[APPLAUSE]
DAVID EWALT: Thank you
all for having me.
My name is David Ewalt.
I am a writer, I am a gamer,
and I am a level-15 cleric.
That's usually a line I actually
like giving to people
who aren't big gamers.
But I'm assuming being here at
Google that there are more
than a few gamers in this
audience and more than a few
D&D people.
So technically, I'm a level-16
character, a level-15 cleric,
and level-1 psionic warrior.
I see the glimpses of
recognition in the audience.
You're my people.
You're the ones I'm going
to be talking to today.
So I wrote this book about
"Dungeons & Dragons" because I
played "D&D" and other
role-playing games a lot when
I was a kid.
And the game was really
important to me for a number
of reasons.
One was just because it was so
much fun, but also because it
was the way that I met
some of my very best
friends in the world.
If you've never played the
game, it's social.
You're sitting down at a table
with other people and looking
at them, and telling
a story together.
So you tend to make friendships
during the game
that last a long time.
So the game was really
important to me.
I grew up, I kind of
stopped playing it
when I went to college.
But then I realized
this game was
something really important.
I started writing about
technology and about games.
And when I would go meet people
in the video game
industry, I would talk to
designers and to executives of
game companies.
And I would say to them, so
what made you want to make
video games for a living?
And over and over and over
again, the answer they would
give me was, "Well, you know, I
played a lot of 'Dungeons &
Dragons' when I was a kid."
So that made me start thinking,
there's more to this
game than just the fun weekends
I had with my
friends, in my friend Mike's
basement, that kind of thing.
And so I started to delve into
it further and figure out the
history of it, where
the game came
from, why it's so important.
Why it influenced our culture,
why it influenced our
industry, and just why it's so
pervasive in the 21st century.
So what I want to do here is I
want to share a little bit of
that history with you.
We're going to do sort of the
fast, very beginnings, just
like where "D&D" came from.
But I want to save a lot of
time for questions, both
because I know you might have
some, but also because one of
the fun things about this
game is sharing
stories with people.
So I'd love to know, if you want
to come up and talk about
one of your favorite campaigns,
or particular
things that you got out of the
game, what you feel like the
benefits of playing "D&D" or
other role-playing games were,
I'd love to talk about
that kind of stuff.
So the kind of 60-second
ancestry, before I get to
reading a little bit of the
book, is that role-playing
games like "Dungeons & Dragons."
I kind of trace
their origins all the
way back to chess.
Which if you think about it,
is really a war game.
It's an abstract simulation
of a famous
battle from Indian history.
You've got the knights,
you've got the king,
you've got the pawns--
and that was first sort of
represented as war on a board.
And these little figures were
kind of teaching concepts of
war, and even more importantly,
little bits of strategy.
Like the real idea was not just
to go in and kill all the
other pieces, but to dominate
the space, to dominate the
board, and sort of be in control
of the battlefield.
Because it was designed to
sort of have that martial
intent, the game remained
popular, especially among
people in the military.
And over the centuries,
chess sort of evolved.
It got more complex.
People added more
squares to it.
At one point, there was
versions of chess that
literally had thousands of
squares on the board, and
sometimes hundreds of pieces.
As technology advanced, the
people playing the game would
add in new stuff.
Suddenly there would
be infantrymen.
There would be halberdiers.
There would be cannons.
And then the board with the
little squares kind of went
away, and you started to see,
really, war games for the sake
of war, where here we've got
terrain, where there's islands
and there's rivers and there's
hills, and even sculpted sand
tables sometimes, where you'd
have little figures.
It's the kind of stuff you see
in war movies, when General
Patton's got his stick
and he's pushing a
tank across the board.
Those war games were
an evolution
from things like chess.
In the early 20th century, the
war games kind of became
popularized when HG Wells--
who you probably know as a
science-fiction author--
he developed a mainstream
version of these big
complicated work games
called Little Wars.
And the idea was that you
could take your own toy
soldiers, if you were a kid,
and use these very simple
rules to play out a war game.
It was very popular in the UK
and across Europe and started
to spill over to the US,
especially after World War II,
where a lot of veterans from
the wars came back to the
United States, brought some
of these games with them.
And sort of, I think, to a
little extent, wanted to
relive some of the thrill of
being on the battlefield and
sort of reminisce with each
other, and use the game as an
excuse to, let's sit around a
table, let's talk about these
battles and sort of relive
some of these days.
So around this community of
gamers, there started to be
gaming groups all over
the country.
And one of the largest gaming
groups the country was the
Midwest Military Simulation
Association, based in
Minneapolis-Saint Paul.
And that's where we're going to
start the history itself of
"Dungeons & Dragons."
The Midwest Military Simulation
Association was
founded in 1964 by a small group
of amateur historians,
miniature modelers,
and gamers.
They grew quickly as war games
became more popular.
Before long, the meetings were
crowded and increasingly
contentious, as the problem
of bickering over
rules reared its head.
Now this is something that comes
up again in role-playing
games, but also in war games.
I went to a convention out in
Pennsylvania a couple years
ago where people were playing
these big war games.
And we played for like six
hours, a single battle, where
we were playing Napoleonic
miniatures, and I was one of
the members of the
Prussian army.
That six hours, I think probably
four hours of it was
arguing over rules and
historical arcana, and the
rest of it was actually
rolling dice
and playing the game.
The solution these gamers found
was in the form of an
80-year-old Army training
manual, "Strategos: A Series
of American Games of War,"
published in 1880 by Charles
AL Totten, a lieutenant
in the Fourth
United States Artillery.
Dave Wesely, an undergraduate
physics student at Saint
Paul's Hamline University,
unearthed the book in the
University of Minnesota library
and rediscovered the
centuries-old idea of an
all-powerful referee--
someone to sort of watch over
the game and look at it and
say, you know what?
You've got it wrong.
He's got it right.
We're going to do
what he said.
Or even to say, you both
have it wrong.
This is how we're going to
resolve whether or not that
cannon just blew up your
entire infantry line.
By 1967, the association had
about 60 members and had grown
so big that it fractured.
Wesely and the rest of the
young war-gamer crowd
coalesced around the home of
David Arneson, a University of
Minnesota student.
