Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #440: Dungeons & Dragons

Episode Date: June 2, 2017

Wizards of the Coast makes games other than Magic. Today, I talk about one of our other big games. I discuss its history, how it influenced Magic, and how it came to be a Wizards of Coast game.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so my topic today is not magic. So Wizards of the Coast produces three major games. We make magic, obviously. I talk about that all the time. We make a game called Duel Masters. That's for the Japanese market. I had a whole podcast on that. And the other game we make let me cough as I try to say this. The other game we make is Dungeons and Dragons. So today I'm going to talk all about kind of the history of Dungeons and Dragons, how it influenced magic, and how it ended up at Wizards of the Coast, and kind of the interaction, sort of what having Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards has done for Magic, too. So anyway, it's a Dungeons & Dragons day! Woo! Okay, so first

we'll hop in our Wayback Machine to go back to 1974. Okay, so there were two men, a guy named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. And at the time, they were gamers. So what was big back then was what was called miniature gaming.

Miniature gaming started as war gaming. That there was, you know, one of the things that was really popular, and I think it stemmed from what the military had actually done to sort of walk through and, I guess, train generals and stuff, you know, train military people, is miniature wargaming. And so you'd have a whole army full of little tiny figures, and you'd have giant wars, and, you know, in miniature gaming, you, the one player, are playing a whole army, and then, like, the relationship between the characters matters,

and you have terrain, and... Anyway, miniature gaming is a fun gaming system, a fun way to game. Not a system, I guess, a whole genre of gaming. But from that, there was a game called Chainmail Game, which was a kind of miniature war game, and they started by making a variant of that. And I think what happened was, they said,

oh, we like the idea that you have figures representing things, but what if instead of representing a whole army, what if you were just one character? What if you individually were just one character? And so they took this idea of sort of playing with miniatures and adapted it. So I guess let me get into what role-playing is. Maybe if you, for those of you that have never role-played, let me explain what role-playing is. I think I jumped the gun a little bit. I was talking to how it came about, but let me explain what it is and I'll get back into how it happened. So in a role-playing game, basically there's a group of people playing and everybody but one person. One person is running the game. It's called the Dungeon Master, DM in Dungeon Dragons.

And everybody else just plays a character. And the idea is you're going through an adventure. Something is happening. It's a story. And the DM is the storyteller. And they're doing everything

behind the scenes and sort of putting out a story for you. This is what's happening. And then you, the characters, can do anything you want. That it's literally like sort of a story game. That what you're doing is you're acting out a story in which each person individually is responsible for a single character.

And the way it works is, I'll get into character creation in a second. You get a lot of choices when you make a character. So we'll get there in a second. But the thing to understand is that you are sitting around with your friends, with a storyteller in charge, just play-acting out a story. And that you have the freedom to do whatever you want within the confines of the story. And Dungeons & Dragons is a system to sort of allow all those things to happen.

But when you go back to the very beginning, so let's go back to the beginning now, is they said, you know, normally when you play a miniatures game, it would be war gaming. So I would have 30, 40, 50, 60, I have all these pieces growing in a giant war. And they said, well, what if instead of representing this giant war, what if we represented something a little different? And so they did what was known as a dungeon crawl. So I don't know, I'm not sure if it's a Tolkien thing, I'm not sure where the concept of a dungeon crawl starts.

But the idea of, there's a dungeon, and in the dungeon there are traps, and there are creatures to fight, and there's treasure to find. traps and there are creatures to fight and there's treasure to find. And so the idea is, what if we were using these little figures to represent where we were in a room and then as we fight other creatures, they show up, but we sort of use this to mark what's going on and then we can tell them the story. And so rather than being a giant war, it's an adventure. And kind of key to that was the idea of an adventure party. That, well, you know, if you're going to go in a deep, dark dungeon, you're not going to go alone. You know, you're going to have a bunch of people there that can help you.

