Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (3 page)

Ganubi pauses, turns, and grins back at us. I know the look on his face, and it worries me.

“Stay right here,” he says. “I’ve got an idea.”

Ganubi is a “bard,” one of the more obscure character classes in Dungeons & Dragons. Bards express magic powers through the use of music or performance, sort of like the Pied Piper. Many players avoid the class, preferring to play something more traditional, like a fighter or thief. But there’s nothing traditional about Phil.

Phillip Gerba, thirty-one, is a professional clown. He earned a bachelor’s degree in theater performance from Northern Arizona University and studied for a year at the Clown Conservatory in San Francisco. After graduation he worked on Royal Caribbean cruise ships as a juggler, and then moved to New York and got a job at the big Disney store in midtown Manhattan. He wore a Goofy suit and did pratfalls to amuse kids.

At the moment, Phil’s developing his own stage show,
Onomatopoeia
. It’s high-concept vaudeville: Each scene explores an idea, but
the only words in the script are onomatopoeias. It’s heavy on the slapstick: Bang! Pop! Thud! Sigh.

Phil started playing D&D when he was just a child. “I really wanted to play a lizard man because I liked lizards,” he says. “I wanted to be a herpetologist when I grew up.” Instead, he went into theater—and now the game table is one more place for him to perform.

D&D players control their characters using a combination of first-person narration and dramatic performance. This is the part of the game that confuses people who’ve never played. But it’s fairly simple, in practice.

Imagine you’re playing a character who is locked in a jail cell. The DM describes the room, from his notes: “You’re in the corner of a cold, dark room, about ten feet square. The walls are made of stone and are only interrupted by a single wooden door. The door is shut tightly, and a fist-sized window near the top is your only source of light.”

As a player, your job is to choose an action and describe it. You might say, “I try to force the door open.”

At this, the DM looks up the rules for breaking down a door,
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consults your character sheet to see how strong you are, and rolls a couple dice. If you’re lucky, he’ll say something like “You put all your weight against the door, and a hinge snaps. The door falls out into the hallway with a loud crash.”

This narrative technique is useful in most situations. But what if you weren’t strong enough to break the door? You might try to talk a guard into releasing you—and your DM might require you to act the scenario out, in character, with him playing the guard. Put on a convincing performance, and he’ll open the door.

For players like Phil, this is the best part of the game. He comes
to life when our characters are haggling with merchants, negotiating with employers, or trying to talk their way out of a fight.

Ganubi’s plans are always dramatic, but not as often successful, so I have my reservations. But he’s already turned the corner and pulled out a trinket we obtained in Tokyo: his hat of disguise, a magical item that allows the wearer to change appearance at will.

He puts it on his head, and his features warp and twist, his skin turns scaly, and his face goes flat. In a moment, he looks like one of the pirates.

“Okay, you look like a fish,” Morgan says.

Phil flashes a large grin. “I’m going to approach the pirates and see what they do.”

Morgan rolls a die, hidden behind the cover of his notebook. “They turn and notice you but don’t take any action. You’re still about thirty feet away.”

“Right.” Phil pauses. “When I get about five feet away, I’m going to act surprised, point behind them, and yell in alarm.”

“You don’t speak their language.”

“I know,” says Phil. “I make a noise like a panicked fish.”

Morgan chuckles and then grimaces. “Okay,” he says. “Roll against your performance skill.”

Phil picks up a d20—a glittery blue plastic die, twenty-sided—and rolls it across the table. It stops showing a seven.

Morgan checks his notes. “The pirates look confused,” he says. “They’re just staring at you.”

“Okay,” says Phil. “Which fish looks the most gullible?”

Alex grunts, exasperated. “To hell with this,” he says. “I draw my swords.”

Jhaden is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in our adventuring party, a ranger who fights with one sword in each hand on the front line of battle. He does the majority of damage to enemies and serves as a meat shield for other, less hardy characters.

He’s played by Alex Agius, thirty-three. Alex is a graphic designer, working freelance since he was laid off from a full-time job at
Penthouse
magazine. It used to be his job to lay out pictorials, Photoshop blemishes off nude models, and select the proper font for each obscene caption. Now he mostly works for a magazine about investment banking.

