The Allure of Role-Playing

Cecil Adams began an article on role-playing with “a lifetime of Parcheesi does not adequately prepare you for this.” He then went on to compare gaming to double-entry book-keeping, an analogy that, for many game systems, has its validity.

I joined my first role-playing game on October 31, 1981. I was a senior in high school in rural Michigan, in a tiny town of about seven hundred people. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I did know it was going to be different from what I had done before. After escorting my younger brother and sister trick-or-treating, I met the people who would soon be joining me every Friday or Saturday evening for the rest of my senior year. I expected something like Candyland with a fantasy motif. What I got was an open-ended question:

You guide your horses up the long dusty road to the castle ruins. At the entrance an iron portcullis blocks your way into the darkness beyond. You see shapes moving inside, and you can hear a river nearby. What do you do next?

The first time we played, we played on our dining room table. Mom made popcorn. From then on we went down to the basement and used the pool table.

Playing Dungeons & Dragons was like waking up from a dreamless sleep on Christmas morning. This was a completely different kind of game, unlike any of the board games I’d played, unlike any of the card games my parents played. Nothing like the Candyland I’d played as a child, and nothing like the poker that all of the uncles played at family gatherings. It wasn't just a new game, it was a new kind of game, a new way of socializing. When we were gaming, we were writing a fantasy story, and having fun doing it. I had already read “The Hobbit” and probably “The Lord of the Rings” by then. And of course I was an avid reader of superhero comic books. One of the first things I did after discovering role-playing games was start working on rules for what became Men & Supermen (http://www.menandsupermen.com/). In my classes, when I finished my schoolwork, I’d pull out the notebook for the superhero game rules.

Or I’d pull out the notes on my own Dungeons & Dragons campaign world, a huge island covered in castles, caverns, and dungeons. Having no idea what a gaming map was supposed to look like, I used square graph paper from math class. I drew the entire island fifty feet to the square. When laid out, the island’s map covered the pool table we gamed on. It was nearly impossible to use during the game. The island was at most a few miles wide and its climates ranged from desert to snowy mountain, forest to jungle. To quote the Knights of the Dinner Table, you had to “suspend disbelief with a frickin’ crane”, but suspend it we did, and we had a blast.

In retrospect, the person who introduced me to gaming probably wasn’t very experienced either; I would not be at all surprised if that first game I played on that Hallowe’en was the first time he had ever been a Dungeon Master. For Christmas that year, I got some Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. As in Hollywood, where every actor sooner or later wants to direct, every gamer someday, even if only once, feels the urge to design and run their own adventure. Two of us took turns as Dungeon Master. When I wasn’t pitting them against the crazed magical island, I role-played Elzaac, a priest of the Norse god Thor. Elzaac’s main purpose was running around deserted castles, banging on monsters with a hammer, calling on Thor to smite monsters with magic, and taking the monsters’ treasure.

Much later, when I saw Richard Linklater’s wonderful “Dazed and Confused,” I thought it made no sense for the main characters to be playing poker together. Who played poker in our age group? When did poker cross jock/geek boundaries, or male/female boundaries as their game clearly did? Poker, I decided, was their code-name for Dungeons & Dragons. They just didn’t want anyone else to know about it in 1976. Gaming was still underground even in 1982, and 1976 was only three years from the infamous and oft-misunderstood Dallas Egbert disappearance. Our Dungeon Master and I decided to “go public” as gamers following a particularly stupid local newspaper article in which the Muskegon Chronicle accused D&D gamers of actually casting real spells. Coming out of Mass the following Sunday I was stopped by a woman who thanked us for our letter-to-the-editor. “It seems like such a fun game,” she said, and told us that her daughters also played. I have a suspicion that she did, also.

There were other games. When the two of us weren’t running a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, my brother (the jock in our group--he was on the football team) ran a post-nuclear game by the same company. In Gamma World the dungeons were not the ruins of ancient castles but the ruins of the modern world. We were mutated creatures trying simply to survive the aftermath of a nuclear war.

When I went East to college the next year, role-playing continued to shape the direction of my life. I’d never been out of our village without my family (or without the Boy Scouts, which included my family). And here I was in a “big” city (the tiny city of Ithaca, New York), my parents had just left, and I was sitting in a dormitory room full of boxes waiting to see who my roommate was going to be. As I unpacked, a sophomore from California walked by and, noticing my Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, invited me to join the D&D group he was starting. I was all set to roll up a new priest of Thor just like Elzaac, when I discovered that our new Dungeon Master’s real name was... Thor. I made quick use of a pencil eraser (always write your new characters in pencil) and introduced my character as Praxos, a priest of the Egyptian god Ra.

Praxos and his companions set out into the Fell Pass, a long tunnel through the Barrier Peaks, the only short cut to something, I don’t even remember what, but whatever it was our characters desperately needed to find it before something horrible happened to the entire world. Fifteen years later I discovered that the “Fell Pass” had been written up by one of Thor’s California friends and published in The Dragon, the number one Dungeons & Dragons magazine. It bore little resemblance except for the name and the concept, but even that didn’t matter, as I’d never read it. The nearest game store in my home town had received The Dragon only sporadically (and with great fanfare: our cousins ran the gaming section of their parents’ general store and always let us know when new products were available).

