or getting surgery seemed equal parts expensive and invasive. A fun thing about fantasy is stripping away the crunchy, real-world limitations and asking yourself: “What would I do if I could do anything?”
That season’s arc for my character, Pete, was extremely euphoric for me. I had described him as a trans cowboy you might see at Burning Man, and the artist drew him dressed as a freaky Hunter S. Thompson in an open shirt to show his top surgery scars. He has wild magic — uncontrollable and dangerous in the game mechanics — which we used to explore the painful chaos of leaving a family that doesn’t accept you.
Since then, I’ve started testosterone HRT and had top surgery. It’s funny to listen back to myself playing a character who had transitioned in ways I hadn’t. It’s full of inaccuracies that make me smile. Pete takes a testosterone pill every day; I now know it’s a weekly injection or a topical gel. I see my face, one wrapped up in playing something so new but instantly right. It was like an oracle. A near-future me who has health insurance! Who’s talked to their mom about being trans and even spent a week post-top surgery on that mom’s couch in Temecula, Calif!
As I started transitioning my appearance, seeing that in front of the camera felt raw. I was starting hormones, and my voice was cracking. Realizing it was all being recorded felt naked at times, but it has been really nice to talk to fans and friends about how important it is to see someone that looks like you taking a big risk on themself.
With Pete, it was really important to me to tell a story other than the dramatic lead-up to a medical transition. So we started with him having just gotten out of surgery, but that’s all you see of that process. Part of his backstory is that he doesn’t have a relationship with his transphobic parents, and before shooting the first episode, I felt sick to my stomach. I’ve been on a journey with my parents, and our starting place didn’t have much common ground. When my character meets with his father, it felt as though I was actually running into my own on the street. Brennan could sense that discomfort, and as my character’s dad was about to call Pete by his deadname, Brennan shut the interaction down, surrounding his dad with bubbles that carried him into the sky. Magic is the power and freedom to manipulate your reality, and you can banish the awful voices in your life — let them swirl away into the air.