Imaginary Worlds - Rolling the Twenty Sided Dice

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

I spent the last two months learning how to play Dungeons & Dragons. That's right, I never played as a kid. But I've been reading so many interviews with interesting creative people who credit D&D with their success, I kept wondering what I missed out on -- and whether it was too late to figure it out. Helping me on my quest are Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians trilogy), Paul La Farge, Richard Valazquez and the staff of The Brooklyn Strategist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. And this is Paul Lafarge. He's a novelist, a journalist, a professor of English, and a former dungeon master. By the way, I didn't alter this tape. Paul was using a digital recorder at home, which kind of gave his voice an otherworldly quality. My father was a war gamer, and he brought home the basic D&D set. When I was about eight or nine years old, I always wanted to be the dungeon master and then i would always just kill off his characters that sounds a little a little freudian a little edible yeah i mean you you could have probably seen it coming

it was perfect for me as a kid i was like i can kill you over and over with giant flame breathing dragons and you have to pretend to be having fun because this is a game that you got and you wanted to spend time with me so ha so was this purely just fun or was there any kind of uh looking back was there any kind of issues you were working out there oh i mean who wasn't working out issues of course i was working out issues yeah my parents were divorced and you know i was one of those joint custody kids so i was shuttling back and forth between my parents' two apartments. And there was a lot of anxiety around that, and I had a lot of resentment about being put in that situation. And my father, to my delight, gave me the opportunity to work it out.

Eventually, Paul hooked all of his friends on Dungeons and Dragons as well. In high school, that's all they did in the weekends. We all went to a private all-boys school in Manhattan, and it was not a pleasant place. You know, the dynamic was straight out of Lord of the Flies, and in fact, when we read Lord of the Flies in middle school, I was like, well, this is really just like school. You know, it's very familiar.

It's like, you know, there were the rich kids and there were the kids who were prematurely whacked out on drugs and they were the upper levels of the hierarchy. And then there were the, you know, the obviously smart kids and the very together kids. And they were kind of in the middle. And then there were the kids you know, the obviously smart kids and the very together kids. And they were kind of in the middle. And then there were the kids who just like had no freaking clue what was going on. And that was us.

Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I went to a new school in seventh grade and it was a school I stayed in until 12th grade. And, you know, I showed up and these two very nerdy geeky guys were just you know we hit it off really well right away and you know it's kind of like oh you're one of us and then when i realized that they were the very bottom of the social ladder and i was not you know in my old school was a very small school you know there's like maybe 20 kids in the class so we didn't have that kind of social ladder and it was shocking that i was about to enter this new school and realize that i was about to be in the lowest caste system.

And I just very actively rejected them. And so all of a sudden I just said, no, no, no, no, no, no. You guys are nerdy. You know, I'm not one of you. And went on a very lonely and was very, very lonely for many years on because the kids that I was trying to ingratiate myself with didn't want to have anything to do with me. And so I would almost rather be alone than playing D&D with those kids. And I look back and I, some of the few things I wish I could, well, one of the many things, but you know,

if you could go back and tell yourself, it's just like, just own it. You know, there'll be a lot less lonely and actually better off because of it. Yeah. I mean the, you know, the irony being that a lot of the people who played D&D then went on to do well at other stuff, but those kids from the bottom of the people who played D&D then went on to do well at other stuff. Those kids from the bottom of the hierarchy work at Google and own the planet.

He's not kidding. Every so often I'll be reading an interview with someone who works in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or Broadway, and they'll say the foundation of their success and creativity comes from playing Dungeons and Dragons when they were a teenager. For example, Richard Velasquez is an executive at Pepsi. And when he worked for Microsoft in the Xbox division,

he wrote a blog post about everything he learned playing D&D. And like many business articles, it's broken into bullet points. Focus on strategy. Learn to improvise. Teamwork is critical. Most importantly, build a story and present it well. And I found that too with my presentations and I pointed out one that I made at Xbox where I actually made more of a theatrical performance out of it and everyone was really engaged, like really on the edge of their seats. And I got a standing ovation at the presentation. He was like, I didn't realize you were such a performer.