They'd meet several times a week
to play out traditional
Kriegspiel-style Napoleonic
battles and board games,
including Avalon Hill's
"Gettysburg," Parker Brothers'
war game "Conflict," Milton
Bradley's Cold War simulator
"Summit," and a French game
known in the US as "Risk."
In the fall, Wesely left the
Twin Cities to attend graduate
school in Kansas.
Away from his gaming friends,
he had months to plan
something memorable for his
return home over winter break.
What he came up with was
the first modern
role-playing game.
The scenario was set during
the Napoleonic Wars in the
fictional town of Braunstein,
Germany, surrounded by
opposing armies.
But Wesely didn't put the
armies on the board.
Instead, he assigned each player
a unique character to
control within the scenario.
Some players controlled
military
officers visiting town.
Others took non-military roles,
like the town's mayor,
school chancellor, or banker.
Wesely then gave each player
their own unique objective,
forcing them to consider
motivations for their actions
and to think beyond battlefield
strategy.
The game quickly spun
out of control.
Players wanted to do things
Wesely hadn't planned for,
like duel each other,
so he had to make up
rules on the spot.
They also wandered away from the
table in small groups to
hold secret negotiations,
which if you're the
all-powerful referee trying to
run this game, people leaving
and not telling you what's going
on, that does not make
your game work.
So Wesely returned to
school thinking that
the game had flopped.
But the players felt
otherwise.
Before long, they were begging
Wesely for another Braunstein.
He obliged by designing new
scenarios, like the one set in
1919 amid the Russian
Civil War.
Another explored a Latin
American dictatorship through
the eyes of student
revolutionaries.
These innovations--
using a referee, assigning
players, individual
characters, each who has their
own unique objective, giving
each person the freedom
to do what they want--
these lit a fire in the Twin
Cities gaming community.
The Braunstein role-playing
adventures appealed to players
who were tired of long,
complicated war reenactments
and got them thinking
about where games
could go from here.
So it wasn't long before other
started to follow his example.
David Arneson was born
in 1947 and grew up
in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
When he was a teenager, his
parents bought him a copy of
Avalon Hill's "Gettysburg,"
and he got hooked.
Later, he moved on to the
hardcore stuff, including
Civil War simulations and
Napoleonic naval battles.
Upon enrolling at the University
of Minnesota to
study history, he joined the
Midwest Military Simulation
Association to further indulge
the habit, and his basement
game room, which was just a
small space within a big
Ping-Pong table in the middle,
became the home base for this
war-gaming crowd.
So seated on a cushy couch
"throne" at the head of that
Ping-Pong table, Arneson began
making his own refinements to
traditional war game rules--
mostly by breaking them.
During one battle said amid the
Roman conquest of Britain,
he got bored and decided
to spice things up.
"I'd given the defending
brigands a druid high priest,"
Arneson explained in
a 1983 interview.
"In the middle of the battle,
the dull battle, when the
Roman war elephant charged the
Britons and looked like he was
going to trample half their army
flat, the druidic high
priest waved his hands and
pointed this funny little box
out of one hand and turned the
elephant into so much barbecue
meat." Arneson removed the war
elephant from the game,
explaining that the druid had
killed it with a "Star
Trek"-style phaser gun.
"That was absolutely the only
thing in the game that was out
of the ordinary, but
the players weren't
expecting it," he said.
The players were nonplussed--
saved for the delighted
commander
of the British druid.
But Arneson wasn't put off
from sneaking elements of
fantasy into his games.
In December 1970, after a
two-day binge of watching
monster movies and reading
Robert H. Howard's "Conan the
Barbarian" books, Arneson
invited his friends over under
the pretense of playing
a traditional
Napoleonic war game.
Instead, he introduced them
to the city of Blackmoor.
"They came down to the basement
and there was a
medieval castle in the middle
of the table," says Wesely's
friend David Megarry.
"And then Arneson says, 'We're
going to do this instead.'"
The players, Arneson told them,
had been sent through
time and space to a medieval
city and had to control
original heroic characters,
each with their own
attributes, powers, and goals.
"My very first character was a
thief," says Megarry, "and my
nemesis was Dan Nicholson,
the merchant.
His role was to try to get stuff
into town and then sell
it, and my role was to try to
steal his stuff and make my
money that way.
It gave us a framework of how
to operate in this world."
Characters in place, Arneson
sent the players to explore
the dungeons beneath
the castle in town.
Inside, he hit them with
another twist--
the subterranean passages
weren't defended by human
soldiers but inhabited by
fantastic monsters, like a
dragon, which Arneson
represented on the table using
a plastic toy brontosaurus
with a fanged clay head.
The fantasy role-playing
game was born here.
At first, combat in the world
of "Blackmoor" was resolved
using a clunky system of "Rock
Paper, and Scissors." But
Arneson quickly to turned to
the rules of a medieval
miniature war game called
"Chainmail," paying particular
interest to two sections of
its 62-page booklet--
"Man to Man," which explained
how to manage individual
heroes amongst your army, and
the fantasy supplement, which
included rules for casting
magical spells and for
fighting hideous monsters.
"Chainmail" provided a
framework that helped
"Blackmoor" develop from a
novelty into a consistent
ongoing game.
But ultimately, the system
proved too limited for
Arneson's growing
fantasy world.
He began adding his
own innovations--
rules for fighting in different
types of armor,
lists of magical artifacts, and
provisions for improving a
character over time.
Like any other passionate
hobbyist, Arneson was excited
to show off his work
with others.
So he decided to show
off "Blackmoor" to
"Chainmail's" author.
Ernest Gary Gygax grew
up playing games.
Born in Chicago in 1938, he knew
pinochle by age five and
chess by six.
His grandfather would challenge
him to matches,
checkmate him, start the game
over at the point where Gary
had made his biggest mistake,
and then repeat the process
until the boy's play
was perfect.
When he was eight, the family
moved out of the city, in part
because Gary had been involved
in a 40-kid rumble, to the
quiet resort town of Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin.
Gary passed his time there
playing board games and cards.
At ten, he discovered Avalon
Hill's "Gettysburg." "That
sealed my fate,"
he later wrote.
"For thereafter, I was a
war-gamer." As an adolescent,
he got hooked on military
miniatures battles and built
his own sand table.