On our journey through the Fell Pass we met displacer beasts, dog-like creatures that attacked, disappeared, re-appeared, and attacked again. Huge rats menaced us throughout the caverns, and in D&D, huge rats are dangerous foes to first level characters. There were things that roamed the corridors that we never did know what they were. We killed them all and took their treasure, although we never got rich. Thor was much stingier with treasure than my hack-and-slash high school friends had been. The treasure didn’t matter. It was all make-believe anyway, and it was all fun.

Praxos eventually died by failing a die roll and slipping off of the side of a mountain. After he slipped, he also failed his roll to grab the side of the trail and hang on; and he failed his roll to grab one of his companions; and his companions failed their rolls to grab him. It might have been possible to drag his battered body to some magical shrine for resurrection, but Praxos also failed the roll to see if his magical staff survived the fall. It didn’t, and the powerful magic of the staff exploded, leaving a crater and no trace of the fourth level Curate of Ra. I still have the maps of the Fell Pass that he was carrying when he fell as well as the final character sheet. When Praxos died he carried wolfsbane, garlic, and a silver holy symbol. He knew the spells cure light wounds, augury, and slow poison. He had already used detect evil, hold person, and silence that day.

I apparently had no problems accepting the death and moving on: Praxos’ final character sheet also contains the notes on my next character in that campaign, a Paladin of the god Vanimaar. If you don’t recognize the name, don’t worry. I made the god up. If real gods couldn’t keep my character from dying, I’d make one up who could. Vanimaar was the god of light and the sculptor of the heavens. As far as I know Sheridan survived to the end of that campaign. The last of my “Sheridan” character sheets has him at eighth level with a warhorse named Daren. I assume he rode off into the sunset.

Of those six friends I still game with two, and Thor is still our Dungeon Master. We gamed as much as we could that year, and not just Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike the village where I grew up, Ithaca had a game store within walking distance. We not only bought The Dragon, we bought all sorts of weird games. We played the superhero game Villains & Vigilantes; we played my own Men & Supermen. When the fantasy game Dragon Quest hit the bargain bin after their financial troubles we played that, too. We played the horribly complicated Chivalry & Sorcery (where even moral code was a random roll, and my character ended up diabolically evil, to Thor’s chagrin) and its sci-fi counterpart, Space Opera. Star Wars was still in its original trilogy at that time, and a huge influence on most of us gaming geeks, but Space Opera took an entire night just to make a character, and sometimes longer. It was too much even for a bunch of computer geeks. Later we would use the simpler Traveller and the even simpler Star Frontiers. Traveller is remembered today mostly for a very unique character creation process, which produced nicely detailed random backgrounds--with the risk that a character could die before you even started playing.

I also remember Tunnels & Trolls, an amazingly different game because while it superficially resembled the other fantasy games we’d played, it emphasized group play to such a degree that the combat rolls of each member of a group were combined when combat ensued. In all other games, it is every man, woman, and demihuman to themselves.

And there was Call of Cthulhu, where the goal was not surviving against unbeatable odds and coming back with great treasures, it was maintaining personal sanity in the face of unspeakable Lovecraftian horrors. Success didn’t mean being a hero, killing monsters, or even staying sane, it meant slowing the inevitable slide into madness. The best way to “win” in Call of Cthulhu was to die in style or retire only moderately insane.

I remember all of those characters in bits and pieces. There are so many of them. Besides Elzaac, Praxos, and Sheridan, there was the superhero “Snapdragon”. Snapdragon could fly, travel to other dimensions, create darkness, control plants, and move quickly. Snapdragon had a short-lived romance with the local NPC newscaster. That’s Non-Player Character for the uninitiated: it means a character that no player is playing. The Adventure Guide wings it.

As Editor of a Men & Supermen campaign, I had “FireBlade”, a fencing, fire-wielding superhero physically inspired by a young Lily Tomlin. The same campaign sported an archaeologist who entered an ancient library in the Urals and came out five years later as “The Rainbow Wizard” and who resembled Stockard Channing.

After graduating from college, gaming took a back seat to finding a job. But when, in the course of finding a job, I ended up in the hospital and then in a body cast for four months, I could have spent my free time learning new skills or planning a future; instead, in my post-near-death-experience mental re-alignment, I spent my time learning to play the guitar and designing a better adventure world than the old fifty-feet to a square magical island of Mordol. There were still some adventures to be had before dying, and I wasn’t about to waste any time on lesser pursuits. I’ve occasionally said that I went through my mid-life crisis at 22.

I wrote “The World of Highland” on single hex sheets, and designed it for Dragon Quest, later using it in Runequest when I moved back to Ithaca, before returning to the AD&D fold. My friends were mostly still there. We lived down the hill from our alma mater, took badly-paying jobs, and hung out in bars that we hadn’t had the money to hang out in while actually going to college. And played role-playing games, until one by one we drifted away--Boston, San Diego, Beijing, Los Angeles, Seattle, Bloomington... it started to get very boring in Ithaca, and part of that mid-life crisis involved heading to Los Angeles to play guitar.