And I was like, I'm not really a performer. And then I thought back, I was like, well, actually, I did perform all those years when I was a dungeon master. So I've mentioned before that as a kid, I was much more into space and superheroes, not medieval fantasies. But in the early 1980s, you just couldn't avoid the hype around Dungeons and Dragons. In 1979, a student at Michigan State University who was a big gamer disappeared into the steam tunnels under the school and eventually killed himself. And this was a huge media story because a lot of people actually believed that Dungeons & Dragons had warped his mind. The story was adapted into a novel called Mazes and Monsters

and a made-for-TV movie starring the young Tom Hanks. I have been on a very long quest. Yeah, well, haven't we all? Can you tell me of the giant dragon? On my travels here, I heard him. Dragon, you say? Yes, the giant dragon, the one above. There he is. Does he stand God over the treasure? Now, at the time, I didn't know anybody who seriously worried that D&D was satanic or would warp children's minds, but Richard Velazquez did.

I was in junior high school, and our half-sister came to live with us. She was overly religious, and she had been convincing my mother that we were practicing the devil's work, and she was a bad mother for letting us do this, etc., etc. So it was quite the controversy at the time. Was your mother in any way susceptible to believing that? She was. Yeah, my mother was religious as well. But, you know, I think my mother had some faith in me. I was fairly intelligent as a child and I would convince her and came up with reasons why

my sister just didn't know what she was talking about and why we weren't really causing any harm by playing this game. So. Wow. You must have been pretty upset. Yeah, it was a frustrating period, that's for sure. I was definitely upset. But he considers that to have been an important building block for his own personal growth as a teenager to become the adult he is today. And I've been thinking for a while, like maybe I really missed out on something important.

And then I started wondering, is it too late? I mean, what if I started playing right now? The Brooklyn Strategist is a game shop that's about a 20-minute walk from my apartment. During the day, it's full of kids playing role-playing games. But after 7 p.m., the place fills up with grown-ups, although most of them were still younger than me. And walking in, I felt a little weird, being like, yes, I'd like to start playing Dungeons & Dragons.

But they were like, yeah, okay, cool. How I go about it, from when I'm deciding, I decided first. A guy named Kino sat down with me, and he just said, okay, you've got to build a character. It's the very first thing you've got to do. So I said, I decided first. This guy named Kino sat down with me and he just said, okay, you got to build a character. It's the very first thing you got to do. So I said, okay, great. And he said, so are you a dwarf? Are you an elf?

Are you a human? I didn't know. Then he said, well, do you want to be a fighter or a sorcerer or a cleric? And I'm like, wait, wait, those are two different things. And he's like, okay, okay, I get a better idea. Who's your favorite character anywhere, any medium? I said, well, Batman. So they debated for a little while.

As group consensus, the closest Batman-like character that could create for me would be a monk. Arlen, maybe you can help me. A good race for a monk. That's dexterity, right? You see a halfling? Halfling monk humans? Do you want toxterity, right? You see a halfling? Halfling monk humans? What's a halfling? It's a little mini creature.

Frodo. There you go. Right on. It's like three feet tall. Yeah, I would either pick a human or a halfling person. So what's the benefit of just being a plain old human? So humans have this variant where they can have plus one to all their attributes. Because they don't have magic spells like a drow does or like any extra

features but humans they get that where they get plus one to everything and that could change your stats pretty significantly since I'm completely starting out new maybe a humans a good good starting point good training wheels like a human fighter is usually like the best class you could be. The best in any class. Very flexible. I'm very familiar with humans too. Then I had to come up with a name for my character. And for some

reason, Azrael kept popping in my head. And I was like, that's lame. Azrael's like the cat in the Smurfs. And then I remembered, oh right, Azrael was also the guy that filled in for Bruce Wayne in the 90s when Bruce Wayne got his back broken. So I decided to at least change it a little bit. I made it Azron. A-Z-R-A-H-N. Totally made up spelling. Some more details about Azron, because I know those of you who are D&D players are going to wonder these things.

