By Don Jolly

Accounts of the beginning vary. All agree that they were young men with an odd hobby, living in a cluster of mid-western states in the late 1960s. On nights and weekends, when work was over, they’d gather in basements and living rooms and sit around complicated maps of historical Holland or war-torn Germany, moving cardboard counters across the their hexagonal grids according to pamphlets of obtuse rules. The aim of the activity, called wargaming, was to play at military strategy and historical recreation. Each chit was an army, or a unit of one. The rules governing their movement were designed to simulate the capacities of men marching overland or ships cutting through the sea. Battles were resolved by tossing dice, modifying the results according to the relative strengths of the units involved. In a game like Chess, the system governing the movement of pieces and the result of those movements is, ultimately, arbitrary. In wargames, such mechanics are mimetic. According to H.G. Wells, their rules provided nothing less than “the game of kings — for players in an inferior social position.”

Wells had been the first of them. His rules for simulating battle with toy soldiers were issued in the 1913 volume Little Wars, unfortunately subtitled “a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books.” The boys from twelve to one hundred and fifty flocked to Wells’ hobby and stayed there, writing rules for “little wars” of their own. The “more intelligent sort of a girl,” had better things to do than suffer condescension for the sake of lead riflemen two-inches tall.

So they were young men, in the mid-west. One of them, David Wesley, was either finishing or had just completed a Bachelor’s in physics at Hamline University when he had the idea that started things. He and his friends, including a security guard named Dave Arneson, were playing at battles in the Napoleaonic era — stringing them together to produce a “campaign,” a succession of battles approximating the fortunes of war. One week, Wesley broke from the routine. He put the armies aside. In their place, he offered his friends a small Prussian town called Braunstein, meticulously mapped and detailed. The troops of their usual sessions, he said, were nearby but not present. Much would depend on the tenor of the town — and the faction in control when the soldiers arrived. Players were given roles: politicians, revolutionaries, students. For the first time they did not move armies around their map, but individual characters.

When Wesley entered active military duty in 1970, Arneson took the Braunstein idea in a new direction. Percolating in a stew of L. Sprague DeCamp’s Conan the Barbarian pastiches, Saturday morning creature-features and the supernatural soap Dark Shadows, Arneson imagined a fantastical faux-dark ages world, full of magic and monsters, which he called Blackmoor. Players were invited to take up roles there, adventuring in an environment of Arneson’s design. The rules for this play were, initially, crude. Early combats were resolved with rock-paper-scissors. That would change in time.

Arneson had met a young game designer named Gary Gygax years before, through their mutual interest in wargames. Together, in the early 70s, they developed Braunstein and Blackmoor further, eventually marrying the idea of single-character play to the mechanics of Chainmail, a set of wargame rules written by Gygax and his friend Jeff Perren. In January of 1974, the product of their labor was issued as a new game; a set of three little white books called Dungeons & Dragons.

In Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), as in wargaming, rules were designed to simulate reality. D&D’s object was was not “the” reality, however, but rather “a” reality: a medieval world of magic and monsters drawn from mythology and pulp fiction. Its rules were appropriately bizarre.

In the Gygax and Arneson’s game, each player controlled a single “character,” a fantasy avatar identified by primarily by their archetypal role, such as “fighting man” or “magic-user.” The world these characters inhabited was under the control of another player, initially called the “referee,” but quickly changed to the more imposing “Dungeon Master,” or (D.M.), It was the D.M. who maintained the game’s map, and the D.M. alone who knew the various treasures and dangers it contained. Each D&D was an “adventure,” a chance for players to explore the D.M.’s world, and attempt to navigate its perils.

Over time, the chits and grids of wargaming lost their importance in D&D. The player’s possible “moves” multiplied exponentially as imagination became a bigger and bigger part of the game. In Chess, a move is relatively straight-forward: a Knight does it this way, a Pawn like that. In D&D, move could be telling one’s Dungeon Master: “I look behind the rock,” or “I swing my sword,” or “I try to jump over the subway turnstile and make it back to the tank before the dragon comes around. Does my phaser still have a charge in ti?” No matter how strange things got, it is the D.M.’s prerogative to determine the consequences of a such actions with reference to the rules. The mechanics of D&D provided a means for resolving many of the most common situations which might arise over the course of a game, including combat between characters and the casting of magic spells. In the early days, when no rules existed to govern a situation, D.M.s were encouraged to improvise.

Dungeons & Dragons was a sales triumph. By the end of the 70s its three initial booklets had expanded into a line of eight, containing rules for such obscure activities as poison handling, pick-pocketing and aerial combat. In 1976, these expanding mechanisms even grew around religion, albeit in a limited way.