He also loved fantasy.
When Gygax was a boy, his
father, a Swiss immigrant, put
him to bed every night with
tales of wizards and warriors.
He picked up "The Brothers
Grimm" as soon as he could
read, mastered Poe before he
was 10, and devoured the
amazing stories in pulp
magazines like "Weird Tales,
"Argosy," and "Blue Book." Gygax
found a favorite in the
works of Robert E. Howard.
Bright and highly literate,
Gygax had little interest in
formal education and dropped
out of high school in his
junior year.
Later, he attended junior
college classes and toyed with
the idea of becoming an
anthropologist, but his
childhood interest had instilled
an undeniable
ambition to write and
design games.
He took a job as an insurance
underwriter to support his
gaming habit and then
a growing family.
In 1958, he married an
attractive redhead named Mary
Jo Powell, and they eventually
had five kids.
In 1966 Gygax became a founding
member of the United
States Continental Army
Command, a club whose
impressive name belied the fact
that its members were
actually engaged in a
play-by-mail campaign of the
strategic war game "Diplomacy."
A year later, the
group changed its name to the
International Federation of
Wargaming and its focus to
promoting the hobby.
So to that end, Gygax decided
to organize a war-gaming
convention.
He rented out the Lake Geneva
Horticultural Hall for $50,
and on August 24, 1968, he
welcomed friends and IFW
members to "Gen Con," a double
pun referring to both the
rules of war and the
event's location.
Admission cost $1, and the show
made just enough money to
cover the rental.
In August of 1969, Gygax
held the event again.
This time, IFW member Dave
Arneson drove from Saint Paul
to check out the action, and the
two gamers spent a lot of
time together.
"Since we're only talking a
couple hundred people at that
point, we pretty much ran into
each other all the time,"
Arneson said.
"We were both interested in
sailing-ship games." Arneson
had developed new rules for
naval warfare simulations, and
so he showed them to Gygax.
And after the convention was
over, they stayed in touch via
phone and letters, and shared
ideas about how to make that
sailing game better.
In 1970, determined to make a
career in gaming, Gygax quit
his job as an insurance
underwriter and took a
part-time job writing and
editing rule books for Guidon
Games, a tiny publisher based
in Evansville, Indiana.
To supplement the meager income,
he learned how to
repair shoes and practice
cobblery out of his basement.
Guidon Games lasted barely
as long as a new
pair of leather soles.
But before it went belly-up,
it produced two games of
particular importance, 1971's
"Chainmail," which was written
by Gygax and his friend Jeff
Perren, and which provided a
starting rule set for Dave
Arneson's "Blackmoor"
campaign, and also 1972's "Don't
Give Up the Ship!,"
which was authored by Gygax,
Arneson, and their war-gaming
friend Mike Carr, which was the
result of their ongoing
discussion about
naval warfare.
So based on his use of
"Chainmail" and the successful
collaboration they had on "Don't
Give Up the Ship!,"
Dave Arneson knew what to do
after he created this weird
new fantasy role-playing game.
He shared it with Gary Gygax.
In the four decades that have
passed since David Arneson and
Gary Gygax began their most
important collaboration,
various geek pundits have
attempted to describe, by way
of analogy, the nature of their
momentous and fateful
partnership.
I've heard them described as
Paul McCartney and John
Lennon, James Watson and
Francis Crick, even--
and this is true--
John the Baptist and Jesus.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: Here's my attempt,
which hopefully
resonates a little bit more
with the Google crowd.
Two young men meet in the late
1960s, and they bond over a
shared love of a
nerdy pastime.
They both belong to the shared
hobbyist's club and they start
making things to share
with the members.
Before long, they're
working together on
something new and exciting.
One of them is the engineer.
He invents new ways
of doing things.
The other is the visionary.
He realizes the potential.
The product they create
could not have existed
without both of them.
And when it's released, it
launches a brand new industry
and changes the world.
The story's the same whether
you base it in the
International Federation of
Wargaming or the Homebrew
Computer Club, where Steve
Wozniak and Steve Jobs
jump-started the personal
computer industry by founding
Apple Computer.
Wozniak, the engineer, designed
the hardware and made
the computer function.
Jobs, the visionary, made it
user-friendly and something
people wanted.
Arneson visited Lake Geneva in
the fall of 1972 to show off
his "Blackmoor" game, but what
he really delivered was
innovations.
Every player at the table
controls just one character.
Those character seek adventure
in a fantasy landscape.
And by doing so, they
gain experience
and become more powerful.
Gary Gygax then took
those ideas and
turned them into a commodity.
Over the next two months, Gygax
labored at a portable
Royal typewriter crafting the
rules for a new kind of game,
where players roll dice to
create a hero, fight monsters,
and find treasure.
By the end of 1972,
he'd finished a
50-page first draft.
He called it the
"Fantasy Game".
The first people to play it were
Gygax's 11-year-old son,
Ernie, and 9-year-old
daughter, Elise.
Gygax had created a counterpart
to Arneson's
"Blackmoor", which he called
"Castle Greyhawk," and he
designed a single level
of its dungeons.
One night after dinner, he
invited the kids to roll up
characters and start
exploring.
Ernie created a wizard and named
in Tenser, an anagram
for his full name, Ernest.
Elise least played a cleric
called Ahlissa.
They wrote down the details of
the characters on index cards
and entered the dungeon.
In the very first room, they
discovered and defeated a nest
of scorpions.
In the second, they fought
a gang of kobolds.
And then they found their first
treasure, a chest full
of copper coins--
but it was too heavy
to carry out.
The two adventurers pressed on
until 9 o'clock, when the
Dungeon Master put
them to bed.
Fatherly duties completed, Gygax
returned to his office
and designed another level
of the dungeons.
The next day, the play
tests continued.
Ernie and Elise were joined by
three players plucked from
Gygax's regular war-gaming
group--
his childhood friend Don Kaye
and local teenagers Rob Kuntz
his brother Terry.
He also sent the manuscript to a
few dozen war-gaming friends
around the country, requesting
feedback.
"The reaction was instant
enthusiasm.
They demanded publication
of the rules as soon as
possible."
The local gamers also
clamored for more.