He is chaotic good, meaning he'll do the right thing if he has to. His training is the way of the four elements, which allows him to do some earthy spells. I figured he should be able to do some spells, you know, even though he's a Batman-like character in this world. But looking back, I really wish I had chosen a character who was simply some kind of wizard, because I forgot how useless Batman can be when he follows the Justice League into a magical realm or when they go into outer space. Anyway, the next thing they had to do was figure out all the numbers that would define this character. So, you know, with D&D, you get about six different dice, four sides to 20 sides. And as you roll them, those numbers will be this character's strengths and weaknesses.

The main thing I wanted for Azeron was really high dexterity, because I'm totally clumsy in real life. Finally, I was ready to start playing. Our dungeon master, or DM for short, was Tim. He sits at the center of the table behind a stack of books, which have this sort of detailed history of the world and the characters, and as you go up the levels, what they're able to do, and scenarios for him to run through with us. So he had a piece of graph paper, and he draws a

sort of crude map, and he does a little X, and he says, okay, there's some pirates here, nasty pirates. And then about maybe five squares away, draws an X on the graph paper and says, these are the locals being held captive. You guys are over here, draws another X. He turns to me and says, these are the locals being held captive. You guys are over here. Draws another X. He turns to me and says, what do you want to do? I didn't realize my choices were that open-ended. I said, okay, well, first I want to make sure the hostages are okay. And he said, yeah, they are. Then I realized, okay, of course, this is not a humanitarian game.

So what is his first move, this badass fighting monk that I've created? I'm still thinking cautiously, so I'm like, well, I'm kind of want to run up this wall up here to get a better look at the pirates and survey the threat. So roll an add plus four, and just don't roll very badly on this.

I rolled very badly. He rolled a one. So the one is the lowest roll you can get on a D20. 20 is great. 20 means that something awesome happened when you rolled. A one means that something really bad happened. And what that simply means is that you were like, hold on. I'll cut them off upstairs.

You run up the stairs here. You get to the doorway right here. And you come running out. And as you kind of, well, you run up to the doorway and you kind of pop your head out. Then Tim rolled to see how the bad guys reacted. it slipped and fell off the roof and the entire crew looked up at you and went Then Tim rolled to see how the bad guys reacted. The captain was not paying attention. This means I'm gonna say that he actually just barely, he looked up and all his crew was like, we saw, we saw him up here pop out of the doorway. And he's like, saw who? There was a guy.

This was the first moment where I was like, I get it. I get why D&D is so amazing. Because I tried writing screenplays for years. I spent a lot of money on night classes. I bought all the right screenwriting books by Sid Mead and Robert McKee. But I never would have written a scene like that, where I set up this super fast, stealthy, badass character. And on his first move, he trips, alerts the bad guys, and embarrasses

himself in front of the new crew, which means that he has a massive amount of motivation to make up for that and prove to everybody like, no, I am the badass that everybody said I'm supposed to be. And it wasn't even my choice. It was just the roll of the dice that dictated the story and the dungeon master that looked at the numbers and said, okay, this is what these numbers mean. The random just static and chaos of everyday life didn't intrude into those old fantasy worlds, but Dungeons and Dragons introduced it. They put it in there and they created a fantasy world that behaves in some ways a lot more like our world does. Lev Grossman wrote The Magician's

Trilogy, which is a series of novels that imagines a sort of Harry Potter type world where there is no Voldemort, there is no big bad. So the moral guidelines around how to use magic are really murky. The sci-fi network is adapting the books for television. So naturally, he played a lot of D&D as a kid. And one of the things that he thinks is really inspirational about this game is that there is nothing there but dice and a map and a pile of books, which don't even tell the story. They're basically like encyclopedic books. Everything else is a fantasy that is collectively happening in our heads at the same time. When you write fantasy novels, you're conscious that, you know, unlike somebody who's making a TV show or a movie where you're showing everybody everything, there's, you know, evocative music