When three of our original college group found ourselves in the same city in the nineties, we had a new breed of games to play. Role-playing games were back in vogue now that the Internet was bringing gamers together on-line. While Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had a second edition, there were also some new genres available. Thor had foreseen the need for a near-future, cybered-up role-playing game back in the eighties in Ithaca, but we had never been able to get our heads around the concept enough to write one that worked. In the nineties we played the games of those who had: Cyperpunk 2020 and the cyberfantasy hybrid Shadowrun. Shadowrun combined the fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons with the near-future gothic bleakness of the cyberpunk genre. I even founded the then-premier on-line Shadowrun zine, The Neo-Anarchists’ Guide to Everything Else (http://www.hoboes.com/pub/Role-Playing/Shadowrun/NAGEE/). And since goth was in, the Vampire role-playing game took Call of Cthulhu to a different level. We role-played undead creatures struggling vainly to maintain a grip on their humanity in the face of unquenchable hunger.

The nineties also brought different kinds of characters to the old standards. One character sheet I have from this time period is for “Raj Gua’dar ab’d’allah”. I no longer have any idea what the name means, but Raj was a second edition Dungeons & Dragons gay psychic whose dialogue was based on a few characters from the writings of Oscar Wilde and Donna Barr. Raj’s psychic powers included teleportation, mind reading, and dream travel. He could dance, play the harpsichord, and had a charisma of 17.

Today, in the twenty-first century, we’ve come full circle. Our gaming group is playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, first edition, the same game we played in college. Dungeons & Dragons itself has a third edition which is seeing some popularity despite being under its fourth owner. Hackmaster, once a joke in “Knights of the Dinner Table”, brings on board many of those weird house rules that in our naïve exuberance we added to Dungeons & Dragons in the seventies and eighties.

Role-playing games are not for everyone, but those of us who enjoy them find it hard to understand why. Who could not enjoy a game that makes such a profound use of individual creativity in a shared setting? Who could not enjoy a game that provides an outlet for pent-up creativity, frustrations, and the need to just get together with friends? A game that also stimulates creativity and challenges intelligence in a way that makes no demands that are not fun to meet? A game whose rules flow with the path that the game takes?

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams writes that the population of the universe is zero, because the universe is infinite and the population is finite. Since “any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, it follows that the population of the whole Universe is zero, and any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

Role-playing games have no rules. Even Space Opera, with its night-long character creation process, has finite rules and infinite possibilities. Role-playing games have no rules. What rules they do have are there to assist you as player and Guide, but for the most part they are inconsequential. There are no rules for the vast majority of things that your character does. When you enter combat, there are rules to assure that you know how to keep your character alive, so that you can reasonably know your character’s chance of success. But when you decide to sneak into town at night or take over the local ruling council, the die rolls you make are inconsequential compared to all of the shared decisions between you and the Guide, decisions that have no rules to cover them. Practically speaking, there are no rules.

Rules are, in a sense, “sandboxes” that the characters occasionally enter, where the players know more precisely the process of what will happen to their characters. But most of the action in a role-playing game takes place in the “negative space” shaped by, but not defined by, the game’s rules.

Someday we might be able to program computer games that have no rules, but for now role-playing games are an unequalled means of passing the time with friends and strangers. No other non-physical game produces stories about game sessions like role-playing does. Old adventures come up in conversations just like glory days for football players and old warriors. Do you remember the time Xen-Arbus tried to get the attention of an oblivious farm family--and ended up waking the dead? We had to fight three skeleton ghouls! Or the time Xen-Arbus decided that there was definitely a monster behind this one door, and opened and rushed it--in full plate armor--to surprise them, only to discover a forty-foot down stairway behind the door? He couldn’t hear for the rest of the adventure.

Maybe you have to be one of Adams’ “deranged imaginations” to enjoy role-playing games. If you read books and often wonder what might have happened if the characters took a different path, you might enjoy role-playing games. If you read books and can discuss in detail the motivations of your favorite characters and what they probably did after the book was over or in the parts of their lives the book didn’t cover, you will almost certainly enjoy role-playing games.

Being a role-playing gamer sometimes feels like being part of a secret club. You’re one of the people in the theater yelling to the characters in the horror movie to “pick up the gun, dammit!” because you think about what the characters in the movie should be doing. You think in terms of what you would do in that utterly ridiculous situation. You accept for the story that dragons are real, and then worry about how “realistic” they are within the story. You’re one of the people who read Harry Potter and know not only what Quidditch means, you also know the rules of the game. You’re one of the people who, after reading one too many wonderful books, sat down and tried to write a book of your own. The chapters you wrote--perhaps even the whole thing--are still sitting in a corner of your workshop or hard drive. You still remember the names of your imaginary friends. You don’t daydream meeting the man or woman of your dreams. You daydream meeting the man or woman of your dreams in an adventure on the Amazon, a pirate ship in the Caribbean, a gothic castle, or a western desert against a setting sun.

If you like stories, if you like making up stories, if you like being in stories, you’ll find something to enjoy in role-playing games. You’ll find adventure, and really wild things. And I hope that Gods & Monsters can be a part of your journey.