As they got farther into the
depths of Castle Greyhawk,
they faced greater challenges
and began to feel like they
were part of a legend.
Thanks to Dave Arneson's
innovation of persistent
characters, the dungeons
had a living history.
If Tenser killed a pack of
kobolds on Tuesday, someone
else might find the corpses
on Thursday.
It was a brand-new way
to create a story.
Gygax began running regular
sessions of the "Fantasy Game"
for a growing group
of players.
And simultaneously, Dave Arneson
tried out the rules
with his "Blackmoor" players
in Saint Paul.
Arneson and Gygax spent a year
testing the "Fantasy Game"
with their respective gaming
clubs and then discussing what
did and didn't work.
"I don't know if any game has
ever been play-tested as much
as this game," says Michael
Mornard, who was the only
person to play a regular
character in both Gygax's
"Greyhawk" campaign and
Arneson's "Blackmoor".
Gygax's early "Greyhawk"
sessions were understandably
surprising to players like
Mornard, who'd never seen this
brand-new thing called a fantasy
role-playing game.
But they would also look
different to today's
experienced D&D players.
There was no common
gaming table.
The players sat together, and
Gygax sat alone at his desk.
The way his study was arranged,
he had a desk with a
filing cabinet right next to it,
and he would pull out the
drawers on the filing cabinet
and hide behind them, so when
you hear his voice, it was kind
of like the voice of God
coming out of nowhere to
issue you instructions.
All the action took
place entirely
inside everyone's heads.
If you wanted a map, you
had to draw one.
Gary wasn't about
to give you one.
And there wasn't much
talking, either.
Each party had a caller who
spoke for the group.
Players quietly discussed their
actions and then told
the caller, who called Gygax.
If anyone talked too much,
they risked missing an
important announcement from
behind the filing cabinet.
There were no set adventuring
parties.
There was nothing like Frodo's
Fellowship of the Ring.
During play-testing, Gygax ran
the game for three to five
players each time, but they
were drawn from a pool of
about 20 different people.
They were adventurers who
occasionally banded together.
There was much more mercenary.
There was no, "We're all in
this together, this is our
group, we're sticking
with this."
There were also no piles of
rule books, and not just
because they hadn't
been written.
Gygax wanted his players to
learn the game through
experience.
And because the game was so new,
players never knew what
to expect from their Dungeon
Master or from their cohorts.
Gygax was learning the game
alongside his players and
changing the rules based
on their actions.
Night after night, small groups
of players pushed the
boundaries of what
was possible.
Their actions shaped Gygax and
Arneson's work and decades of
games that followed.
After the better part of a year
spent playing in Gary
Gygax's "Fantasy Game" play
tests, Mike Mornard moved to
Minneapolis to start
college at the
University of Minnesota.
So naturally, he made friends
with the local gamers and soon
found himself in Dave
Arneson's basement.
Perhaps because the "Blackmoor"
players were more
often college-age and less often
neighborhood children,
Arneson's games were less
playful than Gygax's.
"Blackmoor was a much grimmer,
grittier place than Greyhawk,"
says Mornard.
"In Greyhawk, if you were
killed, the other players
would drag your body home.
But in Blackmoor, there was
no honor amongst thieves.
You'd be looted before
your body hit
the ground." [LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: The game played
a little differently, too.
"It was a different way of
interacting," says Mornard.
Arneson liked to use
miniatures, while
Gygax rarely did so.
Arneson used to draw maps for
his players instead of
insisting they do
so themselves.
And he made people write up
their moves on little pieces
of paper instead of shouting
them out or
talking over each other.
Based on feedback from play
tests in "Blackmoor" and
"Greyhawk" and from war-gamer
friends across the country,
Gygax completed a 150-page
revision of the "Fantasy Game"
in the spring of 1973
and sent it out to
more friends for testing.
"The reaction was so intense
that I was sure we had a
winning game," he wrote.
"I thought we would sell at
least 50,000 copies to
war-gamers and fantasy fans.
I underestimated the
audience a little."
So the demand was there.
The game worked.
The only thing missing
was a name.
"Fantasy Game" was a fine
working title, but too bland
for a final product.
So Gygax created a list of words
that related to the game
and wrote them in two columns
on a sheet of paper--
words like "castles," "magic,"
"monsters," "treasure,"
"trolls," "mazes," "sorcery,"
"spells," and "swords."
He read them aloud to his
players, including Ernie and
Elise, to gauge their
reactions.
The young girl's delight
at two of the words, an
alliterative pair, confirmed
the choice.
The game would be called
"Dungeons & Dragons."
So now they only had
to print it.
In the summer of 1973, Gygax
called Avalon Hill, which was
one of the big gaming companies
at the time, and
asked if they were interested
in publishing his game.
"They laughed at the idea,
turned it down," Gygax wrote.
Most of the gaming establishment
wanted nothing
to do with Arneson and Gygax's
weird little idea.
"One fellow had gone so far to
say that not only was fantasy
gaming 'up a creek,'" wrote
Gygax, "but if I had any
intelligence whatsoever, I would
direct my interest to
something fascinating
and unique--
the Balkan Wars, for
example." No matter.
The Dungeon Master want to
choose his own adventure.
Gygax had aspirations to
run his own company--
he just didn't have the
time and money to
start printing books.
His income was still coming from
repairing shoes in his
basement, and Arneson was
a security guard.
So neither one of them really
had the start-up funds to get
this going.
And remember, this is
1973 Wisconsin.
This is not Silicon Valley.
There's no venture capitalists
running around, offering to
buy out your game.
So the solution was found in
the place where the whole
project started.
In August, the annual
Gen Con convention--
now in its fifth year and
bigger than ever--
was held in several buildings
on the campus of George
Williams College, up the road
from Lake Geneva in a town
called Williams Bay.
Members of Gygax's ever-growing
"D&D" play test
flocked to the con and
caught the eye of one
of Gygax's old friends.
"Don Kaye saw the turnout,
noted the interest in the
fans," wrote Gygax, "and after
the event was over, asked, 'Do
you really think you can make a
success of a game publishing
company?'"
Kaye didn't have cash
to invest, either.
But after seeing the crowds at
Gen Con, he was convinced
"D&D" was a salable product.