playing in the background all the time. When you're a novelist, you're using very tiny, crude little building blocks, namely words, to build up this fantasy universe. Dungeons and Dragons did that, to some extent, in the same way. Your tools are very simple and crude, and it asked a lot of the players. It may be called Dungeons and Dragons, but the game borrows shamelessly from every other mythology, which also inspired Lev Grossman's novels. When I was designing a magic school that's in my books, which is called Breakbills, and thinking about what the curriculum should be like and what the faculty, who should the faculty be, I immediately knew that it had to be highly multicultural. Bringing in these other magic traditions and smashing them up together all under one roof. And that's what Dungeons and Dragons did too. Yeah, my monk character just got bit by a werewolf last week. And I did not, after I built

this character, I did not expect him to become a werewolf. But now he's a werewolf. I was pretty shocked. That must be a shocking development. It was. It's very funny the way D&D handles this stuff. I gave a lecture this year, and I was talking about the origins of fantasy. You know, for C.S. Lewis, it was one of the things that spurred him to kind of write fantasy was an encounter with a poem by Longfellow about the Norse god Balder. And I was thinking, well, when did I encounter Balder? And of course, it was in the Deities and Demigods handbook. And it was a very different, I saw a very different treatment of Balder than Longfellow gave him. Longfellow left out his armor class and hit points. Somebody please write a parody of that Longfellow poem, including Balder

the Beautiful's armor class and hit points. Another innovation which D&D brought to the world of fantasy, imagining magic on a budget. You know, well, this is something that fantasy novelists do routinely now, but they didn't do it back in the day, which is to think about economics and money and currency and how they worked. You never have a sense in, for example, Narnia or Middle Earth that there is particularly a working economy happening in the background. Lewis and Tolkien weren't concerned with that. But Dungeons and Dragons treated it in a very, not just realistic, but in a realist way. You had to make a budget.

Likewise, the way the magic worked. When Gandalf wanted to do a spell, he had his staff and whatever, he waved it around and yelled something, and then something exciting happened. But you never had a sense that there was an orderly system. Well, Dungeons and Dragons rationalized all that in this really radical way. Suddenly, all these questions had answers. Well, if you want to cast a spell, what level do you have to be? What kinds of materials do you have to have on hand? Are you talking? Are you waving your arms? It became very specific and very much in the way that novelists describe things, especially the way novelists describe things now. Tolkien was innovative in the way he included maps of Middle-earth in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books.

But... Dungeons & Dragons had maps in it the way those earlier works did, but Dungeons & Dragons kind of took it seriously in a way that those other writers didn't. I mean, these maps were to scale. They were gridded out. You know, you knew where you could step and you knew where you could not step. Everything was very clear to the last millimeter in this wonderfully rigorous, almost scientific way that was very new and I think has influenced a lot of writers. Killed off the guy with 20 damage, 25 damage, right? 21 damage. 21 damage. Yeah. So anyway, back at the Brooklyn Strategist on my first night there, I was trying to get the hang of things after a few hours.

And my character actually made his first kill with a dart. Four points of damage plus four is eight damage. He goes down. Very nicely done. Dart, describe your kill. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. All right.

So it was, first of all, when it went in the air, it made this awesome, like, and it just went right in the middle of his forehead. And he had a moment of shock. He had, like, this moment of shock before he just, like, fell backwards with a thud. Sure, sure. Awesome. Very cool. All right.

Tim was a great dungeon master, which is not easy. You need to have a managerial mind, a head for numbers. Like the future exec, Richard Velazquez. So a lot of times I would take a break from the DMing and offer it up to one of the characters and say, hey, do you want to DM for the night or do you want to prepare? And give them the opportunity to see from the other side of the table, because it's easy to criticize the DM until you actually have to sit in that role and you actually have to come up with

a campaign and come up with a story, manage all of the players, manage all the characters and do all of that work. It gives them a better appreciation for the role so then when they're back in the player seat they don't give you such a hard time. You sound like you were a very mature teenager. I actually was, yeah. A lot of people told me that. Yeah. No, and I knew kids like you too, so I'm not like, I don't buy that.

Yeah, I knew a lot of them too, so many of them were my friends. Yeah, yeah. Over the next two months, I kind of did a lot of table hopping because I wanted to try different dungeon masters. And the experience was so different each time. Like one of the DMs was all about combat,

which meant it was all about the numbers. When I listen back to the tape from that night, you would never know that we're playing a fantasy game. 19, 15. We sound like actuaries or bookies. Another huge factor was the personality of the players. Like one night, there was a teenage kid in our group, which was rare, it was mostly adults.

