[applause] david ewalt: thank youall 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 actuallylike giving to people who aren't big gamers. but i'm assuming being here atgoogle that there are more than a few gamers in thisaudience and more than a few d&d people.
so technically, i'm a level-16character, a level-15 cleric, and level-1 psionic warrior. i see the glimpses ofrecognition in the audience. you're my people. you're the ones i'm goingto be talking to today. so i wrote this book about"dungeons & dragons" because i played "d&d" and otherrole-playing games a lot when i was a kid. and the game was reallyimportant to me for a number
of reasons. one was just because it was somuch fun, but also because it was the way that i metsome of my very best friends in the world. if you've never played thegame, it's social. you're sitting down at a tablewith other people and looking at them, and tellinga story together. so you tend to make friendshipsduring the game that last a long time.
so the game was reallyimportant to me. i grew up, i kind ofstopped playing it when i went to college. but then i realizedthis game was something really important. i started writing abouttechnology and about games. and when i would go meet peoplein the video game industry, i would talk todesigners and to executives of game companies.
and i would say to them, sowhat made you want to make video games for a living? and over and over and overagain, the answer they would give me was, "well, you know, iplayed 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 weekendsi had with my friends, in my friend mike'sbasement, that kind of thing. and so i started to delve intoit further and figure out the
history of it, wherethe game came from, why it's so important. why it influenced our culture,why it influenced our industry, and just why it's sopervasive in the 21st century. so what i want to do here is iwant to share a little bit of that history with you. we're going to do sort of thefast, very beginnings, just like where "d&d" came from. but i want to save a lot oftime for questions, both
because i know you might havesome, but also because one of the fun things about thisgame is sharing stories with people. so i'd love to know, if you wantto come up and talk about one of your favorite campaigns,or particular things that you got out of thegame, what you feel like the benefits of playing "d&d" orother role-playing games were, i'd love to talk aboutthat kind of stuff. so the kind of 60-secondancestry, before i get to
reading a little bit of thebook, is that role-playing games like "dungeons & dragons."i kind of trace their origins all theway back to chess. which if you think about it,is really a war game. it's an abstract simulationof 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 ofrepresented as war on a board.
and these little figures werekind of teaching concepts of war, and even more importantly, little bits of strategy. like the real idea was not justto go in and kill all the other pieces, but to dominatethe space, to dominate the board, and sort of be in controlof the battlefield. because it was designed tosort of have that martial intent, the game remainedpopular, especially among people in the military.
and over the centuries,chess sort of evolved. it got more complex. people added moresquares to it. at one point, there wasversions of chess that literally had thousands ofsquares on the board, and sometimes hundreds of pieces. as technology advanced, thepeople playing the game would add in new stuff. suddenly there wouldbe infantrymen.
there would be halberdiers. there would be cannons. and then the board with thelittle squares kind of went away, and you started to see,really, war games for the sake of war, where here we've gotterrain, where there's islands and there's rivers and there'shills, and even sculpted sand tables sometimes, where you'dhave little figures. it's the kind of stuff you seein war movies, when general patton's got his stickand he's pushing a
tank across the board. those war games werean evolution from things like chess. in the early 20th century, thewar games kind of became popularized when hg wells-- who you probably know as ascience-fiction author-- he developed a mainstreamversion of these big complicated work gamescalled little wars. and the idea was that youcould 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 ukand across europe and started to spill over to the us,especially after world war ii, where a lot of veterans fromthe wars came back to the united states, brought someof these games with them. and sort of, i think, to alittle extent, wanted to relive some of the thrill ofbeing on the battlefield and sort of reminisce with eachother, and use the game as an
excuse to, let's sit around atable, let's talk about these battles and sort of relivesome of these days. so around this community ofgamers, there started to be gaming groups all overthe country. and one of the largest gaminggroups the country was the midwest military simulationassociation, based in minneapolis-saint paul. and that's where we're going tostart the history itself of "dungeons & dragons."
the midwest military simulationassociation was founded in 1964 by a small groupof amateur historians, miniature modelers,and gamers. they grew quickly as war gamesbecame more popular. before long, the meetings werecrowded and increasingly contentious, as the problemof bickering over rules reared its head. now this is something that comesup again in role-playing games, but also in war games.
i went to a convention out inpennsylvania a couple years ago where people were playingthese big war games. and we played for like sixhours, a single battle, where we were playing napoleonicminiatures, and i was one of the members of theprussian army. that six hours, i think probablyfour hours of it was arguing over rules andhistorical arcana, and the rest of it was actuallyrolling dice and playing the game.
the solution these gamers foundwas in the form of an 80-year-old army trainingmanual, "strategos: a series of american games of war,"published in 1880 by charles al totten, a lieutenantin the fourth united states artillery. dave wesely, an undergraduatephysics student at saint paul's hamline university,unearthed the book in the university of minnesota libraryand rediscovered the centuries-old idea of anall-powerful referee--
someone to sort of watch overthe game and look at it and say, you know what? you've got it wrong. he's got it right. we're going to dowhat he said. or even to say, you bothhave it wrong. this is how we're going toresolve whether or not that cannon just blew up yourentire infantry line. by 1967, the association hadabout 60 members and had grown
so big that it fractured. wesely and the rest of theyoung war-gamer crowd coalesced around the home ofdavid arneson, a university of minnesota student. they'd meet several times a weekto play out traditional kriegspiel-style napoleonicbattles and board games, including avalon hill's"gettysburg," parker brothers' war game "conflict," miltonbradley's cold war simulator "summit," and a french gameknown in the us as "risk."
