Do you remember playing Dungeons & Dragons? Did it lead you worship Satan? Do you know the definition of necromancy? If so, take a trip down memory lane with Drew. And bring your die.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
(On the eve of an election that may signal the end of democracy and unleash a demented dictator with no moral compass, our intrepid humorist takes a moment to wish a very happy 50th birthday to an American institution.)
The game Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 this year. That means I could have rolled my first 20-sided die at age four. Or, more likely, I could have put a 20-sided die in my mouth and choked on it, setting off a long string of D&D related deaths which has cemented its place in history as the deadliest non-sexual, role-playing game in the history of mankind.
(That statement sounds like it could be true, but apparently a full-blown statistical study on deaths related to non-sexual, role-playing games does not exist in a Google search, so that just went on my retirement “to do” list. Fortunately, I was already going to look into deaths related to sexual role-playing games in retirement, so this should dovetail nicely into that research and limit return trips to the UVA library.)
For some readers of this column, D&D turning 50 will likely unleash a wave of nostalgia that probably includes the books of J.R.R. Tolkien and memories of spending late nights with friends enthralled in adventures of the imagination and fantasizing about what it might be like to feel the touch of a real girl rather than wandering darkened woods with dwarves and gnomes. For other readers, the mere mention of D&D is their cue to read no further in this column because, well, it’s a column on a game that used dice of assorted shapes and sizes and was played by boys who, in study hall, wanted to tell you all about their half-elf ranger named Thrace.
(Some might wonder how a humorist was so readily able to conjure a D&D character complete with race and name that quickly. “Wow, Drew, that was an inspired example of a character and his name. How on earth do you perform at such a high level on a weekly basis?”
“I’m glad someone finally asked! It just so happens that Thrace remains an inspiration in my writing, many years after his untimely death in the Castle Amber (Château d’Amberville). My hand painted figurine of Thrace sits atop my writing desk with his bow drawn in perpetuity to defend all that is good in this world including gay dolphins. And yes, the upper half of Thrace’s long bow broke off some time ago, but he still looks intimidating because I did such a fine job on his Elfin ears.”)
During the 1980s, when Thrace and his trusty henchman Huon (someone was reading their Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology) were questing together in Chris Malinowski’s kitchen, Dungeons and Dragons was steeped in controversy because the game was blamed for lonely teenagers killing themselves and murdering others because Satan had infiltrated the game and because their parents were too cheap to buy them Ataris.
And in the 1980s there were no men in cowboy hats to fight the forces of evil in our public school libraries like there are now in King George County. (We actually had teachers who read to us from the Chronicles of Narnia in elementary school and no one fainted when the foul-smelling Tash made an appearance.) The 1980s, however, did have acronyms!
A concerned mother, Patricia Pulling, founded BADD in 1983 which stood for Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons. The derivative name showed she lacked the imagination necessary to play and enjoy D&D, but in her mind and the BADD brochures she published, she felt she had a profound understanding of Dungeons and Dragons and described it as: “a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings.”
Trust me, if the game offered half of those things there would have been more kids in my high school’s Dungeons and Dragons club (which didn’t have enough members to warrant a photo in the yearbook) than on the football team.
Pulling attributed nearly 30 deaths to Dungeons and Dragons and believed that Satanism was pervading society (stop me if you’ve heard this before) including her hometown of Richmond where she believed at least 8% of the population (about 51,680 people in 1985) was worshiping the Angel of Darkness. Upon closer scrutiny, some of Pulling’s assertions did not pass muster and ultimately studies showed that kids who played Dungeons and Dragons were less likely to commit suicide than the general population, but were more likely to know what a necromancer was. Although another study opined that this knowledge could have come from listening to “Caress of Steel” by the rock band Rush and not necessarily from playing D&D.
For me, Dungeons and Dragons was an escape. Not from the bounds of morality, but rather from the doldrums of being a teenage boy who did not have enough money to go to the movies and Bruno’s pizza every Friday and Saturday night. It was an opportunity to listen to Peter Gabriel Genesis when our party of adventurers was separated by an evil warlock and some of us had to sit in Chris’ basement listening to records while the rest of the party soldiered on.
D&D taught us the value of teamwork and what Charisma was (one of the six personality traits that all Dungeons and Dragons characters were measured by) and underscored the fact that if any of us would have possessed more Charisma we might have been actually going out with girls on dates and not playing a role-playing game at 8 o’clock on a Friday night.
So, Happy Birthday to Dungeons and Dragons! And in loving memory of Thrace and Huon and all the other characters who I loved and lost, thank you. (And to Mrs. Malinowski for buying us pizza and allowing us the use of her kitchen for 6-7 hour stretches!)
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