I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, also known as D&D. That’s not for lack of desire — there’s just never been a right place, right time. Still, listening to David M. Ewalt’s D&D history Of Dice and Men reminded me of just how thoroughly the brand has permeated the universe of speculative fiction.
I grew up playing the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video game on Intellivision, and watching the Dungeons & Dragons Saturday morning cartoon. I’ve played Magic: The Gathering, and read multiple lines of choose-your-own-adventure fantasy books inspired by D&D. I’ve seen the 2023 movie based on the franchise, and I regularly play a Star Wars mobile game built on a combat system described as “RPG style.” That’s RPG as in role-playing game, the species of which D&D is the definitive example.
The game’s imprint is so large, it’s hard to believe there was a time when D&D seemed like a has-been. At the turn of the 21st century, D&D was perceived as a niche pursuit and it was far from clear that the game would ever regain anything like its pop culture footprint from the 1980s, when — as Ewalt chronicles — D&D co-creator Gary Gygax left Wisconsin and went Hollywood, pursuing ill-fated but not entirely implausible dreams of parlaying his tabletop celebrity into a multimedia empire.
Though Gygax died in 2008, the tide had already started rising again for D&D by the time the original edition of Ewalt’s book was published in 2013. The company Wizards of the Coast, which bought D&D in 1997, successfully steadied the rollercoaster trajectory the game had followed under Gygax’s company TSR; when Of Dice and Men was first published, Wizards was preparing to launch a new edition that facilitated rulebook modularity so players could choose their own depth of complexity.
Of Dice and Men has now been reissued for the original game’s 50th anniversary, expanded to track D&D’s remarkable ascent over the past decade. The growth of online networking and the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, neither of which was an obvious candidate to spur the growth of a tabletop game, in fact facilitated the rise of an avid multigenerational participant group — including young players attuned to the game’s appeal by media like the Netflix hit Stranger Things and online streaming play sessions.
Given the game’s current ubiquity, if Ewalt was starting from scratch he might not feel the need to give quite so basic an orientation to the game’s central concept. Much of Dice and Men involves walking the reader (or listener) through sessions of D&D and other games, with narrative texts interpolated to convey the game characters’ perspectives in a seeming attempt to help readers understand the game’s storytelling aspect.
While Ewalt covers the essential history of the game’s invention and subsequent spread from its Upper Midwest cradle, Of Dice and Men is a work of gonzo journalism told from the perspective of a player who’s been embedded in D&D culture for decades. That can be indulgent — we learn quite a lot about the campaigns Ewalt and his friends invent for themselves to play — but it does preserve the perspective of a heyday D&D player, one whose experience is no longer necessarily typical of the floods of new players settling in at basement game tables and virtual play spaces.
Ewalt is, for one thing, a man. The book’s title is all too apt for a game that sold to a very predominantly male audience for much of its history; the author notes that fact, but doesn’t delve too deeply into the patriarchal pressures placed on girls and women who’ve dared to roll hit dice. Ewalt uses male pronouns by default for most of the book, and at one point he glibly speculates that the paucity of women playing proto-D&D war games “probably had something to do with the presence of certain nerdy, poorly-socialized males. There is good reason why a group of gamers has come to be known as a ‘stink.’”
The author also spends an extended interval exploring the roots of D&D, tracing the history of play all the way back to early cephalopods (“because octopuses are cool”). Though Ewalt probably didn’t need to trace his pastime to the origin of the species, his point is well-taken. The role-playing aspect, with room for creativity and character-building over multiple play sessions, is what distinguished D&D from the historical battle recreation games that were its immediate predecessors. D&D characters aren’t just foot soldiers like the Napoleonic infantryman the author at one point channels; they have complex personalities that provide the grist for collaborative storytelling.
Ewalt acknowledges the vast impact of D&D on today’s popular culture, where the kind of engaged fandom that was stigmatized in the Reagan era now fuels the world’s most profitable franchises. Still, Ewalt keeps the narrative centered on his own journey — and, by extension, the journeys of players like him. The book’s apotheosis comes when Ewalt emerges as not just a player, but a full-fledged dungeon master who claims a “Gygax number” of just two. That is, having played with multiple people who gamed with Gygax himself, Ewalt has come about as close to RPG Jesus as any of today’s players ever can.
Playing with Gygax’s son demonstrates, for Ewalt, just how far the game has come from its origins among eager early birds perched around a beat-up ping-pong table belonging to co-creator Dave Arneson. Today’s players, accustomed to the colorful campaigns they encounter on podcasts or YouTube, can sit down with positively cinematic expectations for their exercises in imagination. Even if those expectations can rarely be met in ordinary gameplay, today’s dungeon masters know they likely need to provide more than just a classic “dungeon crawl” with little plot and lots of mapping.
Exploring the contours of dungeon dives beyond the author’s own might add helpful context to some of the most interesting developments explored in the new afterword. Those developments include a movement to eliminate so-called “races” of invariably evil creatures, and open-source rules that Wizards of the Coast signed off on in a successful bid to incentivize third-party creators. The company’s owners have since, it seems, reconsidered the decision to give away so much potentially royalty-generating intellectual property, but according to Ewalt, today’s gamers are ready to push fiercely back against the erection of any new walls around D&D’s universe.
Of Dice and Men makes an enjoyable and well-timed listen during this golden anniversary year. Unfortunately, narrator Rob Brinkmann’s delivery tends toward the robotic, so Ewalt’s self-deprecating asides land with unfunny thuds. The book is also rife with mispronunciations, ranging from “sallable” (for “salable”) to “awk-cult” (for “occult”). Good-spirited voice performer Pavi Proczko fares better with his assignment: narrating the in-universe accounts of Ewalt’s various games and campaigns.
The book perforce treats the controversies attending D&D in the ’80s, when the game was swept up in the Satanic Panic. “There once was a culture war,” writes Ewalt by way of conclusion in the final passage of his new afterword, “but the geeks won.”
The pyrrhic aspects of that victory, in the wake of Gamergate and other troubling examples of geeks’ exclusionary behavior, have no place in this largely sunny chronicle of the unlikely triumph of a game system based on shared storytelling and analog calculation. Those dark expanses are left for future adventurers to explore, fully aware of the all-too-real peril that may await.
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