in the fall, wesely left thetwin cities to attend graduate school in kansas. away from his gaming friends,he had months to plan something memorable for hisreturn home over winter break. what he came up with wasthe first modern role-playing game. the scenario was set duringthe napoleonic wars in the fictional town of braunstein,germany, surrounded by opposing armies.
but wesely didn't put thearmies on the board. instead, he assigned each playera unique character to control within the scenario. some players controlledmilitary officers visiting town. others took non-military roles,like the town's mayor, school chancellor, or banker. wesely then gave each playertheir own unique objective, forcing them to considermotivations for their actions
and to think beyond battlefieldstrategy. the game quickly spunout of control. players wanted to do thingswesely hadn't planned for, like duel each other,so he had to make up rules on the spot. they also wandered away from thetable in small groups to hold secret negotiations,which if you're the all-powerful referee trying torun this game, people leaving and not telling you what's goingon, that does not make
your game work. so wesely returned toschool thinking that the game had flopped. but the players feltotherwise. before long, they were beggingwesely for another braunstein. he obliged by designing newscenarios, like the one set in 1919 amid the russiancivil war. another explored a latinamerican dictatorship through the eyes of studentrevolutionaries.
these innovations-- using a referee, assigningplayers, individual characters, each who has theirown unique objective, giving each person the freedomto do what they want-- these lit a fire in the twincities gaming community. the braunstein role-playingadventures appealed to players who were tired of long,complicated war reenactments and got them thinkingabout where games could go from here.
so it wasn't long before otherstarted to follow his example. david arneson was bornin 1947 and grew up in saint paul, minnesota. when he was a teenager, hisparents bought him a copy of avalon hill's "gettysburg,"and he got hooked. later, he moved on to thehardcore stuff, including civil war simulations andnapoleonic naval battles. upon enrolling at the universityof minnesota to study history, he joined themidwest military simulation
association to further indulgethe habit, and his basement game room, which was just asmall 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 beganmaking his own refinements to traditional war game rules-- mostly by breaking them. during one battle said amid theroman conquest of britain,
he got bored and decidedto spice things up. "i'd given the defendingbrigands a druid high priest," arneson explained ina 1983 interview. "in the middle of the battle,the dull battle, when the roman war elephant charged thebritons and looked like he was going to trample half their armyflat, the druidic high priest waved his hands andpointed this funny little box out of one hand and turned theelephant into so much barbecue meat." arneson removed the warelephant from the game,
explaining that the druid hadkilled it with a "star trek"-style phaser gun. "that was absolutely the onlything in the game that was out of the ordinary, butthe players weren't expecting it," he said. the players were nonplussed-- saved for the delightedcommander of the british druid. but arneson wasn't put offfrom sneaking elements of
fantasy into his games. in december 1970, after atwo-day binge of watching monster movies and readingrobert h. howard's "conan the barbarian" books, arnesoninvited his friends over under the pretense of playinga traditional napoleonic war game. instead, he introduced themto the city of blackmoor. "they came down to the basementand there was a medieval castle in the middleof the table," says wesely's
friend david megarry. "and then arneson says, 'we'regoing to do this instead.'" the players, arneson told them,had been sent through time and space to a medievalcity and had to control original heroic characters,each with their own attributes, powers, and goals. "my very first character was athief," says megarry, "and my nemesis was dan nicholson,the merchant. his role was to try to get stuffinto town and then sell
it, and my role was to try tosteal his stuff and make my money that way. it gave us a framework of howto operate in this world." characters in place, arnesonsent the players to explore the dungeons beneaththe castle in town. inside, he hit them withanother twist-- the subterranean passagesweren't defended by human soldiers but inhabited byfantastic monsters, like a dragon, which arnesonrepresented on the table using
a plastic toy brontosauruswith a fanged clay head. the fantasy role-playinggame was born here. at first, combat in the worldof "blackmoor" was resolved using a clunky system of "rockpaper, and scissors." but arneson quickly to turned tothe rules of a medieval miniature war game called"chainmail," paying particular interest to two sections ofits 62-page booklet-- "man to man," which explainedhow to manage individual heroes amongst your army, andthe fantasy supplement, which
included rules for castingmagical spells and for fighting hideous monsters. "chainmail" provided aframework that helped "blackmoor" develop from anovelty into a consistent ongoing game. but ultimately, the systemproved too limited for arneson's growingfantasy world. he began adding hisown innovations-- rules for fighting in differenttypes of armor,
lists of magical artifacts, andprovisions for improving a character over time. like any other passionatehobbyist, arneson was excited to show off his workwith others. so he decided to showoff "blackmoor" to "chainmail's" author. ernest gary gygax grewup playing games. born in chicago in 1938, he knewpinochle by age five and chess by six.