So he borrowed $1,000 against
his life insurance, and that
October he and Gygax became
equal partners in a new
company called Tactical
Studies Rules.
It was based out of Kaye's
dining room.
There were still problems.
$1,000 wouldn't print enough
copies of D&D to meet the
anticipated demand.
So Gygax decided to publish
a different game first--
"Cavaliers and Roundheads," a
set of rules for English Civil
War miniatures battles cowritten
by Gygax and his
"Chainmail" partner,
Jeff Perren.
They published "Cavaliers and
Roundheads" hoping the sales
of the booklet would generate
sufficient income to afford to
publish the D&D game.
They knew that "D&D" was going
to be the horse to pull the
company, but "Cavaliers
and Roundheads" only
raised $700 in sales.
But then the last piece
fell into place.
Another local gamer, Brian
Blume, had also been to Gen
Con, seen the crowds of people,
and "badgered Gary
into letting him in at the
ground-floor." Blume was 23,
divorced, and worked as
a tool-and-die maker's
apprentice at a company
owned by his dad.
In December, he borrowed $2,000
from his father and
became a full partner in Gygax
and Kaye's company.
A week later, Gygax sent his
manuscript, now broken into
three small booklets called
"Men & Magic," "Monsters &
Treasure," and "Underworld &
Wilderness Adventures," to
Graphic Printing
in Lake Geneva.
He paid $2,300 to print
1,000 sets.
In January 1974, Tactical
Studies Rules made its
creation public.
It cost $10 and came in a
hand-assembled cardboard box
covered in wood-grain paper.
A flyer pasted to the top lid
featured a drawing of a Viking
warrior on a rearing horse--
art which was stolen from a
Doc Strange comic book.
Gygax and Arneson's names were
also on the cover, and above
that was the title--
"Dungeon's & Dragons: Rules
for Fantastic Medieval
Wargames Campaigns Playable
with Paper and Pencil and
Miniature Figures."
So this is the beginning
of the history.
And it is an extremely
convoluted and important one.
The game blew up.
Within a year of it coming out,
it was the biggest thing
in the war-gaming community.
People around the country were
playing it, but it was still
kind of a niche hobby thing.
Within a few years, the game
started to leak out of that
little war-gamer community,
and a lot of college kids
everywhere played it.
And something happened where
a kid who was a fan of the
role-playing game suffered from
severe depression and
disappeared from college.
He ran away, basically.
But local law enforcement
authorities, when they went to
figure out, well,
what happened?
Where'd this kid go?
They found these weird books
in his dorm room that had
pictures of demons and
monsters on them.
And this was a brand-new game.
No one had ever seen anything
like it before.
So they said, this must be it.
He's playing this
Satanic game.
He was driven to kill himself.
That sad event is actually kind
of blew "D&D" up into the
mainstream.
It was very negative press for
TSR and for "Dungeons &
Dragons," but it was
national news.
And within a couple of years,
"Dungeons & Dragons" was one
of the most-played games
in the country.
Avalon Hill tried to come back
and at that point, say hey, we
want to buy "Dungeons & Dragons"
from you, at which
point Gary Gygax probably
not so politely
told them to get lost.
And the game went
on to influence
things like video games.
Some of the very first video
games were attempts to codify
"Dungeons & Dragons," to take
the pages of rules and charts
and the manual die-rolling and
make it automatic, make it
simpler to have that adventure,
that experience of
wandering through a dungeon
and fighting things.
So this is where I come in, as
a kid who picked up this game
and had never seen anything
before like it, and said,
"This is awesome.
I want to play this." And this
is where I assume a lot of you
came in, too.
Because "Dungeons & Dragons"
is one of those things that
was not only sort of a seminal
game and a cultural force in
the '80s and '90s, but the
game appeals to a certain
group of people.
There's a certain kind of
geeky personality that
definitely responds to the math,
the logic, the fantasy
setting, the rules.
And so people like me really
got into it, and it
meant a lot to us.
And we met our friends
that way.
And for many of us, it also
shaped our careers.
So what I want to do now is
I want to open this up to
questions, whether you want to
ask about the history of "D&D"
or of other role-playing
games.
But I'd also love to hear your
stories if you did play "D&D"
What were your characters
like?
What did you get out of it?
You know, I had one friend who
told me it helped him get into
college, because he knew
a vocabulary word.
He knew the word "comeliness"
because it appeared in
"Dungeons & Dragons," and then
it showed up on the SATs.
So if you've got stories like
that to share, come up to the
mics at either end.
We are simulcasting this talk to
other offices, so make sure
you use the mic so people
elsewhere can hear you.
And so let's chat.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thank you.
I was curious, as you were
looking into the history of
"Dungeons & Dragons," did you
look at the history of other
story games that, at least at
the present, sort of are a
response to "D&D" but are much
more about the personal story
and much less about, say,
the math or the combat?
DAVID EWALT: Yeah, absolutely.
Because of sort of the nature
of publishing, this book is
very focused on "Dungeons &
Dragons." But there's such a
rich world of role-playing games
that grew out of this.
It's important to remember that
"D&D" wasn't just sort of
the first game of this type.
It was the first role-playing
game.
No one had ever done that--
you play a person and
you pretend to
be a different person.
And there were some really
interesting responses to it.
There were games like "Bunnies
& Burrows," which was a
role-playing game based on the
novel "Watership Down." You
actually played a bunny
and sort of acted out
some Marxist politics.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: There were
role-playing games based on
spy novels, things like "Top
Secret." And a lot of the
games had a different focus.
It was less about the rules and
the numbers and more about
this idea of, OK, if you're
going to play a character,
what's going to be interesting
here is to flesh that out and
to see where you can
take the person.
More modern incarnations of
that--you know, White Wolf did
some great games in the 1990s
that I played a lot, games
like "Vampire: The Masquerade,"
where it was
really more about sort of acting
out the character.
And the politics between
players--
I'm a vampire, I belong to this
one clan, you belong to a
different one.
The game's not going to
be about us fighting.
It's going to be about, how does
my clan relate to yours?
How can I manipulate you to get
the political goals done
of my clan.
And modern role-playing games
today, if I can generalize,
have sort of branched out
in two directions.
There are the ones which are
sort of very rules-light and
where the point is really
to explore character.