Gods, Demigods and Heroes billed itself as “the last D&D supplement.” Its contents were straightforward: a listing of Gods, monsters and demigods drawn from pop-culture and classical mythology, all broken down into the necessary statistics to make them a part of the Dungeons & Dragons system. These gods were meant to serves as D&D’s upper limit; the most powerful beings possible within its rules. With this border marked, the book’s editor, Timothy J. Kask, felt there was little else to do. “We’ve told you just about everything we can,” he wrote, in the introduction to Gods, Demigods and Heroes. “From now on, when the circumstances [of your game] aren’t covered somewhere in the books, wing it as best you can.” Power was left to the Dungeon Masters, whom Kask considered sovereigns of their individual realms. “As we’ve said time and time again,” he continued, “the ‘rules’ [of D&D] were not meant to be more than guidelines.” For Kask, It was the game’s concept which was definitive — a combination of Gygax and Arneson’s eccentric taste in fiction and the innovations of Wesley at Braunstein. It was a perspective that would not survive long.

As D&D grew more successful its publisher, T.S.R. Hobbies, began to work on revising and repackaging its rules for the mass market. One product of this initiative was issued in July of 1977: a capable distillation of D&D into less than 50 pages, written by a neurologist named John Eric Holmes. More interesting, however, was Gygax’s attempt to elaborate D&D into something larger, and more “complete.”

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) began its release in 1977 as well, presented through a series of lavishly illustrated hardcover volumes, each containing hundreds of pages of rules, monsters, weaponry and spells. Gygax was advertised as AD&D’s sole author, and it was his ethos which propelled it, even after Arneson took him to court over proper credit. While D&D’s rules had always been a kind of fantastic physics, AD&D made the maintenance of the “reality” they described as important as the imaginations of its players and Dungeon Masters.

AD&D was unprecedented in its scope. In addition to the expected rules for creating characters and resolving combats, the game was enfolded within a cosmology of its own, divided into multitudes of extra-dimensional planes and arranged upon a wheel of existence providing habitation for various spirits, divinities and devils. Where Braunstein’s reality had been restricted to the borders of one Prussian town and one simulated era, AD&D’s stretched far beyond the borders of what players could reasonably encounter in a game session. It was a machine containing both heaven and earth, governing the operations of both.

In 1980, for instance, the AD&D rulebook Deities & Demigods devoted a lengthy section to the metaphysical nature of D&D characters, and their survival after death. “AD&D assumes the anima, that force which gives life and distinct existence to thinking beings, is one of two sorts: soul of spirit,” it begins. Humans, and select near-humans are accorded souls. Elves and similar beings must make-do with spirits. “When a being from the Prime Material Plane dies, its soul or spirit goes to one of the outer planes,” the text continues. “For souls, [arriving at an outer plane] is the beginning of eternity; it is on this plane that the soul will remain forever, enjoying the benefits or suffering the torments thereof.” Spirits are governed by a separate mechanism. “At some time in the future, at the will of the deity, the spirit can be returned to the Prime Material Plane — reincarnated.”

What’s more, the passage of souls and spirits from the “prime material plane” is a lengthy process: it can take 3 to 30 days, depending on circumstances. “Thus the rationale for the progressive time limit on the raise dead spell becomes clear,” the book concludes. Similarly detailed treatments are given, in Deities & Demigods, for the dispatching of omens, the calculus of divine intervention and the exact mechanics of the awe induced by an encounter with a god. Ultimately, AD&D’s complexity carried the system into areas with likely to have little bearing on any one session of the game itself. Its rules became not just the physics of the D&D world, but also its metaphysics. It’s an approach that Dungeons and Dragons, under Gygax and his successors, has continued to refine for more than thirty years.

At the end of this past August, D&D’s newest edition began a staggered release, garnering spectacular, if sometimes skeptical, reviews. At present, Publisher’s Weekly has the first volume of the new version, the fifth edition The Player’s Handbook, ranked at #4 in hardcover non-fiction sales nationwide. It’s moved more than 30,000 units, total, all in around three weeks.

“Religion is an important part of life in the worlds of the D&D multiverse,” the Handbook says, in its appendix on the subject. “When Gods walk the world … and shining paladins stand like beacons against the darkness, it’s hard to be ambivalent about deities or deny their existence.” Dungeons & Dragons is, in other words, a universe where “religion” has a definitive, material existence. God, like everything else, is part of the game.