his grandfather would challengehim to matches, checkmate him, start the gameover at the point where gary had made his biggest mistake,and then repeat the process until the boy's playwas perfect. when he was eight, the familymoved out of the city, in part because gary had been involvedin a 40-kid rumble, to the quiet resort town of lakegeneva, wisconsin. gary passed his time thereplaying board games and cards. at ten, he discovered avalonhill's "gettysburg." "that
sealed my fate,"he later wrote. "for thereafter, i was awar-gamer." as an adolescent, he got hooked on militaryminiatures battles and built his own sand table. he also loved fantasy. when gygax was a boy, hisfather, a swiss immigrant, put him to bed every night withtales of wizards and warriors. he picked up "the brothersgrimm" as soon as he could read, mastered poe before hewas 10, and devoured the
amazing stories in pulpmagazines like "weird tales, "argosy," and "blue book." gygaxfound a favorite in the works of robert e. howard. bright and highly literate,gygax had little interest in formal education and droppedout of high school in his junior year. later, he attended juniorcollege classes and toyed with the idea of becoming ananthropologist, but his childhood interest had instilledan undeniable
ambition to write anddesign games. he took a job as an insuranceunderwriter to support his gaming habit and thena growing family. in 1958, he married anattractive redhead named mary jo powell, and they eventuallyhad five kids. in 1966 gygax became a foundingmember of the united states continental armycommand, a club whose impressive name belied the factthat its members were actually engaged in aplay-by-mail campaign of the
strategic war game "diplomacy."a year later, the group changed its name to theinternational federation of wargaming and its focus topromoting the hobby. so to that end, gygax decidedto organize a war-gaming convention. he rented out the lake genevahorticultural hall for $50, and on august 24, 1968, hewelcomed friends and ifw members to "gen con," a doublepun referring to both the rules of war and theevent's location.
admission cost $1, and the showmade just enough money to cover the rental. in august of 1969, gygaxheld the event again. this time, ifw member davearneson drove from saint paul to check out the action, and thetwo gamers spent a lot of time together. "since we're only talking acouple hundred people at that point, we pretty much ran intoeach other all the time," arneson said.
"we were both interested insailing-ship games." arneson had developed new rules fornaval warfare simulations, and so he showed them to gygax. and after the convention wasover, they stayed in touch via phone and letters, and sharedideas about how to make that sailing game better. in 1970, determined to make acareer in gaming, gygax quit his job as an insuranceunderwriter and took a part-time job writing andediting rule books for guidon
games, a tiny publisher basedin evansville, indiana. to supplement the meager income,he learned how to repair shoes and practicecobblery out of his basement. guidon games lasted barelyas 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 jeffperren, and which provided a starting rule set for davearneson's "blackmoor"
campaign, and also 1972's "don'tgive up the ship!," which was authored by gygax,arneson, and their war-gaming friend mike carr, which was theresult of their ongoing discussion aboutnaval warfare. so based on his use of"chainmail" and the successful collaboration they had on "don'tgive up the ship!," dave arneson knew what to doafter he created this weird new fantasy role-playing game. he shared it with gary gygax.
in the four decades that havepassed since david arneson and gary gygax began their mostimportant collaboration, various geek pundits haveattempted to describe, by way of analogy, the nature of theirmomentous and fateful partnership. i've heard them described aspaul mccartney and john lennon, james watson andfrancis crick, even-- and this is true-- john the baptist and jesus.
[laughter] david ewalt: here's my attempt,which hopefully resonates a little bit morewith the google crowd. two young men meet in the late1960s, and they bond over a shared love of anerdy pastime. they both belong to the sharedhobbyist's club and they start making things to sharewith the members. before long, they'reworking together on something new and exciting.
one of them is the engineer. he invents new waysof doing things. the other is the visionary. he realizes the potential. the product they createcould not have existed without both of them. and when it's released, itlaunches a brand new industry and changes the world. the story's the same whetheryou base it in the
international federation ofwargaming or the homebrew computer club, where stevewozniak and steve jobs jump-started the personalcomputer industry by founding apple computer. wozniak, the engineer, designedthe hardware and made the computer function. jobs, the visionary, made ituser-friendly and something people wanted. arneson visited lake geneva inthe fall of 1972 to show off
his "blackmoor" game, but whathe really delivered was innovations. every player at the tablecontrols just one character. those character seek adventurein a fantasy landscape. and by doing so, theygain experience and become more powerful. gary gygax then tookthose ideas and turned them into a commodity. over the next two months, gygaxlabored at a portable
royal typewriter crafting therules for a new kind of game, where players roll dice tocreate 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 weregygax's 11-year-old son, ernie, and 9-year-olddaughter, elise. gygax had created a counterpartto arneson's
"blackmoor", which he called"castle greyhawk," and he designed a single levelof its dungeons. one night after dinner, heinvited the kids to roll up characters and startexploring. ernie created a wizard and namedin tenser, an anagram for his full name, ernest. elise least played a clericcalled ahlissa. they wrote down the details ofthe characters on index cards and entered the dungeon.