And so from that, they really sort of invented this different kind of game. That they started from one genre, which is miniatures, and ended up with another, which is role-playing. And be aware that Dungeons & Dragons was the very first role-playing game. It was, you know, it is to role-playing games what Magic is to trading card games. It invented the genre. And both inspired many others of the kind. You know, just like there's many trading card games, there's a lot of role-playing games.

And role-playing has a very low overhead from a business standpoint, that you're mostly printing on paper. You're putting out books. You're putting out information. And so it's a pretty low head to start a company. And so there are a lot of role-playing companies because it's not as expensive to make role-playing games.

You're basically printing books and things. Speaking of which, if you want to tie in, I'll slowly weave this all together, but remember that Wizards of the Coast was started as a role-playing game company. Peter Atkinson and his friends started the company and they loved role-playing.

They really, really loved role-playing. And more than anything else, they loved the granddaddy of role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons. That will become important later on. But anyway, so Dungeons and Dragons, back in 1974, they started a company. So the company they started was called

TSR, which stands for Tactical Studies Rules. And I think they were based out of Milwaukee. And anyway, they started up this company company and they started making Dungeons and Dragons. So it was first published in 1974, but it wasn't until 1977 that they had the first what they call base set. So let me describe that when you play Dungeons and

Dragons, there are what they call three core rule books or three core books. The first is, I told that one of the people is a storyteller, what they call the Dungeon Master. Well, there's a book called The Dungeon Master's Guide. And what that does is it gives all the information that the Dungeon Master needs to run the game. All the information about what you need to do. And there are a lot of, it might explain to you

different scenarios and how things work and traps and a little bit about creatures, although we'll get to creatures in a second. And it gives you all the tools to be able to run the game. It teaches you how to run the game. It's sort of both an instruction guide and a resource to let you DM the game. And there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of skills to being a good DM. Because your role is, as the storyteller, is to keep the story going. And you tend to do a lot of work.

You're the one person that has the homework that you prep things ahead of time. And normally what you're doing is you're making a story and then you're giving the player sort of clues to follow along. Now, the one cool thing about role-playing in general is why you can guide your players. They can do whatever they want. You know, I spent time, I've done my share of DMing and like I've, you know, built a whole structure and then have the players, you know, you know, if they go right, they'll run into this thing and I spend hours on this thing and they go left and not right and never see it, you know. And so there's a real interesting aspect to being a DM of trying to have the resources necessary because the players are going to do what the players are going to do. And you've got to, you know, there's a certain amount of freedom they have.

So a good DM can sort of give them their freedom but also have the story worked out and kind of what you want to do is encourage them, you know, the story encourages them to do the things that lead to the next part of the story. Okay, the second book is called The Player's Handbook. The story encourages them to do the things that lead to the next part of the story. The second book is called The Player's Handbook. And that is, for the players, you need... The number one thing you need to do is you need to make a creature. And there's a bunch of choices. So let me walk through the choices you get if you are making a creature.

So first off, you get to pick a race. There's a whole bunch of races. The major races, I think, are human, elf, dwarf, halfling, half-orc, and gnome. And gnome is relatively recent. I think when the game began, or when I played, when I started playing way back when, I'll get to that in a second, I think human, elf, dwarf, halfling, and half-orc were the five originally you could play. Gnome got added. There's a few more that got added. So there's a lot of different races you can choose.

You can be something other than human, or you can be human if you want. And then for classes, when the game started, I think there were four classes. You could be a fighter, you could be a wizard, you could be a cleric, or you could be a thief. But since then, there's a whole bunch. There's barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, magic user, slash mage, slash wizard,

monk, slash mystic, paladin, ranger, sorcerer, thief, slash rogue, warlock. There's a lot of different choices you can pick. So, you sort of mix and match them. I'm going to be a human fighter. I'm going to be an elf thief. I'm going to be a dwarf paladin, you know. And you sort of choose those. You choose the characters. And then what you do is you also pick an alignment. And what an alignment means is there's two sort of vectors. One is good and evil.

Good is do you have morals? Are you trying to generally do the right thing? Or is evil, no, I don't have morals. I'm out for myself. I maybe actively will harm others for my own gain. And then the other vector is lawful and chaotic. Lawful is, look, I follow the rules. Whatever it says I can do, I do.

