by Paul LaFarge
A JOURNEY DEEP INTO THE CAVERN OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, A UTOPIAN, PROFOUNDLY DORKY AND INFLUENTIAL GAME THAT, LACKING CLEAR WINNERS OR AN END, MAY NOT BE A GAME AT ALL
We are far enough into the cave now that I can tell you that I have mixed feelings about Dungeons & Dragons. I played fantasy role-playing games more or less incessantly from 1978, when my father brought home the D&D Basic Set, until 1985, when I changed high schools and fell out of constant contact with my gamer friends. I played so much that it’s hard for me to understand in retrospect how I managed to do anything else, and the truth is that I didn’t do anything else. I was a mediocre student; I didn’t see hardly any of New York City, where I lived; I knew less about girls than I did about the Gelatinous Cube (immune to cold and sleep; takes normal damage from fire). I played at friends’ houses; I played in the school cafeteria; I played in the hallway between classes; I cut class to play in whispers in the library. I hesitate to say that I was addicted to role-playing games only because I never knew what it was like to go without them; in D&D I had found something I loved more than life itself. Then a number of things happened, and for fifteen years I didn’t think about D&D at all. I was living in San Francisco, where dungeon referred to something entirely different, and life seemed mutable and good, like a game. In December 2001, I moved back to New York, and soon afterward I began to think about D&D again. It turned out that my agent’s office was a block from the Compleat Strategist, the hobby shop where I used to buy my role-playing games. I wasn’t eager to revisit that part of my life, which I thought of as a dangerous mire from which I had miraculously escaped, but I slunk into the store. Nothing had changed: nothing.
