Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Read Online Free PDF Page B

game of D&D during my freshman year, at a friend of a friend’s off-campus apartment. But I felt embarrassed about it and never returned.
    In retrospect, I had merely replaced one geeky habit with another: Only a D&D nerd would think he’d become cool by working on a school newspaper. Still, I managed to cultivate an air of hipster superiority. We were definitely not nerds, oh no; we didn’t spend our weekends playing D&D in someone’s parents’ basement, we spent them arguing about politics in the student union basement.
    In the spring of my freshman year, the campus hosted an annual science fiction and gaming convention. I attended under the aegis of a reporter and pretended to look down my nose at the weirdos. When I realized some of the convention’s dealers would pay good money for old hardback D&D rule books, I had my parents ship mine to me overnight and sold them for beer money.
    I wouldn’t play again for more than a decade.
----
    There’s one round left until the fear effect wears off, and I’ve got only 8 hit points. Things look grim for Weslocke the Cleric.
    There are three pirates on the deck, including the angry one on top of me. On my turn, I cower. Then the pirate gets his attack. I can barely stand to look as Morgan throws the die.
    “He hits,” says Morgan. He picks up two six-sided dice to roll the damage. They skitter across the table and come up 3 and 3.
    All five guys around the table groan in unison, a sound of reliefand disbelief. “All right,” says Morgan. “You’ve got two hit points left, and the fear is gone, so next round, you can take an action.”
    Jhaden skewers one of the pirates with Bloodlust, killing him. Ganubi finishes off the second with a flurry of arrows. Finally, I feel my courage return. I drop the blade barrier and scramble away from my attacker. He pursues but moves slowly and can’t close the distance.
    Jhaden’s turn. Alex gives me a hard look. “I’m charging,” he says, “and declaring a power attack for five points.”
    Power attacks are one of Jhaden’s special abilities, requiring him to subtract points from his roll to hit an opponent. It makes it harder to hit the target—but if the attack is successful, he adds those points to its damage. It’s a desperation move. Alex rolls the die.
    Jhaden’s blades go snicker-snack. The hit connects. The last pirate crumples to the deck.
    Morgan shuts his notebook. “And that’s it for this week,” he says.
----
    I grew up, got a job as a reporter, put on a jacket and tie, and didn’t think much about D&D. So did thousands of other gamers: Dungeons & Dragons faded as an object of nerd obsession, replaced by video games and the Internet.
    But then something happened. Players started picking up the game again—and this time, they weren’t hiding in their parents’ basement. In August 2012, more than forty-one thousand men, women, and children descended on Indianapolis for the D&D-heavy Gen Con gaming convention—the biggest crowd in its forty-five-year history.In San Francisco, gamers show up on Market Street and repurpose outdoor chess tables for open-to-the-public D&D sessions. In New York, trendy bars and coffee shops host D&D nights. In London, they play at hundred-year-old pubs.
    What happened? People who grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons remembered how much fun they had. D&D offers a unique form of entertainment, a communal storytelling that’s more interactive than video games, more engrossing than TV or film, and more social than books. It’s hard for people who’ve experienced that to stay away for too long.
    The D&D players of the eighties matured to a point where they recognize, and value, how the game shaped their lives. Above all else, Dungeons & Dragons is a social game, and for many players, it was the tool that helped them form friendships that have lasted a lifetime. It’s also a game defined by performance, where players live vicariously through their characters. As such, it’s