What I say I don't do, I don't do. I follow the rules that are set out. Chaotic is I do my own thing. I'm not penned in by any rules or anything. And so what happens is there's four choices for your character. Also, there's neutral. So you can be neutral in either. Actually, I guess there's more than four.

So you can be lawful good. That, I guess there's more than four. So you can be lawful good. That is the goody two-shoes. It's like, I believe in doing the right thing, and I follow the rules, and I'm, you know, I will. And a lot of times, for example, paladins often are lawful good. They're the goody two-shoes. It's like, I'm going to do the right thing and say the right, you know, I'm going to generally be a force of good. And I'm going to follow the rules. Okay, then you get to

chaotic evil. I'm evil. I'm going to do whatever I want. I'm not going to follow the rules. I'm a force of evil, and nothing is going to pin me in. Now, then you get the other ones, which are interesting, is you get lawful evil, which is I'm evil, I'm doing evil things,

but I'm doing it within the confines of the law. I'm going to mess with you, but I'm not stepping outside the law to do it. I might use the law or the system as a tool to hurt other people. And then there's chaotic good. It's like I'm generally a good person. I try to do the right thing, but I'm not tied down by laws. Maybe I'm a vigilante or maybe I'm doing something

in which I'm fighting for the force of good, but I'm not really, I'm seen as a rule breaker and I'm seen as a little bit of a troublemaker because I don't follow the rules. And then you can have neutral there. So you could be, for example, be lawful neutral.

You could be chaotic neutral. You'd be neutral good or neutral evil, in which you're one of the things, but you can't be neutral neutral. The other thing that you get to pick if you're doing characters is you have six attributes. Strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, charisma, and constitution. Okay, so strength is how strong you are. are has to do with literally your physical strength. Intelligence is kind of how smart you are, how fast you figure things out.

Wisdom is sort of more a general sense of, do you have a general flavor of how things work? Intelligence is kind of more in the moment, and wisdom is more gained over time. Dexterity is your speed how fast you move how agile you are charisma is kind of your how likable you are how easy it is you get other people to do things you ask and then constitution

is your hardiness, how tough are you how much damage can you take to survive it and what you do is you take three six-sided dice. Oh, so one of the things about Dungeons & Dragons is they use a lot of dice. The main die is the 20-sided die. But they actually will use, there are six dice, gaming dice that they refer to, which is a 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 20-sided die.

All but the 10-sided die are, I forget the name of it, but natural. Like, all of them have the same, they have an equal number of sides, they're all the same size. Those five dice are the property that have that to it. And then the 10-sided die is used so you can do percentages. And anyway, you will roll die to figure out things.

So one of the things you do with your attributes is you start with six, sorry, three six-sided dice, and you roll them, and then you get to pick what attribute that goes towards. So you get as low as three, as high as eighteen. And usually what happens is the attributes I guess are actually done first, because sometimes what attributes you choose might influence what kind of character you want to build. For example, if you have a high strength, well maybe you want to be a fighter. High strength in constitution, maybe you want to build. For example, if you have a high strength, well, maybe you want to be a fighter.

High strength in constitution, maybe you want to be a fighter. If you have a high intelligence or wisdom, maybe you want to be a magic user or a cleric. You know, different things require different abilities. So then, okay, so you have attributes, you have an alignment, you have a race, you have a class. The next thing you then start picking out is you have weapons and armor and stuff.

So you have like, if you're a fighter, someone's going to do some kind of fighting, which is most people in this game. You get to pick things that are your weapons to use. And if you're a spellcaster, you get to pick some spells. So the other neat thing about your characters is something that D&D calls leveling. Which is you start as a level one character. And that means certain things, you have certain attributes to things, what weapons you have access to, how

good you are with weapons and stuff. And then on the spell side, there are spells for different levels. So there's like first level spells. So if you're a spell caster first level, use some simple spells you can do. But as you get higher up, there's more and more complex and more powerful spells you can do. And essentially, the higher

level you get, the better off you are. The more powerful you are, the more abilities you get. You also get to choose some skills. That's another thing you get to choose. Like, am I good at lockpicking? Do I know another language? Am I good at map reading? You get to pick. Like, am I good at lockpicking? Do I know another language?