in the very first room, theydiscovered and defeated a nest of scorpions. in the second, they foughta gang of kobolds. and then they found their firsttreasure, a chest full of copper coins-- but it was too heavyto carry out. the two adventurers pressed onuntil 9 o'clock, when the dungeon master putthem to bed. fatherly duties completed, gygaxreturned to his office
and designed another levelof the dungeons. the next day, the playtests continued. ernie and elise were joined bythree players plucked from gygax's regular war-gaminggroup-- his childhood friend don kayeand local teenagers rob kuntz his brother terry. he also sent the manuscript to afew dozen war-gaming friends around the country, requestingfeedback. "the reaction was instantenthusiasm.
they demanded publicationof the rules as soon as possible." the local gamers alsoclamored for more. as they got farther into thedepths of castle greyhawk, they faced greater challengesand began to feel like they were part of a legend. thanks to dave arneson'sinnovation of persistent characters, the dungeonshad a living history. if tenser killed a pack ofkobolds on tuesday, someone
else might find the corpseson thursday. it was a brand-new wayto create a story. gygax began running regularsessions of the "fantasy game" for a growing groupof players. and simultaneously, dave arnesontried out the rules with his "blackmoor" playersin saint paul. arneson and gygax spent a yeartesting the "fantasy game" with their respective gamingclubs and then discussing what did and didn't work.
"i don't know if any game hasever been play-tested as much as this game," says michaelmornard, who was the only person to play a regularcharacter in both gygax's "greyhawk" campaign andarneson's "blackmoor". gygax's early "greyhawk"sessions were understandably surprising to players likemornard, who'd never seen this brand-new thing called a fantasyrole-playing game. but they would also lookdifferent to today's experienced d&d players.
there was no commongaming table. the players sat together, andgygax 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 cabinetand hide behind them, so when you hear his voice, it was kindof like the voice of god coming out of nowhere toissue you instructions. all the action tookplace entirely inside everyone's heads.
if you wanted a map, youhad to draw one. gary wasn't aboutto give you one. and there wasn't muchtalking, either. each party had a caller whospoke for the group. players quietly discussed theiractions and then told the caller, who called gygax. if anyone talked too much,they risked missing an important announcement frombehind the filing cabinet. there were no set adventuringparties.
there was nothing like frodo'sfellowship of the ring. during play-testing, gygax ranthe game for three to five players each time, but theywere drawn from a pool of about 20 different people. they were adventurers whooccasionally banded together. there was much more mercenary. there was no, "we're all inthis together, this is our group, we're stickingwith this." there were also no piles ofrule books, and not just
because they hadn'tbeen written. gygax wanted his players tolearn the game through experience. and because the game was so new,players never knew what to expect from their dungeonmaster or from their cohorts. gygax was learning the gamealongside his players and changing the rules basedon their actions. night after night, small groupsof players pushed the boundaries of whatwas possible.
their actions shaped gygax andarneson's work and decades of games that followed. after the better part of a yearspent playing in gary gygax's "fantasy game" playtests, mike mornard moved to minneapolis to startcollege at the university of minnesota. so naturally, he made friendswith the local gamers and soon found himself in davearneson's basement. perhaps because the "blackmoor"players were more
often college-age and less oftenneighborhood children, arneson's games were lessplayful than gygax's. "blackmoor was a much grimmer,grittier place than greyhawk," says mornard. "in greyhawk, if you werekilled, the other players would drag your body home. but in blackmoor, there wasno honor amongst thieves. you'd be looted beforeyour body hit the ground." [laughter]
david ewalt: the game playeda little differently, too. "it was a different way ofinteracting," says mornard. arneson liked to useminiatures, while gygax rarely did so. arneson used to draw maps forhis players instead of insisting they doso themselves. and he made people write uptheir moves on little pieces of paper instead of shoutingthem out or talking over each other.
based on feedback from playtests in "blackmoor" and "greyhawk" and from war-gamerfriends across the country, gygax completed a 150-pagerevision of the "fantasy game" in the spring of 1973and sent it out to more friends for testing. "the reaction was so intensethat i was sure we had a winning game," he wrote. "i thought we would sell atleast 50,000 copies to war-gamers and fantasy fans.
i underestimated theaudience a little." so the demand was there. the game worked. the only thing missingwas a name. "fantasy game" was a fineworking title, but too bland for a final product. so gygax created a list of wordsthat related to the game and wrote them in two columnson a sheet of paper-- words like "castles," "magic,""monsters," "treasure,"
"trolls," "mazes," "sorcery,""spells," and "swords." he read them aloud to hisplayers, including ernie and elise, to gauge theirreactions. the young girl's delightat two of the words, an alliterative pair, confirmedthe choice. the game would be called"dungeons & dragons." so now they only hadto print it. in the summer of 1973, gygaxcalled avalon hill, which was one of the big gaming companiesat the time, and
asked if they were interestedin publishing his game. "they laughed at the idea,turned it down," gygax wrote. most of the gaming establishmentwanted nothing to do with arneson and gygax'sweird little idea. "one fellow had gone so far tosay that not only was fantasy gaming 'up a creek,'" wrotegygax, "but if i had any intelligence whatsoever, i woulddirect my interest to something fascinatingand unique-- the balkan wars, for
example." no matter. the dungeon master want tochoose his own adventure. gygax had aspirations torun his own company-- he just didn't have thetime and money to start printing books. his income was still coming fromrepairing shoes in his basement, and arneson wasa security guard. so neither one of them reallyhad the start-up funds to get this going.
