Transcript
How’d you get into D&D? Your friend showed you this mystical booklet and weird esoteric dice you’d never seen before? You wanted to be Legolas and one day someone in the high school drama club invited you to a “role playing exercise”?
Maybe you just had a good time watching Stranger Things and you jumped on this curious bandwagon of misfits and miscreants tooling around in these kinda cool tabletop game stores?
We’ve all got our stories about how we first encountered Dungeons and Dragons – and this one is mine. Oh, and this is also Tabletop Alchemy’s one year YouTube anniversary. I should have come up with something better to talk about.
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes it’s story time! And where we thank our patrons for their kind and generous support, much obliged!
All right, it’s 1981. I didn’t know what cool music was yet, my favorite book was Harriet The Spy and my favorite movie was Empire Strikes Back. I was in the fifth grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a Catholic elementary school smack dab in the middle of a desert.
One day my friend Alan grabs me at recess, all excited and tells me he’s got this new game we gotta try out. He’s got this red box in his hands and drags me over to the walkway in front of our classroom. The rest of the school is all out on the playground doing playground stuff in a hundred and ten degree heat. He slaps this box on the ground and opens it up.
Now at this point in my life, I’ve played all the board games in our family closet, board games in my grandparents’ garage, I’ve played cribbage and yahtzee and uno and old maid and go fish, but inside this red box Alan has are thin booklets with wall-to-wall text in tiny font and what look like math tables and lists, there’s some graph paper in there and pencils and weird, hollow plastic red dice, they’re strange shapes but also they’re really cheap and crappy feeling because they have no weight to them. They’re like cheesy prizes at a ChuckECheese or something. Notably, there is no board nor any playing cards in this box.
And I’m like, “So what is this man?”
And he’s like, “It’s Dungeons and Dragons!” Like I was supposed to know what that meant.
But I have no idea what he’s talking about. Let’s take a moment to clarify what my setup here implies: I’m 10 and I’m in a Catholic elementary school. I’m also an alter boy at the church that owns the school. The only rock and roll songs I’ve heard are on my mom’s vinyl records of The Monkeys. I’m what they call “sheltered”, but I don’t know this. Nor does Alan.
In contrast, Alan’s parents are literal Hell’s Angels bikers. Okay, that might be dramatic. They were definitely bikers, and there’s a 99% chance they belonged to a riding group, and there’s a tiny chance that group was the Hell’s Angels. But of course they’ve enrolled their kid in a Catholic school … so maybe they’re reformed Hell’s Angels. Or retired Hell’s Angels. At any rate, Alan’s parents were very cool and laid back, and he always had a pretty decent acquisition platform for the coolest toys. Like, he had the Star Wars Death Star play set as soon as it came out. And on top of that, he had all the cool Star Wars figures, and on top of that he had the holy grail – multiple stormtroopers in addition to all the best characters.
I had these two – the mailbox and the bug-eyed guy.
Anyway, there we are sitting on the concrete in front of our classroom and Alan is trying to explain to me how this game works. I’m not even convinced this is a game at this point. He’s telling me I’m gonna be this character, maybe a fighter or a wizard, and I’m gonna go into this dungeon place. And all I have in my mind is a dungeon cell from some 1960s tv movie or something. Why am I going into a dungeon cell?
I asked him where the board was and he says, with a straight face, there IS no board. He’s drawing something on a piece of that graph paper with one of the pencils. I didn’t understand what was going on. So roll this, he says, and gives me the d20. “You can fight a goblin,” he says. I don’t think I knew what a goblin was at that point. I might have. But I sure didn’t understand how we got from “here’s a piece of graph paper and a die” to “you’re fighting a goblin”. I try to explain to him that he’s not making any sense.
He starts flipping through one of the booklets and it looks like a text book to me – not even a regular text book but like something for college students or professors or something. It was literally impenetrable to me for the two minutes I had to look at it.
I have a tendency to want to “get to the bottom line” quickly, like when I don’t understand something. And I just kept asking questions like “where’s my character?” as in “where’s my Monopoly top hat.” And how do I move. And he’s looking at this table in one of the books and saying things like “Okay, you gotta roll a 12 on that dice there.” And I’m like, “What? How do you know I have to roll a 12? And where’s the goblin?”
And then the school bell rings and we have to pack up all the papers and cheesy dice and booklets. Alan’s a little frustrated I think but you know, we’re ten, so, whatever, we just go back to class. I had no idea what the game part of the game was that he was trying to show me. I suppose he didn’t really understand everything about what he was doing either, but maybe if he’d like acted out how the game was played, maybe I would have got it. But, you know, that’s probably giving my ten-year old self too much credit. The whole thing just confused me.
But nevertheless, I went home and tried to explain to my mom what Alan had shown me at recess. And unbeknownst to me, there was something going on in the world that I was completely unaware of. I was ten, I didn’t watch the news. You didn’t either when you were ten.
So what I didn’t know was that my mom was already familiar with D&D. And after I told her about Alan and his weird new game that didn’t seem like a game at all, well, I was barred from hanging out with Alan from that point forward. I was fairly shocked by this unilateral response, it seemed totally outta left field and I didn’t understand. And there was one more surprise coming down the road too.