Am I good at map reading? You get to pick a bunch of skills. And finally, you get something known as hit points. And hit points have to do with how much damage you take before you get knocked unconscious and ultimately die. The idea is you have a certain number of hit points.

Every time you take damage, you lose hit points. And if you ever get to zero, you're knocked unconscious. And then if you get a certain number of hit points. Every time you take damage, you lose hit points. And if you ever get to zero, you're knocked unconscious. And then if you get a certain number below, you die. And you can heal and stuff. There's ways to heal. One of the reasons you have a cleric in your party, clerics are good at healing. But anyway,

so the Player's Handbook talks about all of that. All the stuff I just rattled off through. Races and classes. And the other thing, by the way, is if you want to know more, there's lots and lots and lots of books. So let's say you want to be a dwarf. There's a whole book just about dwarves. Just about dwarf skills and dwarf attributes and all the things about dwarves.

And let's say you want to be a fighter. There's a book about fighters. Whatever you want to do, there are books about that thing, so you can get more detail. You can drill down. So there's a lot of things you can do when you're sort of building your character. Okay. So that's the second book, the Player's Handbook.

The third book is the Monster Manual. And this is just a list of monsters upon monsters. And the thing you'll find about Dungeon Dragons is it pulls its influence from a lot of sources. The two biggest would probably be Greek and Roman mythology and Tolkien. Those are probably the two biggest influential forces. But there are other. There's things from, you know, it went around, finds mythology from all around the world. And some of the stuff they just made up. One of the real famous Dungeons & Dragons creatures is called the Beholder.

It's this big ball that floats that has all these eye stalks. It has like a hundred eye stalks. And it's psionic powers and things. That's a unique... That monster was made specifically for Dungeons & Dragons. It exists in Dungeons & Dragons. And so the Monster Manual is just full of all these monsters. Usually the Monster Manual is used by the DM.

But when things attack, there's pictures and stuff, and they can show you pictures like, ooh, this is what's happening. One of the fun things is if the players don't read the Monster Manual, and I know some players do, it's fun to read, is sometimes you'll meet something, and you, the players, don't quite know what it is.

One of the things that's fun for the dungeon masters is to throw things at the players, and the players have to kind of figure things out. Maybe you meet these creatures that you're like, are these going to attack us? And if so, what can they do? You know, and try to understand, like, oh, what are their weaknesses?

I know there's some people who are really into, like, the dragons that, like, memorize a monster manual, so, like, when they run a monster, they know the weaknesses of the creatures and stuff. Now, the dungeon mafters is not reduced to just using these books. A, there are other books they have access to, and B, they can make stuff up. I used to

make up stuff all the time. And that's one of the fun things about it is there's a lot of creativity. The dungeon mafters, the storyteller, they get to make up as much as they want, and a lot of people will make up their own campaigns, and their own, there's something called NPCs, which is non-player characters,

that sometimes you interact with other characters that one of the players aren't playing, and the DM plays the character instead. And, in fact, sometimes even in your party, you'll have a non-player character played by the dungeon master. So anyway, so in 1977 was the first basic set.

So Dungeon Dragon version number one, and that had, I think, these three books appeared for the first time. Then in 1977, they created something called Advanced Dungeon Dragons, where they added rules to it. 1981 was the second base set.

1983 was the third base set. And then 1989 was the second Advanced Dungeon Dragons set, which was called AD&D. base set and then 1989 was the second advanced Dungeon Dragons set which was called AD&D okay and then we started getting involved with how

wizards and magic gets involved in Dungeon Dragons so as I said Peter Ackeson was a huge role playing fan in fact Legends the set Legends

is all the Legends all the legendary characters in the set Legends were characters based off role-playing characters that Peter and his friends had played when they did role-playing. If you're able to name different characters,

they were... Either people played them or they were NPCs in role-playing games they had done. That's where the characters came from. So Lady of the Mountain was somebody, you know. Anyway, so what happened was TSR, they started up in 1974. And anyway, by the time you get to the 90s, it's 20 years later, they're having a hard time. They're having some trouble.