And there's also a really cool
phenomenon that people
describe as old-school gaming,
where it's much more about,
let's roll some dice.
Let's get back in that dungeon
and kill a bunch of kobolds,
and just have that classic
sort of rolling through.
I find value in both of them.
It's really fun to put yourself
in another character
and to explore who
that person is.
And it's therapeutic in
a lot of ways, too.
You start to think about, well,
how do other people act
and respond to stimulus
that I don't usually
have to deal with?
Are there more questions?
Somebody else want to jump up?
AUDIENCE: Hello there.
DAVID EWALT: Hi.
AUDIENCE: So I just want to say,
first, a statement that
leads to the question, that I've
always found the greatest
value in the role-playing games,
any of the D20 tabletop
games, is in the true
malleability of the story that
no other medium can capture.
A book, a movie have one story,
no matter how many
times you read it.
A video game will have maybe
finitely many, but still, you
can go through them all.
But this is the only game where
as you go, as, say, a
player figures out a twist in
your plot, you can, before you
reveal that twist, change
the twist so that
they're still wrong.
You can constantly change the
game to fit the kind of
players you have.
But I can't help but find that
in games like mine, where the
story is even more than the
combat, that the mechanics
sometimes still drags
down the game.
So the question is, with the
now pervasiveness of cheap
technology like Chromebooks and
tablets, the ability to
play with people who aren't
sitting at the same table as
you, like Hangouts, do you see
perhaps another revolution in
this industry as it starts
to unite with technology?
The ability to have a malleable
story, but not
necessarily all the
math and dice?
DAVID EWALT: I do, in a couple
of different ways.
One is purely the mechanical.
So when I'm playing with my
friends-- we have this
campaign that's been going on
now for a couple years, that I
write about in the book.
And I'm a 15th-level cleric, so
sometimes I cast a spell,
and the way that "Dungeons &
Dragons" calculates spells
becoming more powerful over
time, is for some of them, if
you're level 15, you're
going to roll 15-,
6-, or 8-sided dice.
And so that breaks
up the narrative.
It's also, now you have to
scrounge around the table, see
if you can find enough dice.
You probably only find
five of them.
Then you have to roll them,
add them up, roll
them add them up.
It takes you out of it.
So one of the simple
technological innovations we
have is everybody's got their
Android phone or their iPhone.
And there's a million apps
that go on these things.
So just something as simple as
automating the dice-rolling,
having a pre-programmed button
that rolls 15 D6, really keeps
the narrative going.
Things like these virtual
tabletops and things that
exist online where you can loop
in friends and play long
distance, I think
those are great.
I've got a friend who runs
an entire campaign where
everybody's in a
different city.
It allows you to keep having
that social connection with
those people, and to play a game
that's much more about
the people involved than you
might find playing "World of
Warcraft." You actually can see
people's faces and change
the story based on people's
reactions.
One thing I will also tell you
about, that's sort of related
to this, is what we're trying to
address, a lot, with these
technological innovations
is like you say.
We don't want the rules and
the mechanics to take away
from the thrill of the game,
from the narrative.
There's a new game that came out
in the last couple years.
It's an indie role-playing game
that goes in the exact
opposite direction.
Instead of going high-tech to
try and get you on the story,
this game goes extremely
low-tech.
It's called "Dread," and
it's a survival-horror
role-playing game.
So the idea is really
like you're going
into a horror movie.
It's like "Friday the 13th."
It's a bunch of teenagers
going into an abandoned house,
and a monster comes, starts
chasing them.
But there's no dice and there's
no rules that the
players see.
All you have is on the middle of
the gaming table, there is
a stack of "Jenga" pieces.
And as you get deeper into the
story, every time you do
something that would require a
die roll-0- like you try to
pick a lock or you try to break
down a door, you take
one of the "Jenga" pieces out.
And it actually works
brilliantly, because this is a
horror game.
And as you get further into the
story, the "Jenga" tower
starts getting wobbly,
and your decisions--
you start getting,
physically--
I mean, you've played "Jenga."
You have this physical
manifestation of, like--
reinforces all the tension and
fear in the narrative through
this incredibly simple
mechanical device.
Anybody who's a role-player,
I recommend it.
But because it's got no rules,
it's also great.
Like we've played it with lots
of people who've never
role-played a game before.
So it's just interesting to
see the two different ways
that people try to address
narrative and to
keep it in the story.
They're going by super high-tech
or super low-tech.
Another question?
AUDIENCE: First of all, thanks
for telling the story and
writing your book.
This is a purely historical
question.
I remember--
and subsequently could never
find, but apparently it's
somewhere in my parents'
basement, but they insist they
didn't throw it away--
there was a first printing,
second edition of "Deities &
Demigods" that included
Gray Mouser and
Fafhrd, Elric of Melnibone.
And subsequently, there was
a reprinting, and they
disappeared.
What happened?
DAVID EWALT: So there's a little
bit of back-story here,
which is that, as you can see--
you know, I told you how
the first box of "Dungeons &
Dragons" had a stolen piece of
artwork on the cover?
TSR, over its first few years,
had a couple of different
legal run-ins.
One of the earliest was they
printed a war-gaming board
game based on the big climactic
battle in "The
Hobbit." They didn't have
permission from JRR Tolkien's
estate, but they printed a war
game based on "The Hobbit." So
they got sued and told
not to do that.
They also printed a war game
based on the Barsoom novels
and got sued based on that.
It was the same thing with the
"Deities & Demigods" book.
This was a big book where
they were collecting--
I mean, it was literally
deities and demigods.
It was lists of, like, if you
have a super high-level
character, you might
run into a god.
You might run into Thor.
Or just if you're a cleric,
this is who your deity is.
And they included some fictional
characters, things
like Fafhrd and the
Gray Mouser, and
also the Cthulhu mythos.
And they didn't have the
rights to any of those.
So they put the book out,
and they got a couple of
cease-and-desist letters from
various rights owners, and had
to very quickly withdraw what
they had and release new ones.
And this is actually one of the
things, you know, as "D&D"
has become more popular over the
years, and now as people
are looking back on it in
nostalgia, if you happen to
have one of these old hardback
"AD&D" books, especially the
ones with the Cthulhu mythos
and with the Gray Mouser
stories, those are worth
a lot of money now.