Alex was first exposed to D&D when he turned nine years old and a cousin brought the game to his birthday party. “I loved the Conan comic books, so what initially attracted me to D&D was that you could be a barbarian,” he says. “But when I realized that I could play a character that was totally my design, instead of a pre-created character like Conan . . . that was really cool.”

After his cousin went home, Alex sketched a map of the dungeon they’d explored in the game. When his mom found the drawing, she “thought it was really cool,” so she bought him a set of D&D rule books.

Unlike Phil, Alex tends to get restless when there’s too much role-playing in a game. He’s much more comfortable when the adventure tends toward action.

Combat in D&D is handled as a sequence of narrated actions and lots of dice rolling. If a player decides to hit something with his sword, he may announce the attack, but the DM calculates whether it succeeds. In practice, this amounts to calculating an algebraic equation, something like: (strength of the fighter + skill of the fighter) − (agility of the target + armor worn by the target) + an element of randomness introduced by the dice = whether or not the fighter hits.

Every creature in the game—whether a character controlled by a
player or a monster controlled by the DM—has a specific amount of “hit points,” a number representing their health. When a fighter hits his target, he rolls dice to see how much it hurts, with higher numbers indicating more damage. The DM subtracts that number from the monster’s pool of hit points, and the process repeats. Player after player takes their shots until the monster hits zero hit points and dies.

These rules for combat get incredibly complex. There are specific rules for fighting while blinded, while underwater, and while riding a horse. There are rules that describe how to knock a sword out of someone’s hands and how to bash them with a shield. There is even an entire rule book,
Weapons of Legacy,
listing hundreds of different armaments and describing the effect they have upon the game.

Jhaden’s sword, Bloodlust, is an epic weapon, magically enchanted to inflict extra damage against vampires and other undead creatures. He wields it in his right hand, and in his left he holds a shorter blade, a foot long and unnaturally sharp. If he comes at you with both, you’re going to get hurt.

“I’m charging,” Alex says. “This guy.” He points at an inch-high plastic figurine on the table, representing one of the fish. Morgan has set them up on our battle mat, a piece of tan vinyl printed with a twenty-by-twenty grid of one-inch squares. Each square corresponds to five feet of space in the game world, and every participant in a battle is represented by a different miniature figurine, or “mini.” We don’t use it all the time in the game, but it’s helpful during combat because it allows us to track each other’s location and movement.

“The guards see you, and now it’s time for initiative order,” says Morgan. Any time players enter combat, they roll a die to determine
the order in which they’ll take their turns. This time, Alex comes up first.

“Okay, I charge in, and I’m attacking with Bloodlust,” he says. He moves his mini—a crouching figure in a brown cloak, holding two swords—across the mat, picks up a d20, and rolls it to determine the success of his attack. It comes up 12. “I get plus two for charging, and plus eight for my melee attack bonus, so my attack roll is a twenty-two.”

Jhaden rushes forward, and Bloodlust slashes through the pirate’s scales, penetrating deep into its chest. As he pulls the sword from his victim, Jhaden looks back at us and shouts, “Tonight we’re eating sushi!”

A Dungeons & Dragons campaign almost always includes a wizard. Abel was our first. He was an “evoker,” which denotes a specialization in spells that create something from nothing—like fireballs and lightning bolts. But he was killed just a few weeks ago, when his consciousness was merged with that of an ancient dragon.
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Since wizards are so critical to an adventuring party’s success, we quickly recruited a new one, Babeal.

Both characters are played by Brandon Bryant. It would be simple to typecast Brandon as a D&D player—he’s a big guy with unruly hair who works as an IT manager. But the easy stereotypes end there. At thirty-four, he’s on his second marriage, to a recent art school graduate. He’s studied karate since he was a kid and regularly travels to competitions around the Northeast. He’s also an expert fire dancer—on warm summer nights in Brooklyn, you can sometimes
find him on the roof of his apartment building, tossing and catching flaming batons.