I don't really know the behind the scenes, but the person running the business sort of had made some poor decisions, and it was looking like Dungeon Dragons might go under. Not because there wasn't an audience for Dungeon Dragons, you know, just they had made some poor choices, and there was a lot of problems. and there was a lot of problems. And so Peter, I guess, somehow found out that TSR was up for sale, that the company was about to go under,

and Peter loved, loved, loved Dungeon Dragons. So Peter, or Wizards, through Peter's urging, purchased TSR. We bought Dungeon Dragons. And we brought it in house, and I know Peter specifically worked with everybody. In 2000, we put out the third edition. 2003 was the 3.5.

2008 was 4th edition. 2014 was 5th edition, which is out right now, very popular. And we, a whole bunch of people moved from Wisconsin out to Seattle, out, very popular. And we, a whole bunch of people moved from Wisconsin out to Seattle, out to Renton. And it really became one of the cornerstones of Wizards. So let me talk a little bit about the influence

of Dungeons & Dragons as a game, and then I'll talk a little more about Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards. So remember, the story of how Magic came to be is Mike Davis, who by the way sadly passed away very recently after a long battle with cancer. So Mike Davis was a really good friend of Richard Garfield's. He convinced Richard Garfield that they should go to Seattle to try to sell RoboRally. And Richard had sell RoboRally. And Richard had invented RoboRally. It was a very fun game.

And so they were trying to sell it. So the two of them came up to Seattle to meet with Peter Atkinson. And what Peter said to them was, look, I like this game. It's a fun game. But it has components way above what I can make. I'm a lowly role-playing game company. I have access to a printer.

Pretty much, if I can't print in a printer, I don't have the means right now to, you know, molded plastic or molded metal or whatever you need. I don't have the means to do that right now. I can't afford that. But I do have access to a printer and I have access to artists. So if you want to do anything with cards, you know, or something that we print, I could help you. And what Peter said he was looking for was he wanted a quick, fun game that could be played between role-playing game sessions. Because a role-playing game session usually takes four to six hours. It's a little longer of a thing. And he was wondering if there's something that was like quick and fast that you might play in between.

Richard said, oh, I think I have an idea idea and Richard went off and came back with magic. So um so the fact that Wizards, I'm sorry, the fact that Wizards of the Coast existed in the first place was very much due to Peter's love of role-playing and love of Dungeon Dragons and kind of the guiding force that got Peter to ask something of Richard was kind of role-playing. Richard, meanwhile, is a gamer. I've never met anyone in my life that loves games more than Richard Garfield. He

just absorbs it. He loves games as a topic to study. He loves, you know, he just will play every different game he can get his hand on. He loves looking at different mechanics. He just loves seeing and playing lots of different games. And so he obviously played Dungeons & Dragons. And one of the things that I think really stuck with him,

and I think Dungeons & Dragons had two big influences on magic. One is, as I explained before, there's this quality in Dungeons & Dragons that, when I say that magic is bigger than the box, this is where Richard got the idea from. That when you open up a role-playing thing, yeah, there are books that explain things to you, but people make things, and people have experiences that extend beyond. Now, one of the things in general, I didn't mention this,

they do make adventures. Meaning, let's say you, the DM, want your handheld, meaning you don't want to have to come up with your own adventure. They sell adventures. You can buy a completed adventure that sort of walks you through everything you need. And not that you don't have to adapt to your group, but it gives you all the components you need to build a story.

