Randor faces the orc, watching the fecund creature swing a heavy maul toward him. Mike rolls his twenty-sided die, and it comes up a 20! Randor’s greatsword strikes the orc in the belly, slicing through the pitiful armor protecting it. It falls to the ground, a lifeless heap.
That was just a minuscule sampling of the action happening on campuses around the country as tabletop adventurers explore paper dungeons in search of fame, glory and, above all, loot. The game of choice for these adventurers is D&D.
What is D&D, you ask? Dungeons and Dragons is the progenitor of all modern role-playing games. Basically, the players assume the roles of characters that they have created, much like an actor assumes a role in a play or movie. The DM (for dungeon master) takes on the job of “director,” if you will, controlling the world around the characters, including villains, villagers, the weather and even the fictional deities of the world.
Players can wield a sword as a mighty paladin, master stealth as a rogue or even command the primal forces of magic as a sorcerer. All this through the player’s imagination and a handful of oddly-shaped dice.
The game came about as an extension of a more traditional war game put out by the Tactical Strategic Rules game club of Lake Geneva, Wisc., which would become the leading gaming company of the ’80s and ’90s. After a while, the players found it more fun to play as individuals completing an epic quest. With that, Dungeons and Dragons was born.
Now in its third iteration (the first ran from 1974-1980, the second, “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,” from 1984-1999 and the third released three months ago), the game has proved immensely successful and laid the groundwork for a panoply of later games. D&D has also sparked novels, comic books, a 1982-83 Saturday morning cartoon and, coming later this year, a motion picture.
With such a runaway and sustained success, gaming should have been fully accepted (or at least tolerated) by the mainstream by now. That’s what would happen in a world filled with normal people.
Yet groups like Patricia Pulling’s B.A.D.D. (“Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons,” a group she established after her son’s suicide, which she blamed on the game) continually try to get the game banned or censored. Jack Chick, the religious right’s grand poobah of foolishness, published one of his toilet-paper pamphlets excoriating D&D and calling it a direct entrance to Satanism and other really, really bad things. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” took it one step further, making the outrageous claim that it is morally right for a person to steal and destroy gaming materials to “save” the players.
So what’s the problem with D&D? The main complaint from the ruling cabal of the village idiots is twofold: First, the characters use magic, which in the Bible is seen as a tool of the devil; second, that the game uses its own, often polytheistic, theological system that has no mention of Jesus Christ.
First, yes, the characters do use magic, but characters are fictional constructs. To say that a player is actually casting magic when his character chants “magic missile” is the equivalent of saying that Harrison Ford is a mass murderer because so many Nazis died in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Just who has the fuzzy grasp of reality here?
Secondly, the religions in the game are also fictional, and so praying, in game terms, to Pelor (a good-aligned basic game deity) would have as much relevance as someone believing in The Force. However, no player I’ve ever met in a game has had even the slightest inclination toward the “dark side” (OK, one went into advertising, but that’s a different story).
In fact, one of my old friends, the one who introduced me to the game, is a devout church member, and, when last I heard, was running church-sanctioned D&D games. The guy with red underwear and horns was nowhere to be seen.