and remember, this is1973 wisconsin. this is not silicon valley. there's no venture capitalistsrunning around, offering to buy out your game. so the solution was found inthe place where the whole project started. in august, the annualgen con convention-- now in its fifth year andbigger than ever-- was held in several buildingson the campus of george
williams college, up the roadfrom lake geneva in a town called williams bay. members of gygax's ever-growing"d&d" play test flocked to the con andcaught the eye of one of gygax's old friends. "don kaye saw the turnout,noted the interest in the fans," wrote gygax, "and afterthe event was over, asked, 'do you really think you can make asuccess of a game publishing company?'"
kaye didn't have cashto invest, either. but after seeing the crowds atgen con, he was convinced "d&d" was a salable product. so he borrowed $1,000 againsthis life insurance, and that october he and gygax becameequal partners in a new company called tacticalstudies rules. it was based out of kaye'sdining room. there were still problems. $1,000 wouldn't print enoughcopies of d&d to meet the
anticipated demand. so gygax decided to publisha different game first-- "cavaliers and roundheads," aset of rules for english civil war miniatures battles cowrittenby gygax and his "chainmail" partner,jeff perren. they published "cavaliers androundheads" hoping the sales of the booklet would generatesufficient income to afford to publish the d&d game. they knew that "d&d" was goingto be the horse to pull the
company, but "cavaliersand roundheads" only raised $700 in sales. but then the last piecefell into place. another local gamer, brianblume, had also been to gen con, seen the crowds of people,and "badgered gary into letting him in at theground-floor." blume was 23, divorced, and worked asa tool-and-die maker's apprentice at a companyowned by his dad. in december, he borrowed $2,000from his father and
became a full partner in gygaxand kaye's company. a week later, gygax sent hismanuscript, now broken into three small booklets called"men & magic," "monsters & treasure," and "underworld &wilderness adventures," to graphic printingin lake geneva. he paid $2,300 to print1,000 sets. in january 1974, tacticalstudies rules made its creation public. it cost $10 and came in ahand-assembled cardboard box
covered in wood-grain paper. a flyer pasted to the top lidfeatured a drawing of a viking warrior on a rearing horse-- art which was stolen from adoc strange comic book. gygax and arneson's names werealso on the cover, and above that was the title-- "dungeon's & dragons: rulesfor fantastic medieval wargames campaigns playablewith paper and pencil and miniature figures."
so this is the beginningof the history. and it is an extremelyconvoluted 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 wereplaying it, but it was still kind of a niche hobby thing. within a few years, the gamestarted to leak out of that little war-gamer community,and a lot of college kids
everywhere played it. and something happened wherea kid who was a fan of the role-playing game suffered fromsevere depression and disappeared from college. he ran away, basically. but local law enforcementauthorities, when they went to figure out, well,what happened? where'd this kid go? they found these weird booksin his dorm room that had
pictures of demons andmonsters on them. and this was a brand-new game. no one had ever seen anythinglike it before. so they said, this must be it. he's playing thissatanic game. he was driven to kill himself. that sad event is actually kindof blew "d&d" up into the mainstream. it was very negative press fortsr and for "dungeons &
dragons," but it wasnational news. and within a couple of years,"dungeons & dragons" was one of the most-played gamesin the country. avalon hill tried to come backand at that point, say hey, we want to buy "dungeons & dragons"from you, at which point gary gygax probablynot so politely told them to get lost. and the game wenton to influence things like video games.
some of the very first videogames were attempts to codify "dungeons & dragons," to takethe pages of rules and charts and the manual die-rolling andmake it automatic, make it simpler to have that adventure,that experience of wandering through a dungeonand fighting things. so this is where i come in, asa kid who picked up this game and had never seen anythingbefore like it, and said, "this is awesome. i want to play this." and thisis 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 seminalgame and a cultural force in the '80s and '90s, but thegame appeals to a certain group of people. there's a certain kind ofgeeky personality that definitely responds to the math,the logic, the fantasy setting, the rules. and so people like me reallygot into it, and it
meant a lot to us. and we met our friendsthat way. and for many of us, it alsoshaped our careers. so what i want to do now isi want to open this up to questions, whether you want toask about the history of "d&d" or of other role-playinggames. but i'd also love to hear yourstories if you did play "d&d" what were your characterslike? what did you get out of it?
you know, i had one friend whotold me it helped him get into college, because he knewa vocabulary word. he knew the word "comeliness"because it appeared in "dungeons & dragons," and thenit showed up on the sats. so if you've got stories likethat to share, come up to the mics at either end. we are simulcasting this talk toother offices, so make sure you use the mic so peopleelsewhere can hear you. and so let's chat.
audience: hi. thank you. i was curious, as you werelooking into the history of "dungeons & dragons," did youlook at the history of other story games that, at least atthe present, sort of are a response to "d&d" but are muchmore about the personal story and much less about, say,the math or the combat? david ewalt: yeah, absolutely. because of sort of the natureof publishing, this book is
very focused on "dungeons &dragons." but there's such a rich world of role-playing gamesthat 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-playinggame. no one had ever done that-- you play a person andyou pretend to be a different person. and there were some reallyinteresting responses to it.