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer reflected that play itself was, essentially, a series of movements — and that games were means by which these movements could be organized. “It seems to me characteristic of human play that [the human] plays something,” he wrote in his major work, 1960‘s Truth and Method. “That means that the structure of movement to which [the player] submits has a definite quality,” a “spirit” and set of meanings built into the mechanism of its rules. To play, Gadamer said, was to enter into an alternate state where certain movements are rebuilt and imbued with new significance. The choice of these movements, and the means of their re-signification, is the construction of a game.

Dungeons and Dragons began its development in wargaming, with a limited map and a finite number of possible moves. After the initial, imaginative explosion produced by the marriage of Arneson’s setting and Wesley’s approach, D&D began to go through the difficult task of building a “definite quality” into its “structure of movement.” Bit by bit, driven by Gygax and his successors, D&D became a game of such baroque complexity that elements such as life and death, mortals and gods, became small elements within its rules. It’s like a version of Monopoly with additional rules by Karl Marx, detailing the means by which pewter thimbles and dogs might leave the board and dismantle capitialism.

“The attraction of a game, the fascination it exerts, consists primarily in the fact that the game masters [its] players,” according to Gadamer. In D&D this is especially true. Why go to all the trouble of mapping great kingdoms that don’t exist and peopling their fictional heavens? Why does it matter that a fake-soul takes 3 to 30 days to arrive at a fake-elysium? Why, in short, do D&D’s players and designers care?

One possibility is that D&D is, at least partially, a response to the ideological world occupied by its audience — namely, the world of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There, according to religion theorist Charles Taylor, the common reality is defined by its immanence. Citizens of the modern west view themselves as isolated individuals, and the world beyond their isolation as fundamentally comprehensible through the instruments of reason passed down in the Western intellectual tradition. Taylor, in his 2007 volume A Secular Age, dubs this method of perception the “immanent frame.” Projects conceived through it, he continues, must be articulated as an outgrowth of “developing human motivation” — originated and answerable only to the capacities of an individuated humanity loose in an indifferent natural world. Dungeons & Dragons is certainly that; its systems openly rely on nothing more than the efforts of human beings for their generation and maintenance. As a game, its involvement with the natural world is nil. Its structure of movements are deeply, and at times embarrassingly, human: talking, imagining, rolling dice.

In A Secular Age, Taylor argues that while the immanent frame can “slough off the transcendent,” it does not “necessarily do so.” Rather, its assumption of human independence can be read as either “open” or “closed.” When “closed,” the frame is complete in-and-of itself. When “open,” however, the frame allows for the possibility of a transcendent reality beyond. Dungeons & Dragons, as a game, is necessarily transcended by the real world in which it is played. Within the game itself, however, aesthetics of transcendence drawn this outer world are appropriated and redeployed. Speculation about the soul becomes a matter of purchasing and absorbing the right rulebook. The power of a god in a relation to a mortal is clearly delineated; both are made part of the same human-generated and human-perpetuated system. Dungeons & Dragons is, then, in part a kind of metaphysical roller-coaster. It allowsits participants to dabble in the complexities of an “open” immanent frame without ever acceding the sense of comprehensibility and control so strongly evidenced by a closed one.

“Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion,” wrote H.G. Wells in Little Wars, in reference to his work’s “real world” analogue. He concluded: “My game is just as good as their game and saner by reason of its size.” Dungeons & Dragons, whose rules have been penned by many hands and in many different styles, rarely allows itself these moments of humor and personality. Still, having read through the various compendiums which which have contained D&D over the years, it is impossible not to find a kind of sly half-smile towards “reality” implicit in the game

As modern individuals, D&D’s players are “empowered” by technology and the confluence of various collective societal entities: businesses, schools and governments. As characters, within the game, they are empowered by themselves alone — their achievements won in single combat and through the personal mastery of supernatural power. It is the imagination of the game’s players which hangs its stars, and allows its Gordian cosmology to spin. In D&D, the player becomes both creator and audience for creation — alpha and omega — a kind of dress-up God.

Dungeons & Dragons is a “little reality,” as surely as Wells‘ game was a “little war.” I doubt very much, however, that the old author’s words apply to it.

D&D is no saner for its size.

***

Sulamith Ish-Kishor

Salem Kirban, Part 2

Guide to Survival (Salem Kirban, Part 1)

Monster in My Pocket

The Power of Source 

Carman, Part 2

Carman

Speak Out!

Fear of Death Removed

Good Ol’ Job

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Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. You can find his writing and art at: www.rockettotheruemorgue.tumblr.com.