There's a really big collectible
market for these
"D&D" errata.
And if you have them stuck in a
basement or in a box in your
parents' closet, go dig them
out, because they're really
valuable nowadays.
AUDIENCE: I'm curious about the
sort of family tree with
collectible card games and
role-playing games.
I'd always sort of assumed when
they came out, like when
I was made aware of them, in
"Magic: The Gathering," that
it was a way to commercially
sort of make more money on
something similar to
role-playing games.
But I wonder, now, with the
history of more rule-intensive
battle stuff sort of forking
from the-- like if it does
actually meet the family
tree somewhere?
DAVID EWALT: Sure.
So collectible card games are
things like "Magic: The
Gathering," which were in fact
directly inspired by "D&D."
The guy who invented "Magic:
The Gathering," his name is
Richard Garfield.
He's still designing games.
In fact, he has a brand-new
sort of computerized
collectible card game out.
He had played "D&D," and this
was an attempt to sort of come
up with a new mechanism for, how
can we have these fantasy
battles, but do it based
on pieces of paper?
And a big part of the idea
is the mechanism of
deck-building.
It's a less about, I build a
character and I go into a
dungeon to climb levels.
It's more about, I buy these
pieces and I put them together
in very smart ways to
have them battle.
When those games first came
out, when "Magic: The
Gathering" was first introduced,
it was published
by a company called Wizards
of the Coast.
"D&D," at the time, was still
published by TSR.
It was kind of a shadow
of its former self.
This the early '90s we're
talking about.
And "Magic: The Gathering"
just ate "D&D"'s lunch.
Like, nobody was buying "D&D"
anymore. "Magic: The
Gathering" was hugely popular,
in part because of this really
smart and insidious mechanism
of, you want to be better?
Go to the store and
buy more cards.
TSR tried to replicate that.
They released their own
collectible card game called
"Spellfire: Master the Magic."
It was not successful.
Piles of it sat in their
warehouses and actually
contributed to their
eventual downfall.
The company, because of all
this unsold inventory and
because of other financial
problems, went bankrupt, went
up on the block, and was
purchased by Wizards of the
Coast, the "Magic: The
Gathering" company.
Wizards of the Coast still
owns "D&D" today.
They're owned, in turn,
now by Hasbro.
But "Magic: The Gathering" is
still very, very popular.
"D&D," in some sense, is still
a little bit of a smaller
cousin, at least in terms of
revenue, to "Magic: The
Gathering." If you go to game
stores on any given night,
you're probably more likely to
find people playing these
collectible card games
then you are "D&D."
AUDIENCE: So along the note that
we were just discussing,
the reputation TSR had in the
early '90s and late '80s, the
impression I got, just vaguely,
was that they were
totally incompetent
managing money.
And there's apparently stories
about them printing books that
literally, the price, even if
they sold them at the exact
price, they would still lose
money in every single sale,
because they put way too much
effort, the hardback
books and the like.
Now how much of that is true?
And how much of that's just,
they were dealing with, people
don't rebuy the same books over
and over again for the
same edition of D&D they have?
DAVID EWALT: A surprising
amount of it is true.
I already drew the comparison
between Arneson and Gygax and
Wozniak and Jobs.
And there are lots of
comparisons between this sort
of gaming culture and this
startup, versus the start-up
of the computer industry.
But what you see here, and a lot
of the stories I tell in
the book, are kind of like, this
is what happens on the
bad side of the equation.
Like, it's great when you get
people who are passionate
about their product, people who
are hobbyists, who say, I
want to create an operating
system.
Or I'm going to put this gadget
together in a garage.
And when they turn that into a
big product, that's great.
Just as often, the people who
come into that, the problem
is, they're domain experts.
And these guys were gamers.
They were not experienced
businessmen.
So TSR wasted a lot of money
on really stupid things.
And that's the reason why the
company eventually got bought
out, and why Gary Gygax, at one
point, gets kicked out of
the company.
It's because they were
doing stuff like--
and some of the stories
I refer to--
TSR got really rich.
The game was super popular.
Tons of money are coming in.
They didn't know what
to do with it.
Instead of spending it
responsibly, they did things
like, they purchased a company
that did needlework kits.
They released tons of
"D&D"-themed merchandise,
everything from coloring books,
but also like beach
towels and just like tons of
worthless crap that nobody
really wanted.
My favorite story of this sort
of corporate excess was that
for a while, the management
of TSR
considered buying a railroad.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID EWALT: The place where TSR
was based, which was Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin, was a resort
town sort of during the
1920s, like the Al
Capone days.
It was a big resort town.
So all the rich people from
Chicago would take the train
up to Lake Geneva.
After that age ended, the
train got shut down.
There was nobody running
on that train line.
So the makers of TSR was like,
well, what if we bought this
train line?
And we could set up trains, and
instead of a conductor in
each car, you would have
a Dungeon Master.
And people would get on the
train, and by the time they
made it from Lake Geneva to
Chicago, they'd have done a
full adventure.
Well, thankfully, they never
spent the money on that.
But probably the reason why they
never spent that money
was because they got kicked
out of business for doing
stupid stuff like thinking
about buying a railroad.
AUDIENCE: So you were talking
about video games, which are
getting more and more
high-fidelity, and collectible
card games, and "Dungeons &
Dragons" still being a smaller
part of Wizards of the Coast.
Do you think that there's a lot
of future in this hobby?
Or is it more of like a
nostalgic phenomenon for
people kind of in their 30s
and older who started with
these things?
Because I don't see people
playing it anymore very much.
You know, you see game stores
closing around the place.
And I just wonder what your
opinion on that is.
DAVID EWALT: I think there is
definitely a future for
"Dungeons & Dragons," and I
think we're actually in the
early stages of a big
revival of the game.
I think this is happening
for two reasons.
One, which is as you identified,
there's a
nostalgia for the game.
I mean, you've got people
who played it
when they were a kid.
And now they're grown up, and
they have money, and they want
to reconnect with
their friends.
They want to do something
social.
And this is a great way--
I mean, it's like having
a weekly poker night.
Come sit down with your
friends, play
a game for a while.
And people really remember
that fondly and
want to do it again.