Brandon’s happy to draw a direct line from his fire dancing to spell casting. “I like the idea of having control over an elemental force,” he says. “Here’s this primal thing and I’m bending it to my will . . . it’s magical but mundane, like having tea with a god.”

“The pirate has been badly wounded by Jhaden’s attack but is still standing,” says Morgan. “Babeal, it’s your turn.”

The mini representing Babeal is at the far end of the battle mat, where Morgan has drawn a box with a brown dry-erase marker, indicating the walls of the ship’s wheelhouse. It’s a figure of a man in a forest-green robe, holding a long staff and wearing a bucket-shaped helmet with long antlers curving upward on each side. This mini has always reminded me of the leader of the “Knights who say Ni” from the film
Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
but I have never made this observation aloud. Making a Python reference in a room full of geeks is like bringing brownies to a Weight Watchers meeting. It could take hours to restore order.

Jhaden is across the grid, in a square next to the wounded pirate. The three other fish-men are a few squares away.

“Suck on this, fishies,” says Brandon. “Fireball.”

Morgan nods. A fireball is a ranged attack spell, so Babeal can cast it from a distance. And since it has a distinct area of effect—a circle forty feet in diameter, or eight squares on the grid—Babeal can target it so as to immolate the pirates but miss his allies.

Morgan draws a red circle on the mat. “You cast and the deck explodes in flame, engulfing the pirates. Roll for damage.”

A fireball spell causes worlds of hurt, so Babeal needs to roll ten six-sided dice (in geekspeak, “10d6”) to find out how many hit points each pirate loses.

He doesn’t have enough dice, though. So he picks 5d6 off the table—three of his own, and two of Alex’s—tosses them on the table, scoops them up, and tosses them again. Each affected enemy will take 32 points of damage.

Brandon’s fireballs do 10d6 of damage now, but when our game began, he couldn’t cast the spell at all. That’s changed because of a key element of the D&D rules: Characters don’t just persist from session to session, they learn from their experiences.

Anyone who has played a video game in the last twenty years won’t find that shocking. But D&D pioneered the idea of characters that become more powerful over time; before its invention, games were almost all static. The rules of Monopoly never change, no matter how many times you go around the board.
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Because D&D characters can grow, like real people, playing the game becomes a uniquely visceral experience. Participants are more motivated to succeed, since victories are accumulative. They experience greater joy from those successes, since they are more emotionally invested. And they know the thrill of real danger, since no one wants to lose a character they’ve spent years building.

In short, D&D players live vicariously through their characters the way a parent might live through their children—not that any gamer would take the relationship that seriously, unless they’re crazy. But more on that later.

Naturally, advancement is measured in terms of a mathematical progression. At various points in an adventure, usually during breaks in the narrative, a DM will review the players’ accomplishments and reward them with “experience points.” They’ll get points for every monster they’ve defeated, based on their relative threat; killing a rat might earn 100 experience points, while slaying a dragon could be worth 100,000. They’ll also, at the DM’s discretion, receive points for abstract achievements, like solving a puzzle or successfully role-playing their way out of trouble. When a character has earned enough experience points they advance a level, gain access to new abilities, and become more powerful.

The characters aren’t the only thing changing over time. Since D&D campaigns can last months, years, or even decades, players will come and go as their personal lives allow more or less opportunity for leisure.

Vampire World has seen its share of personnel changes. Brandon’s friend Nick played a barbarian, Taluug, until he moved out of the apartment. A second Alex (we called him “Deuce”) had a few characters, including a druid, a magic-user who draws his powers from nature. Deuce was a college student and quit because of school obligations.

R. C. Robbins joined the game well after Abel, Jhaden, Ganubi, and Weslocke met in Kyoto. He plays Graeme, a rogue. They’re an essential part of any adventuring party; skills like finding traps and picking locks are frequently useful in the fantasy-adventure genre. But since R. C. didn’t make the game tonight, we consider Graeme “in pocket”—he hasn’t died or left the party, he’s just off in the background until next time. It’s a shame, because we could use a little help with these pirates: Babeal’s fireball scorched them but didn’t take them down.