there were games like "bunnies& burrows," which was a role-playing game based on thenovel "watership down." you actually played a bunnyand sort of acted out some marxist politics. david ewalt: there wererole-playing games based on spy novels, things like "topsecret." and a lot of the games had a different focus. it was less about the rules andthe numbers and more about this idea of, ok, if you'regoing to play a character,
what's going to be interestinghere is to flesh that out and to see where you cantake the person. more modern incarnations ofthat--you know, white wolf did some great games in the 1990sthat i played a lot, games like "vampire: the masquerade,"where it was really more about sort of actingout the character. and the politics betweenplayers-- i'm a vampire, i belong to thisone clan, you belong to a different one.
the game's not going tobe about us fighting. it's going to be about, how doesmy clan relate to yours? how can i manipulate you to getthe political goals done of my clan. and modern role-playing gamestoday, if i can generalize, have sort of branched outin two directions. there are the ones which aresort of very rules-light and where the point is reallyto explore character. and there's also a really coolphenomenon that people
describe as old-school gaming,where it's much more about, let's roll some dice. let's get back in that dungeonand kill a bunch of kobolds, and just have that classicsort of rolling through. i find value in both of them. it's really fun to put yourselfin another character and to explore whothat person is. and it's therapeutic ina lot of ways, too. you start to think about, well,how do other people act
and respond to stimulusthat 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'vealways found the greatest value in the role-playing games,any of the d20 tabletop
games, is in the truemalleability 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 maybefinitely many, but still, you can go through them all. but this is the only game whereas you go, as, say, a player figures out a twist inyour plot, you can, before you reveal that twist, changethe twist so that
they're still wrong. you can constantly change thegame to fit the kind of players you have. but i can't help but find thatin games like mine, where the story is even more than thecombat, that the mechanics sometimes still dragsdown the game. so the question is, with thenow pervasiveness of cheap technology like chromebooks andtablets, the ability to play with people who aren'tsitting at the same table as
you, like hangouts, do you seeperhaps another revolution in this industry as it startsto unite with technology? the ability to have a malleablestory, but not necessarily all themath and dice? david ewalt: i do, in a coupleof different ways. one is purely the mechanical. so when i'm playing with myfriends-- we have this campaign that's been going onnow for a couple years, that i write about in the book.
and i'm a 15th-level cleric, sosometimes i cast a spell, and the way that "dungeons &dragons" calculates spells becoming more powerful overtime, is for some of them, if you're level 15, you'regoing to roll 15-, 6-, or 8-sided dice. and so that breaksup the narrative. it's also, now you have toscrounge around the table, see if you can find enough dice. you probably only findfive 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 simpletechnological innovations we have is everybody's got theirandroid phone or their iphone. and there's a million appsthat go on these things. so just something as simple asautomating the dice-rolling, having a pre-programmed buttonthat rolls 15 d6, really keeps the narrative going.
things like these virtualtabletops and things that exist online where you can loopin friends and play long distance, i thinkthose are great. i've got a friend who runsan entire campaign where everybody's in adifferent city. it allows you to keep havingthat social connection with those people, and to play a gamethat's much more about the people involved than youmight find playing "world of warcraft." you actually can seepeople's faces and change
the story based on people'sreactions. one thing i will also tell youabout, that's sort of related to this, is what we're trying toaddress, a lot, with these technological innovationsis like you say. we don't want the rules andthe mechanics to take away from the thrill of the game,from the narrative. there's a new game that came outin the last couple years. it's an indie role-playing gamethat goes in the exact opposite direction.
instead of going high-tech totry and get you on the story, this game goes extremelylow-tech. it's called "dread," andit's a survival-horror so the idea is reallylike 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'sno rules that the
players see. all you have is on the middle ofthe gaming table, there is a stack of "jenga" pieces. and as you get deeper into thestory, every time you do something that would require adie roll-0- like you try to pick a lock or you try to breakdown a door, you take one of the "jenga" pieces out. and it actually worksbrilliantly, because this is a horror game.
and as you get further into thestory, 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 andfear in the narrative through this incredibly simplemechanical 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 lotsof people who've never role-played a game before. so it's just interesting tosee the two different ways that people try to addressnarrative and to keep it in the story. they're going by super high-techor super low-tech. another question? audience: first of all, thanksfor telling the story and writing your book.
this is a purely historicalquestion. i remember-- and subsequently could neverfind, 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 includedgray mouser and fafhrd, elric of melnibone. and subsequently, there wasa reprinting, and they
disappeared. what happened? david ewalt: so there's a littlebit 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 theyprinted a war-gaming board
game based on the big climacticbattle in "the hobbit." they didn't havepermission from jrr tolkien's estate, but they printed a wargame based on "the hobbit." so they got sued and toldnot to do that. they also printed a war gamebased 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 wherethey were collecting-- i mean, it was literallydeities and demigods.