The other reason, I think,
actually has to do with the
expansion of video games.
And "D&D" almost got killed by
video games, but I think now
it's coming back.
Because for one thing, video
games are everywhere now.
Everyone plays video games.
Young, old, male, female--
I mean, you've got grandparents
who are playing
"Angry Birds" on their phone.
So "D&D" is no longer as
weird as it once was.
Like it was hard, in the 1980s,
to go to someone who
didn't game and explain to them,
here's this thing where
you pretend to be a paladin,
and you're
going to kill some--
they couldn't-- it was a
difficult mental leap to make.
Now when you're playing games
all the time, it's much easier
to understand and to
make the leap.
And it's also less scary,
because you're not going to
think of it as, like, gaming?
That's some weird, nerdy thing
that I would never do.
You're like, well,
I do play this.
I play "World of Warcraft."
Why not?
So I think the game is going
to have a revival.
And I think particularly, as
our lives are becoming more
digital, I think people
really value that--
I get to sit down at a table.
And even if they don't want to
sit down at a table with their
friends, they can get online
with them and use some of
these online tools and have
a face-to-face connection.
So the game's not going away.
Another question?
AUDIENCE: Hey, Dave.
Just wanted to do also ask a
question based on where the
future and where you see
the next revival going.
I know that--
I'm not an MMO guy.
The biggest leap forward I've
seen is "Eve," and how you see
this great community
of people, doing
these massive battles.
And then they're covered as,
like, televised events.
And I was seeing if you knew
something like that.
What would the next
evolution be?
You know, taking something like
that and having that kind
of connection to tell these
stories and to actually have
the kind of narrative power?
DAVID EWALT: Sure.
Well, there's two interesting
things happening.
One is, so you talk about online
games, and sort of
hinting towards the idea of
eSports, where people are
televising these events of like,
OK, we're going to have
a "League of Legends" finals.
Like, these things
are huge now.
If you play the games, people
log on to sites like Twitch
and millions of people watch,
live, other people
video-gaming.
There is something sort of like
that with D&D. The guys
who draw the webcomic "Penny
Arcade" and do the Penny
Arcade Expos, they have an
ongoing game that they record
as podcasts.
And when they do one of their
Expos, they play on stage.
And people watch and people
cheer and people laugh.
And they record them as video
podcasts and put them online,
and they're really popular.
So I can see even "D&D" becoming
sort of a spectator
sport and evolving
in that way.
In the other sense, in terms
of just MMOs more
specifically, the problem we
face-- the strength that "D&D"
has right now, as opposed to
MMOs, something like "World of
Warcraft" or "Eve" or anything
else, is that the D&D game can
go anywhere.
It's up to the imagination
of the players.
You're not limited by everything
the programmers
planned for, and
the designers.
If the designers in a video game
didn't think the player
might want to do X, the player's
not going to be able
to do X.
MMOs are going to get smarter
and faster and more complex,
and there'll be more processing
power, and they
will come closer and closer to
offering the true freedom of
choice that "D&D" does.
But it's going to
be a long time.
I mean, you want to get really
nerdy here, you have to have
true artificial intelligence
before you can have a game
smart enough to react the same
way a human Dungeon Master
would react to his players.
AUDIENCE: So no White
Wolf RPG coming out?
No MMO for White Wolf?
Would you say that
ship has sailed?
DAVID EWALT: I mean, there's
some really cool MMOs coming
out, and there's a lot
of great video games.
I mean, "Skyrim," just in the
last year or two, "Skyrim" was
very much the D&D experience.
And millions of people
loved that game.
But none of them, for now, are
offering anything that's truly
revolutionary or that can
really compete with the
freedom of choice for
"D&D." I think
we'll do one more question.
AUDIENCE: So if you multi-class
cleric/psychic
warrior, you've clearly
played either 2nd or
3rd edition, or both.
What are your thoughts on the
other editions of "D&D" that
you have played?
DAVID EWALT: So this is one
of the most controversial
arguments in all Nerd-dom.
This is right up there with,
like, could a Star Destroyer
beat up the "USS Enterprise"?
But it's important, because the
quick answer is, over the
years, TSR had to find a
way to get people to
keep buying the game.
If I buy a box of "Monopoly,"
I've got "Monopoly." I don't
have to buy a new one.
Same thing was true with "D&D."
So what would happen is
every few years, TSR would
release a new edition.
They would change the rules,
with new supplements.
It was a way to get people
to be, like,
oh, this one's better.
It's still "D&D," but it's
done a different way.
So there's all these different
editions of the game.
I do play, with my gaming group,
we played 3.5 edition,
which is really massively nerdy
and great, and I love
it, because it's so detailed.
But there are other versions
which are simpler.
4th edition, which came out
not too long ago, a lot of
people complained it was sort
of video-game-y, that it
limited your choices.
I've had, especially while
reporting this book, I have
had fun playing every version
of "Dungeons & Dragons." 3.5
might be my personal favorite,
because that's what I play
with my friends.
If we had started out playing
basic "D&D," the 1983 rules,
that would probably
be my favorite.
I will say that Wizards of the
Coast is currently working on
a brand-new edition, which
they will probably
release next year.
Next year's the 40th anniversary
of "Dungeons &
Dragons." They've been
play-testing this thing for
almost a year and a half now.
And I've been in
the play test.
I've talked to other people
that have been in them.
And it's a lot of fun.
I think what they're trying to
do is get rid of a lot of this
sort of edition war politics,
make it less about the rules.
Why should we get wrapped up
on whether spells are cast
using a system of spell points,
or whether they are
cast based on what you memorized
in the book?
Like, that's not what's
important to us having fun.
And so what they're trying to
do with this new version is
make it really about the
fundamentals of "Dungeons &
Dragons." Make it
about exploring.
Make it about telling a story.
And make it about hanging
out with your friends.
And so far, I think they've
been successful with that.
So we'll see, when the final
product comes out.
It might be one that everyone
can agree on.
So I want to thank everyone
for your time.
This is the book.
A lot more history about
this in here.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID EWALT: And if it
gets you interested,
go look up the game.
There's game stores and groups
everywhere around the country.
You can always reconnect
with people and
start playing again.
Thanks for coming.
