In the fall of 1978, I had never heard of Dungeons and
Dragons, even though I lived only 40 miles from Lake Geneva, WI where it had
been created four years earlier. I spent a lot of time playing Avalon Hill and
SPI wargames by myself. I had recently met a few new friends at my high school
who seemed interested in games, but my older sister didn't know that. She met a
young man at her local university who liked the same games I did and convinced
him to spend an afternoon playing Third Reich with me.
While his little cardboard German army counters were
marching across England, he asked if I had ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons.
I hadn't. After we packed up, I went outside with him and he opened the trunk
of his car. His Dungeons and Dragons supplies were back there - contraband in
the late seventies and early eighties as conservative groups tried to blame the
game for suicides and devil worship.
He had multiple, odd-sized books of cryptic charts and
tables, bags of strangely-shaped dice, and a huge sheet of graph paper covered with a drawing of a complex dungeon his players had been exploring for
months. I'd never heard of a role-playing game and was fascinated by the idea
of playing the same character session after session. Here was a game that created
story.
Later that week, I went to the small hobby shop in a local
mall (it's now the ladies shoe department of JC Penny's) and bought the
Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (the Blue Box). I had never seen anyone play the
game, but I figured out as much as I could. It wasn't the pages of rules that
confused me - I had Avalon Hill games with just as many - it was the lack of
any apparent structure. Did we take turns? Were the squares on the maps like
game board spaces? How did I determine what the monsters did next? As the
dungeon master, was I trying to win by killing the player's characters?
I created a simple dungeon and convinced my new friends to
play. Our first session was surprisingly consistent with how we would roleplay
together for years to come.
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| Our First Dungeon |
I loved it, but I wasn't entirely sure if anyone else did.
It was especially hard to read my friend Tim. He was tall, strong, and
absolutely brilliant, but he didn't talk much or get too excited. He spotted me
the next day at school, firmly pushed me against the lockers, held me there and
said, "We're playing again tonight, right?"
We played that night and for our last two years of high
school. Four of us went to college together in Madison and recruited new
players there. We went to our first Gen Con in 1979 and I've been to thirty-six
more since. I've written for Dungeon magazine and other roleplaying
publications, and my sons have been playing D&D now for over twenty years.