The next day I rode my bike the two miles to school like I did every day, but this time Alan and mutual friend ours confronted me by blocking my path on the sidewalk with their own bikes, and he was kinda pissed. I didn’t know what was going on and he’s telling me it’s all my fault and I’m like what’s my fault, dude, what’s going on? And it turns out that the school had forcibly banned Dungeons and Dragons from its campus. That very morning. And he was literally the only kid who had brought the game to school. I think he’d been called into the principal’s office you know, like the whole shebang, right? Read some kind of riot act, et cetera.
Again, I was pretty shocked and still did not comprehend why all this was happening but me and Alan, we weren’t ever quite the same friends after that.
Now, my mom watches these videos – no, I don’t know why – and she’s heard me tell this story before. She and I had the appropriate rocky relationship throughout my teen years and we’re appropriately close now, so you know, this is just another example of getting some views at someone else’s expense. Everything gets funnier the older it gets. Like wine. Or cheese.
So, I never gave D&D a second thought after that, never even like heard of it again. My second, and technically my officially lasting encounter with D&D happened six or seven years later. In fact, this encounter was really with the fantasy genre itself, which up to that point I wasn’t even really aware of how big of a fan I was myself. I never got into the – hold on, let me cast my cantrip of Protection from Fandom – I could never get through more than 10 pages of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. But, on the flip side, I was huge fan of Peter Pan, Robin Hood, and a guy I worked with at the public library during my first high school summer job gave me his extra copies of the first four Elfquest graphic novels, which I totally fell in love with and those were my introduction to the idea that there were such a thing as non-superhero comic books.
I told you, I’m late to the game on most things, always have been.
So I was a fan of “fantasy” but I never quite thought of it in that way. But one day I was in the mall bookstore with a buddy of mine – yep, the classic 80s Waldenbooks – and I spotted a book on the shelf and the cover art just grabbed me. This cover art right here. And my buddy mentioned something about Dragonlance being based on Dungeons and Dragons. I devoured that first Dragonlance trilogy and then it was time for DnD. My bookstore buddy showed me a couple of his Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks and I was hooked, right away this time. I went right back to the mall, to another classic store called the Gamekeeper and I got the Players Handbook, this one, which I know now is the 2nd printing with the better cover. And I got the 2nd printing Dungeon Master’s Guide soon after.
I’ll be honest, at the risk of alienating some of you dear viewers. Hey, we all have our aesthetic preferences, what works for you or works for me doesn’t have to work for everyone. If my buddy had shown me the 1st printing covers of those books and those were the only ones available, there’s a pretty big chance I would have not been interested. No shade on the artist, I just really like Jeff Easley’s work. And Larry Elmore’s stuff of course, and he did the covers for the Dragonlance trilogy.
In fact, I remember later seeing the covers for DnD 3rd edition when I got out of the Army and I thought they were so cheesy looking I didn’t even consider buying those books. Oh, allow me: I’m a terrible person I know, I’m just a hack that judges books by their covers half the time.
Anyway, I was saving up my ducats from paycheck to paycheck from the movie theater where I worked – one day I’ll share some stories from that whole adventure, it was definitely my favorite job – but I’d buy another DnD rule book as soon as I could afford one. I hadn’t actually played the game yet but I was just all in, making characters and reading the rules and stuff. Eventually I found out a guy I worked at the movie theater was a dungeon master and he invited me to a big game he was setting up for new players with the intention of starting a campaign. Or something like that. So I jumped at the chance to play.
And it was pretty much a total fiasco. There were too many players, and it took like 3 hours just to get everyone’s characters set up and when we finally started actually playing, it was just a huge boring mess. It took like half an hour just to get to your turn in combat right? So I never went back to that group, BUT, that experience of interacting with the game in some fashion, was enough to give me a grasp of the basic gameplay process and that coupled with the facts that I didn’t know anyone else who played and my own personal leanings, led me right into wanting to run games myself.
I ended up recruiting a couple of new players from other guys I worked with at the movie theater and I ran a couple of very small sessions in people’s garages late at night after work and shortly after that I joined the Army, and I shipped all my DnD books to Germany with me. I ran a small campaign for a couple of months during my stint overseas and when I got out, during the summer of 1992, I stumbled across Shadowrun 2nd Edition. And a group of us, including my buddy from the bookstore, all decided to go to what was my first tabletop gaming convention, here in Los Angeles. It still runs every year, it’s called Strategicon. The one activity I engaged in during that convention was a “learn how to play Shadowrun” event, and the GM who ran our table was so good at describing things cinematically and clearly that I was just blown away and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I ran Shadowrun for our group for a year straight. It was super fun.
And playing Shadowrun is how I found out about miniatures and how much I didn’t know I needed them. I found that I really liked painting them and using them for the game. And as most things are doorways to others, TTRPG miniatures became a gateway to the discovery of wargames like Warhammer and Warhammer 40k and, you know, the slippery slide had begun. I progressively got into lots of other hobby stuff too, but those are tales for another time.
And that’s how I got into D&D and the hobby in general. Which I guess further led to this very moment right now, where I’m telling you all about it. Which, yes, seems, in hindsight, like a ridiculous thing to be doing. I don’t know why this would this would be interesting, but hey, maybe there should be a two-drink minimum for all my videos. That’d help, right?
Anyway, I guess let me know how you discovered your first tabletop hobby game. Especially if it involves scholastic book bannings of some kind.
See ya!