And it tells you everything. They're called modules. So you can buy modules to do that. Or you can make your own. I love making my own. I had a lot of fun getting out your graph paper and making your rooms and filling with monsters. But anyway, so Richard really embraced the idea that you could make your own stuff, that you had a lot of options of what you could do, and that the game of Dungeons & Dragons was bigger than the box. And I think Richard really loved the idea of,

could other games do that? Could a more traditional game do that? You know? The second thing is, I think that Dungeons & Dragons really got Richard enamored with the fantasy IP, with fantasy. And if you look at early Magic, a lot of the choices Richard made creatively

are based upon his love of Dungeon Dragons. That a lot of the fantasy stuff was tied to Richard really enjoyed, you know, and Richard was also into Tolkien and I mean Richard, I think Richard liked fantasy from a lot of different places, but I think one of the things that helped get him into fantasy was Dungeon Dragons. So when you actually sort of look through magic, especially early magic, there's a lot of crossover. There's a lot of, oh,

you know. And for those that like, I just did a podcast not too long ago on fights I've lost. And one of the fights I lost was the dog-hound fight. And the reason I lost it was Dungeons & Dragons. There's a creature in Dungeons & Dragons called a hellhound. And I think

Bill Rose was enamored with the hellhound. And so when he thought fantasy, he just thought the hellhound. So hound just sounded more fantasy to him than dog. Dog was more mainstream. But hound, that's a fantasy dog. And so I think the reason that Bill fought so far for hound was

due to Dungeons & Dragons. So as you can see, there's lots and lots of influences that the game has. And, like I said, even down to creature choices. Like, I think that this is me, I'm not

100% on this, but I do know that Richard also had some fun taking some fantasy tropes and pushing them in a certain direction. The most famous one is he decided to make goblins more comical and less kind of cruel. If you actually look at Tolkien, the orcs and the goblins intermingle,

and they're pretty vicious creatures. So where did he get the goblin kind of humorous thing? And I think part of it might have been that when Richard did his role playing, that he was able to sort of have some fun bending things in the way he liked. And my guess is that might be where he first sort of got a lot of idea of goblins as comic relief, that really magic embraced wholeheartedly. Like I said, he made them red.

He made them chaotic, not black. And I attribute that to magic. I'm sorry, to Dungeons & Dragons. The other thing that Dungeons & Dragons did, so maybe there's a third thing that influenced Richard, is there are a lot of different worlds for Dungeons & Dragons. So, for example, I wrote a bunch down. I'm not as well versed in magic.

I can spit things off the top of my head. But with Dungeons & Dragons, I needed to do a little bit of research. So, Birthright, Blackmoor, Council of Worms, Dark Sun, Dragonfist, Dragonlance, Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Ghostwalk, Greyhawk, Jackandor, Jackandor? Jackandor.

Kingdom of Kalamar, Lankmar, Mahasarpa, Mystara, Nestor Vale, Pelennor, Planescape, Ravenloft, Rokugan, Spelljammer, Thunderrift, Warcraft, Wildlands of the High Fantasy. Those are all different worlds built through Dungeons & Dragons. And so there's a lot of different worlds. And so I think that Dungeons & Dragons also introduced Richard to the idea of a game

that like, they're just different worlds the game existed in. And I think the idea of planes might have also come from sort of, you know, like for example, Ravenloft is kind of the gothic horror world of Dungeons & Dragons, for example. And that, you know, that, you know, kind of in some level inspired the thoughts of Innistrad. You know, that there was the idea of having these different planes really did influence them. And also, by the way, Magic has a race class that it uses that very much is sort of borrowed from D&D.

You know, now you'll see a human wizard or a goblin rogue or whatever. You know, we... I mean, when Richard started, he had both classes

and races. We later sort of combined them into a class race system around Mirrodin, I think is when we did. But that 100% was influenced

by Dungeon Dragons. The other big thing about Dungeon Dragons, by the way, is, I don't know, there's very few people in the pit. I'm not going to say everybody, but the people who make Magic or Gamers, we gamed, and as a, oh, I never talked about how I

got my interaction with Dungeon Dragons. So, when I was 13, I had my bar mitzvah. I'm Jewish, for those that don't know. You become a man, age 13, or a woman, and you have a bar or bar mitzvah. I'm Jewish, for those that don't know. You become a man aged 13 or a woman, and you have a bar or bat mitzvah, accordingly. And so I had my bar mitzvah. So across the street, on our street,

lived a woman named Mrs. Maynard. And she was my first grade teacher. And so we had kept in touch with her after I was in first grade. And I would trick-or-treat at her house. And, you know, we'd have, like, street picnics, and we'd see her. So my mom and dad invited Miss Maynard to my bar mitzvah.