it was lists of, like, if youhave a super high-level character, you mightrun 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 fictionalcharacters, things like fafhrd and thegray mouser, and also the cthulhu mythos. and they didn't have therights to any of those. so they put the book out,and they got a couple of
cease-and-desist letters fromvarious rights owners, and had to very quickly withdraw whatthey had and release new ones. and this is actually one of thethings, you know, as "d&d" has become more popular over theyears, and now as people are looking back on it innostalgia, if you happen to have one of these old hardback"ad&d" books, especially the ones with the cthulhu mythosand with the gray mouser stories, those are wortha lot of money now. there's a really big collectiblemarket for these
"d&d" errata. and if you have them stuck in abasement or in a box in your parents' closet, go dig themout, because they're really valuable nowadays. audience: i'm curious about thesort of family tree with collectible card games androle-playing games. i'd always sort of assumed whenthey came out, like when i was made aware of them, in"magic: the gathering," that it was a way to commerciallysort of make more money on
something similar torole-playing games. but i wonder, now, with thehistory of more rule-intensive battle stuff sort of forkingfrom the-- like if it does actually meet the familytree somewhere? david ewalt: sure. so collectible card games arethings like "magic: the gathering," which were in factdirectly 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-newsort of computerized collectible card game out. he had played "d&d," and thiswas an attempt to sort of come up with a new mechanism for, howcan we have these fantasy battles, but do it basedon pieces of paper? and a big part of the ideais the mechanism of deck-building. it's a less about, i build acharacter and i go into a
dungeon to climb levels. it's more about, i buy thesepieces and i put them together in very smart ways tohave them battle. when those games first cameout, when "magic: the gathering" was first introduced,it was published by a company called wizardsof the coast. "d&d," at the time, was stillpublished by tsr. it was kind of a shadowof its former self. this the early '90s we'retalking 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 mechanismof, you want to be better? go to the store andbuy more cards. tsr tried to replicate that. they released their owncollectible card game called "spellfire: master the magic."it was not successful. piles of it sat in theirwarehouses and actually
contributed to theireventual downfall. the company, because of allthis unsold inventory and because of other financialproblems, went bankrupt, went up on the block, and waspurchased by wizards of the coast, the "magic: thegathering" company. wizards of the coast stillowns "d&d" today. they're owned, in turn,now by hasbro. but "magic: the gathering" isstill very, very popular. "d&d," in some sense, is stilla little bit of a smaller
cousin, at least in terms ofrevenue, to "magic: the gathering." if you go to gamestores on any given night, you're probably more likely tofind people playing these collectible card gamesthen you are "d&d." audience: so along the note thatwe were just discussing, the reputation tsr had in theearly '90s and late '80s, the impression i got, just vaguely,was that they were totally incompetentmanaging money. and there's apparently storiesabout them printing books that
literally, the price, even ifthey sold them at the exact price, they would still losemoney in every single sale, because they put way too mucheffort, 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 overand over again for the same edition of d&d they have? david ewalt: a surprisingamount of it is true.
i already drew the comparisonbetween arneson and gygax and wozniak and jobs. and there are lots ofcomparisons between this sort of gaming culture and thisstartup, versus the start-up of the computer industry. but what you see here, and a lotof the stories i tell in the book, are kind of like, thisis what happens on the bad side of the equation. like, it's great when you getpeople who are passionate
about their product, people whoare hobbyists, who say, i want to create an operatingsystem. or i'm going to put this gadgettogether in a garage. and when they turn that into abig product, that's great. just as often, the people whocome into that, the problem is, they're domain experts. and these guys were gamers. they were not experiencedbusinessmen. so tsr wasted a lot of moneyon really stupid things.
and that's the reason why thecompany eventually got bought out, and why gary gygax, at onepoint, gets kicked out of the company. it's because they weredoing stuff like-- and some of the storiesi refer to-- tsr got really rich. the game was super popular. tons of money are coming in. they didn't know whatto do with it.
instead of spending itresponsibly, they did things like, they purchased a companythat did needlework kits. they released tons of"d&d"-themed merchandise, everything from coloring books,but also like beach towels and just like tons ofworthless crap that nobody really wanted. my favorite story of this sortof corporate excess was that for a while, the managementof tsr considered buying a railroad.
david ewalt: the place where tsrwas based, which was lake geneva, wisconsin, was a resorttown sort of during the 1920s, like the alcapone days. it was a big resort town. so all the rich people fromchicago would take the train up to lake geneva. after that age ended, thetrain got shut down. there was nobody runningon that train line. so the makers of tsr was like,well, what if we bought this
train line? and we could set up trains, andinstead of a conductor in each car, you would havea dungeon master. and people would get on thetrain, and by the time they made it from lake geneva tochicago, they'd have done a full adventure. well, thankfully, they neverspent the money on that. but probably the reason why theynever spent that money was because they got kickedout of business for doing
stupid stuff like thinkingabout buying a railroad. audience: so you were talkingabout video games, which are getting more and morehigh-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 lotof future in this hobby? or is it more of like anostalgic phenomenon for people kind of in their 30sand older who started with these things?
because i don't see peopleplaying it anymore very much. you know, you see game storesclosing around the place. and i just wonder what youropinion on that is. david ewalt: i think there isdefinitely a future for "dungeons & dragons," and ithink we're actually in the early stages of a bigrevival of the game. i think this is happeningfor two reasons. one, which is as you identified,there's a nostalgia for the game.