And he decided that his character was a douche, his words. And he thought that was hilarious. And so as the night began, our little fellowship came across a group of fire worshipers. And the adults playing the game wanted to do a lot of recon missions to figure out who they were. And this kid thought it would be really funny if his character walked right up to the bad guys and just started insulting them.

So the DM said, all right, they're pissed and they're going to strike back. And for the rest of the night, we were all desperately trying to stay alive. And yeah, you can die in D&D. One of the guys in the group said to this teenager that he didn't hate him, but his character did. And the kid looked so shaken, I seriously thought he was going to cry. But then I started to wonder, am I coming at this too late? Can I really have the full D&D experience if I start as a middle-aged adult? I mean, I think everybody at the Brooklyn Strategist had been playing since they were teenagers.

You know, like Lev Grossman did. And when I think now of who we were, which is young male adolescents who were in the absolute crucible of figuring out who we were, there's a lot of pathos to me to remember us doing that, creating people over and over again

and figuring out who they were, because that's what we were trying to remember us doing that, creating people over and over again and figuring out who they were, because that's what we were trying to do in real life, too. We were playing at being grown-ups in order to be friends. You know, we were playing at a version of grown-ups which has very little to do with actually being grown-ups, but just in order to remain friends with each other and to survive the pressure of not being grown-ups. In fact, Paul Lafarge thinks that D&D isn't really even a game. It's more like a ritual. And more specifically, it's a rite of passage.

It's a way for a group of maybe unassociated adolescents to form a kind of unit, you know, and to find some kind of collective identity. Oh, you mean like a quest or a fellowship? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the Fellowship of the Ring. I mean, you know, yeah. I mean, the irony being that, you know, for us, what was really the ring of power turned out to be girls. So we're like, oh, okay, now we've found that. Now the fellowship can disband, and we'll all go on to the next thing. Because obviously this is actually more fun than rolling dice and eating chips.

But for a mature teenager like Richard, even having a girlfriend wasn't a game changer. Because we had spent so much time playing D&D that she didn't know what it was about. She wanted to be involved. So I brought her in to be a good boyfriend, but she didn't really take it seriously. So like her character's name was Penelope Penelope, for example. She would just do like, can I do this? And she would just throw out really stupid things.

And so in terms of dealing quickly, I had to like how to have a conversation with her and she was out of the campaign. Yeah. I had to let her go. At the time. Did you think of it? So business-like as, as,

as unemotional and business-like? Uh, no, it's probably a little bit more emotional because like, uh, we're going to get into a big fight about this or whatnot. So, um, i had to

put myself at our relationship at risk but for the good of the campaign wow how long did that relationship last after that so maybe it was like another year so i wasn't okay you know obviously she was a little bit upset but yeah she didn't she wasn't taking it seriously anyway so she was more upset that we were spending time without her than that she didn't get to play. It's funny, they all stopped playing after college, but all three of these guys kept thinking about how D&D had influenced them. In fact, Paul LaFarge pitched a story to a magazine called The Believer, where he would track down Gary Gygax, the quote, father of role-playing games, who co-created Dungeons & Dragons back in the 70s. of role-playing games, who co-created Dungeons & Dragons back in the 70s.

Gary Gygax was a rules-light person in a lot of ways. He was a smoker, he was a drinker, he certainly had his womanizing days when he lived in Beverly Hills in the early 80s. He was someone who was very happy to be alive. And he was a very, I think, warm and gracious person because of that. And he loved people who knew who he was, who doesn't want to be adored, who doesn't want to think of themselves as the wizard and have people come and like, you know, make pilgrimages to meet him. and make pilgrimages to meet him. After the interview was over, Gary Gygax offered to dungeon master a game with Paul and his colleague.