And so she got me a present, and the present she got me, so this would have been 1980, she got me Dungeons & Dragons. That's where I got my first Dungeons & Dragons set. In fact, it was a blue box. It was a little blue box with a dragon on the cover. I remember it now. And you open it up

and there was like a little blue book that explained. And then the initial box you bought, like, it wasn't the full books. It was like sort of smaller versions of books. Or maybe the books at the time were just stapled together. I don't remember. But anyway, those are the first books that I later would go and get the Dungeon Masters

and the Plater's Handbook and the Monster Manual and Deedee's and Demigods and a those are the first books that I had. I later would go and get the Dungeon Masters and the Player's Handbook and the Monster Manual and Deities and Demigods and a whole bunch of other books that I got. And it really was, that was my exposure to it. And so I was 13 when I got into Dungeon Dragons. I played a lot of Fetcher with my best friend David. And I was always a DM. I would make stuff and I loved making dungeons

and making traps. dungeons and making traps. I loved making traps. And then when I was in college, I played a little bit of Dungeons & Dragons in college and then after college, when I moved to Los Angeles, I had a bunch of friends. I had room with a guy named Chris

and Chris and I decided we'd start up a role-playing thing with our friends and what we did is every other week, Chris ran a Dungeons & Dragons game and then on the off weeks I would rent a Gamma World game so Gamma World's also put out by another game the TSR made originally and it's like a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that I used to joke is the game where mutation is your friend where there's all this

mutation you get mutated by radiation and the characters represent like mutated animals and stuff and you characters represent like, mutated animals and stuff, and anyway, the humanoid animals and things. It's fun. It's a little goofy. And then when I played Dungeon Dragons, I wrote about this, by the way, if you go online, there's an article,

a topical blend I wrote called Sessions, which combines what's the other topic? It talks about dungeon dragons is the non-magic topic. And I share some stories from my dungeon dragon playing days.

But I was a wizard named Gemini. I was ambidextrous. And the story I tell there was I used to love breaking the fourth wall. I would talk as if I were me and not my character. And Chris had a rule that said you couldn't break the fourth wall. Like, I would, you know, I would talk as if I were me and not my character.

And Chris had a rule that said you couldn't break the fourth wall, and you got punished if you did. And you in-game got punished. And I would get punished. I would make puns, and he deemed puns breaking the fourth wall. I was like, no, my character makes puns. Anyway. And so I was struck blind at one point and turned into a fish.

Anyway. You want more on that, I believe I tell that story in my article. You can read about that. But anyway, and so I, like many other people in R&D, have experience with Dungeon Dragons. There's a language that we got that comes from it. You know, the Dungeon Dragons, like I said,

really before the trading card game, like there's this evolution that happens in gaming where there's war gaming, and that begot role playing. And role playing begot trading card games. You know, that sort of, each thing had a huge influence on the thing that follows it. And like I said, it wasn't, I think role playing came a little more directly. Literally, they adapted a miniatures game to't I think role playing came a little more directly they literally they adapted a miniatures game

to make the first role playing game not quite how trading card game started but you can't there is no way not to say

that the influence that Dungeon Dragons had on magic it is it is just so I don't know so large in the way how it shaped

anyway so back in 1997 Peter Ackeson purchased so large in the way how it shaped. Anyway, so back in 1997, Peter Ackeson purchased TSR and thus purchased Dungeons & Dragons, and a bunch of people from there came out

came out to to Wizards. In fact, one of our art directors, Dawn, Dawn Marin, was actually, I believe, worked at TSR. And she was one of the people that moved over.

She now does magic. And so over the years, what happens is we, R&D, Magic R&D is right next to D&D R&D. And what has happened over the years is there's been a lot of cross-pollination. For example, right now, I'm working on a set. My strong second set is a guy named Peter Lee.