i mean, you've got peoplewho played it when they were a kid. and now they're grown up, andthey have money, and they want to reconnect withtheir friends. they want to do somethingsocial. and this is a great way-- i mean, it's like havinga weekly poker night. come sit down with yourfriends, play a game for a while.
and people really rememberthat 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 byvideo games, but i think now it's coming back. because for one thing, videogames are everywhere now. everyone plays video games. young, old, male, female--
i mean, you've got grandparentswho are playing "angry birds" on their phone. so "d&d" is no longer asweird 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 adifficult mental leap to make. now when you're playing gamesall the time, it's much easier
to understand and tomake 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 thingthat 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 goingto have a revival. and i think particularly, asour lives are becoming more digital, i think peoplereally value that--
i get to sit down at a table. and even if they don't want tosit down at a table with their friends, they can get onlinewith them and use some of these online tools and havea face-to-face connection. so the game's not going away. audience: hey, dave. just wanted to do also ask aquestion based on where the future and where you seethe next revival going. i know that--
i'm not an mmo guy. the biggest leap forward i'veseen is "eve," and how you see this great communityof people, doing these massive battles. and then they're covered as,like, televised events. and i was seeing if you knewsomething like that. what would the nextevolution be? you know, taking something likethat and having that kind of connection to tell thesestories and to actually have
the kind of narrative power? well, there's two interestingthings happening. one is, so you talk about onlinegames, and sort of hinting towards the idea ofesports, where people are televising these events of like,ok, we're going to have a "league of legends" finals. like, these thingsare huge now. if you play the games, peoplelog on to sites like twitch and millions of people watch,live, other people
video-gaming. there is something sort of likethat with d&d. the guys who draw the webcomic "pennyarcade" and do the penny arcade expos, they have anongoing game that they record as podcasts. and when they do one of theirexpos, they play on stage. and people watch and peoplecheer and people laugh. and they record them as videopodcasts and put them online, and they're really popular.
so i can see even "d&d" becomingsort of a spectator sport and evolvingin that way. in the other sense, in termsof just mmos more specifically, the problem weface-- the strength that "d&d" has right now, as opposed tommos, something like "world of warcraft" or "eve" or anythingelse, is that the d&d game can go anywhere. it's up to the imaginationof the players. you're not limited by everythingthe programmers
planned for, andthe designers. if the designers in a video gamedidn't think the player might want to do x, the player'snot going to be able to do x. mmos are going to get smarterand faster and more complex, and there'll be more processingpower, and they will come closer and closer tooffering the true freedom of choice that "d&d" does. but it's going tobe a long time.
i mean, you want to get reallynerdy here, you have to have true artificial intelligencebefore you can have a game smart enough to react the sameway a human dungeon master would react to his players. audience: so no whitewolf rpg coming out? no mmo for white wolf? would you say thatship has sailed? david ewalt: i mean, there'ssome really cool mmos coming out, and there's a lotof great video games.
i mean, "skyrim," just in thelast year or two, "skyrim" was very much the d&d experience. and millions of peopleloved that game. but none of them, for now, areoffering anything that's truly revolutionary or that canreally compete with the freedom of choice for"d&d." i think we'll do one more question. audience: so if you multi-classcleric/psychic warrior, you've clearlyplayed either 2nd or
3rd edition, or both. what are your thoughts on theother editions of "d&d" that you have played? david ewalt: so this is oneof 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 thequick answer is, over the years, tsr had to find away 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 wouldrelease a new edition. they would change the rules,with new supplements. it was a way to get peopleto be, like, oh, this one's better. it's still "d&d," but it'sdone a different way.
so there's all these differenteditions of the game. i do play, with my gaming group,we played 3.5 edition, which is really massively nerdyand great, and i love it, because it's so detailed. but there are other versionswhich are simpler. 4th edition, which came outnot too long ago, a lot of people complained it was sortof video-game-y, that it limited your choices. i've had, especially whilereporting this book, i have
had fun playing every versionof "dungeons & dragons." 3.5 might be my personal favorite,because that's what i play with my friends. if we had started out playingbasic "d&d," the 1983 rules, that would probablybe my favorite. i will say that wizards of thecoast is currently working on a brand-new edition, whichthey will probably release next year. next year's the 40th anniversaryof "dungeons &
dragons." they've beenplay-testing this thing for almost a year and a half now. and i've been inthe play test. i've talked to other peoplethat have been in them. and it's a lot of fun. i think what they're trying todo is get rid of a lot of this sort of edition war politics,make it less about the rules. why should we get wrapped upon whether spells are cast using a system of spell points,or whether they are
cast based on what you memorizedin the book? like, that's not what'simportant to us having fun. and so what they're trying todo with this new version is make it really about thefundamentals of "dungeons & dragons." make itabout exploring. make it about telling a story. and make it about hangingout with your friends. and so far, i think they'vebeen successful with that. so we'll see, when the finalproduct comes out.
it might be one that everyonecan agree on. so i want to thank everyonefor your time. this is the book. a lot more history aboutthis in here. david ewalt: and if itgets you interested, go look up the game. there's game stores and groupseverywhere around the country. you can always reconnectwith people and start playing again.
thanks for coming.
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