He came out of the wargaming world, which was very much strategy-based, and he played D&D as if it were a wargame. He posed problems to the players, and there were better solutions and worse solutions. And he had very little compunction about killing characters off if the occasion warranted. And his thought was, you know, if you play smart, you're going to win. And if you don't, you're very likely going to lose. And now let's sit down and see how you play. But it sounds like you were slightly disappointed,

a little bit in terms of you really were. Were you more interested in the character? No, it was great because, you know, as a kid, if somebody had waved their magic wand over me when I was 11 years old and said, poof, you are in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and here's Gary Gajax, and he's running a game of D&D. Here's your seat at the table. Go. Which actually would have been possible because he loved to dungeon master and he ran games at conventions. But if it had happened then, I would have been disappointed because I would have lost.

I wouldn't have gotten into the problem solving aspect of it. And there wouldn't have been room for the part I liked and I would have felt frustrated. But to meet him in the context of doing this as a grown up, it was kind of perfect because, you know, it was as if Gary were saying, hey, this is about reality now. You know, here's a problem. See if you can solve it. You don't get to, like, get into the theatrics of being an elf, because who cares about the theatrics of being an elf? You're not an elf. I ended up playing at the Brooklyn Strategist for two months. Some nights, I showed up feeling stressed or depressed about whatever was going on in my life, and playing D&D for three hours was really cathartic.

By the end, I felt pure joy. Like in the final round, when we faced this ginormous red dragon. Arlen, who helped create my character early in the summer, was our dungeon master. We were getting our asses kicked trying to figure out how to stop this thing. And then I remembered I could actually use one of the few puny little spells that my monk had. Can I make the dragon still with my stillness of mind? I use stillness of mind. So you, okay, you're going to roll just, this is for a special roll.

I use stillness of mind on the dragon. Okay, you're going to roll. This is for a special roll. It's a big dragon. You cast your hands up, and your hands are shaking as you try to do this spell. Oh, three. You can help him.

I'll help him. Arlen turned to this very mature 10-year-old kid who was staying up very late playing with us. And his character was also a monk. So he cast the same spell, Stillness of Mind, and he rolled very high. Fifteen. No, fifteen is good. The dragon begins to calm down.

The cave's still shaking, and he rolls you with his snout, wondering what happened. I'm more like, what the hell? This guy calmed me down. Can we pet the dragon? I don't know. It's a red dragon.

So you guys have like, how long before? It gets bored. It gets bored and starts to... Right, okay. In the end, I think D&D did help me think about approaching problems in a new way. You know, you kind of come into a situation with a certain amount of points. That's just who you are.

And you roll the dice. And if you roll well, then you can kind of overcome whatever it is that you have as your natural talents. And if you roll poorly, well, figure out a new strategy. I do wish I'd gotten to know my character better. I mean, despite what Gary Gagak says, I really did care about the theatrics of being a monk or an elf. So I'm actually joining a private D&D group. The adventures are supposed to be more character-driven, less about combat. I'm still chasing that high. I just hope I'm not too late. That's it for this week's show.

Thank you for listening. Special thanks to everybody at the Brooklyn Strategist. You guys are awesome. Thanks to Richard Velazquez, Paul LaFarge, and Lev Grossman. I had a bard who got very high up the scale, whose name was Paleologus for some reason. I had a fighter thief whose name, I blush to say it now, was Dirk Wh Whisper Shadow. I think of them fondly as Dirk itself that I had for a little while. The other thing about D&D is that

it's tragic because it comes to people at a time when your memory is amazingly good. But then what happens is that you fill your head with complete garbage which has no use anywhere else in reality. It's like, you know, you hear about people who learned Latin and Greek and read the Iliad and the Aeneid by the time they were 12. And you're like, that could have been me.

And it doesn't go away. I still remember most of it. And I, in turn, remember every lyric of every Bruce Springsteen album that was made before 1985. Even that is more useful because he still comes on the radio sometimes and you can sing along and people don't think you're an alien. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook. I tweet at Ebalinski. The show's website

is imaginaryworldspodcast.org Freelick! Aren't you dead? Didn't you die when you leaped into the pit? Hey, come on, Robbie. Stop fooling around. It is you, Freelik. You have been restored to the living. Whoever did that is a great holy man. A greater holy man even than I.

Well, shall we not begin the quest? Panoply