And his background is he used to work on Dungeons & Dragons. James Wyatt, for example. If you guys have been enjoying the Planescape, we've started making D&D campaigns using magic settings. That's being done by James Wyatt, who's also done a lot of the creative stuff. Wrote the structure of the story, for example, for Shadows Over Innistrad. He's been doing a lot of work on the Fall set, Ixalan. And anyway, he was a Dungeons & Dragons person. And likewise, some of the magic people, some

of the creative team, for example, have gone over and started working on Dungeons & Dragons. There's a lot of cross-pollination and we definitely, while there's different skills for the different games, it's not as if I you could just plunk me down the middle Dungeon Dragons I can just make Dungeon Dragons. There's a skill to learning, you know, they're different games. But there's been a lot of crossover. One of the things, by the way, this is one of the trickiest things we run into is, so Wizards' two biggest games are Magic and Dungeon Dragons. And one of the problems are they're both fantasy games. But other than that, they're really different games. We are a strategic

card game. Dungeon Dragons is a role-playing game. But people who do not know any better, like it's very common when I introduce somebody and say, I work on Magic, and they say, oh, what's that? And I describe it, they go, oh, is that like Dungeon and Dragons? And the answer is like, well, they share a genre. They're both about fantasy. But we've actually worked really hard to try to separate the two. In fact, here's a little story most people don't know, is I actually, with the help of a couple of people, designed, I was the lead designer, of the Dungeon Dragons trading card game. We experimented with CB1 to make a trading card game, and we ended up choosing not to do it

because there was so much confusion between the two properties that we decided to sort of not cross the streams. Now, we've been dipping our toe a little bit. The stuff that James has been making, making settings, role-playing settings for Magic, we're starting to see us dip our toe a little bit. I don't know if we'll ever make the trading card game. I did make it. It was fun. The way it worked,

real briefly the way it worked is one side played the Dungeon Master and one side played the party. And so it was sort of you, the party, were trying to get your stuff before the Dungeon Master, then Dungeon, defeated you, essentially. It was a lot of fun. I made it with Scaff Elias and a guy named

Dave Eccleberry, who actually used to work on Dungeon Dragons. And, like I said, one of the hard parts about making new games is a lot of your games never receive a light of day, and that was definitely one of them. In fact, it's funny when I think back of all the different games I made outside of Magic.

One of the fun things about making Magic is when you make Magic, usually, with Unglue 2 accepted, normally the things come out. But anyway, one of the challenges has been trying to make sure that Magic and Dungeons & Dragons have their own unique identity.

And that has been a challenge, having two fantasy IPs as our major IPs. Like, for example, dragons play a major role in both of them, but yet they're a little bit different, you know, so. But anyway, I'm now driving up to Rachel's school. So I'm hoping today, really want to talk about today is a little bit of history of Dungeon Dragons. It's a big part of Wizards. You know, I talk most about magic because I make magic and you guys play magic, but, you know, we're very, very proud of Dungeon

Dragons. It's a great game. It's a very popular game. A lot of people, it was the introduction of a lot of people to sort of core gaming, and it had a huge influence on Magic. It affected Peter and the means by which it got to the company, and wizards wouldn't have existed if not for role-playing.

It affected Richard, you know, sort of a lot of the creative choices, the fantasy choices, all stemmed from that. The idea of planes, I think, came from that. And just the bigger than the box, the whole idea of something in which you learn and explore. I think all of that really was heavily influenced by Dungeon Dragons. So if you love magic, you know, you owe a debt of gratitude to Dungeon Dragons. And if you've never played Dungeon Dragons, let me end today by saying, give it a try.

It's really fun. It is a lot of fun. You sit around with your friends, and it's like, it's this big storytelling thing where you get to sort of, together, sort of live through a story. And it's, if you've never done it, it is really, really a lot of fun. Okay, guys, but I'm now here at Rachel's school, so we all know what that means. I mean, this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, or mostly Dungeon Dragons, it's time for me to make magic.

I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.