Stuff You Should Know - How Dungeons and Dragons Works

Episode Date: May 2, 2013

Despite what you've heard, Dungeons and Dragons isn't just for geeks, it isn't satanic and it's actually a pretty great way to exercise your imagination. Find out about the basics of D&D, its place in pop culture and the controversy the classic role playing game has stirred. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. I'm just a simple cleric. Minded my way down the Primrose path. I was going to ask you what you were. Got my staff, got my sword. Yep, you would be well-outfitted then. Ready to battle some nerds.

So have you played before? Okay, this is about Dungeons and Dragons. And I think that is a good move is two things. One caveat, if you're a big D&D person, we're not going to get everything right. We'll get what we can write, obviously, but it's not going to be as comprehensive as you want. No, we're just going to go over the basic edition.

And two, I think we should both relate our own experience so people just know. I played a little bit, because this is right in my wheelhouse, dude. I am really surprised that your community let you play. The Baptist community? Yeah. Yeah, I didn't hear it talked about much in church, but.

Wow, that's surprising. In school, there were some of my friends started to play, and I played, I started to a little bit, but it was always way too complicated and involved for me. I played a little top secret. That's another role-playing game. That was like the Espionage James Bond D&D. So I played a little bit of that,

but I never got into it, man, like other people did. And I think it's because I was so active and I would always rather be out riding my bikes, my bike, and playing at the creek near my house, and building forts, and zip lines, and setting things on fire, and putting fireworks and bottle rockets and model planes and flying them off my roof.

Nice. So I was doing stuff like that. I wasn't so much inside playing D&D, or I was an early gamer, so I'd be like, screw D&D, let's play Adventure on Atari, and be a block with an arrow. Right, exactly. That's the real cutting edge stuff.

Yeah, so that was my deal. Mine was, I did all that stuff, like I had a fort in the woods, and I could make a pretty good machine gun sound, and I did all that kind of stuff. But I also played D&D fairly extensively for several summers that were just basically spent in a friend's basement playing Dungeons & Dragons.

I think it depends on who your friend's set is, unless you're the initiator, like you'll just fall in and do whatever your friends are doing. And here's the deal, I think this affected it too. I grew up on a street in the woods with like six houses. I didn't grow up in one of those big sprawling neighborhoods, like all my other friends. So they would walk down the street

and play D&D in the basement. It was just me and my bro, hanging out like in the woods. I would walk across the street for one group. Then there was another one where I had to ride my bike a pretty decent distance. I was secluded, I was sequestered out in the forest. And I got made fun of because of that,

until later on when all my friends were like, dude, you live on two acres in the woods. That's rad. Let's have a bonfire. Exactly, and we did. So we both played D&D and we both are not experts in any way, shape, or form. Like from the time I last played D&D

till we started researching for this episode, I forgot everything, basically. Over those three months? Yeah. So it was like a pretty cool trip down memory lane, like going back and researching. Yeah, me too, some, because I don't think I remembered

how much I had played it. And it was a little bit more than I had remembered because a lot of the stuff was like, oh yeah, I remember that. I remember that cover. I remember that box. But there was like, exactly. There was a ton of new stuff that I didn't know

that I learned in researching this. Oh, sure. Like Gary Giax. Giax. Giax. Oh, man. A bunch of people just put their robes on, put the hoods on their heads,

they're like, I'm gonna kick your earbuds. Gary Giax. Let's call him Gary G from now on. He is the co-creator along with Dave Arneson of Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah. And he started out as a war gaming fanatic, so much so that he started GenCon

at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, his hometown. Yeah. Which is this huge gaming convention still. But he started out as a war gaming convention. And that's basically where you roll dice, move little men. It's like risk. Risk is a war game.

It's like that and Axis and allies are like quintessential war games. I used to love risk. It's a great game. But Giax and his buddies were doing this before there was ever any risk. Like they were making their own boards, they were reenacting battles

or doing alternate universe battles of them. And then along came Dave Arneson who kind of had this idea for something a little less stilted, a little more free form. And he didn't quite have a conception of it yet, but Giax did. He was working on something called Chainmail and they got together and that ultimately became

kind of the first dry run of Dungeons and Dragons. And they liked what they were doing and they kind of took it from there and then ultimately made Dungeons and Dragons in 1974. Yeah. I didn't find out a whole lot about Arneson. It seems like Giax is always the, I guess because he was the original like,

the originator of the idea. He's always the one that's revered and like, you know, bowed down to it seems like. He is. He was also, I get the impression of a lot more of the self promoter than Arneson is. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, they were both very much

intimately involved in the creation of this game. Oh. Right. Giax also, by the way, Sidebar says that he is a descendant of Goliath. Is that right? Yeah. He, well, he didn't, let me rephrase that.

The interview I saw, he wasn't like, well, I'm a descendant of Goliath. Yeah, he wasn't like that. He was a cool guy. Yeah, he said, the Giax means giant and supposedly like the family lore is that we are descendants of Goliath. So I thought that was sort of interesting.

Who more appropriate than descendant of a biblical giant than to make this fantastical fantasy game. Right, exactly. And there's actually like a really neat wired article on him that includes a pretty decent amount on Arneson too called The Dungeon Master. Oh yeah. It's about Gary Giax who died in 2008, we should say.

But the two of them get together and this is when things are really good and they set up something called TSR which is a company called Tactical Studies Rules which sounds like the most boring company you could ever think of, but this company is what produced what became the role-playing game. Like you said, Top Secret was the James Bond D&D.

You didn't say Top Secret was the James Bond role-playing game, D&D was literally becomes synonymous with role-playing games and for good reason. Like in 1974 when Dungeons and Dragons came out, there was nothing in the entire world that even remotely resembled it. Yeah, it was super unique and that's one of the reasons why people always say it's like a nerd game

and you sit in your basement by yourself and they did have adventures you'd go in by yourself but they pointed out in this article it's a very social game because you would get together with your friends and sit around a table and you could play it straight and just sort of play or you could start acting things out and doing funny voices and make it more like a dramatic portrayal of this game.

It was really kind of up to you but it may have a nerdy connotations but it is a social game. Like they're just a bunch of nerds together playing. Right, well and if you look at some of the recent ads for Dungeons and Dragons in some of the gamers' magazines, they are still appealing to the fact that it's a social game.

They're trying to get people who play World of Warcraft to like start playing D&D again and they're using taglines like if you're gonna sit in your basement and pretend you're an elf for hours on and you might as well do it with a group of friends. That's a great tagline for a company. So it has been social from the beginning and what Gygax and Arneson came up with

was essentially a book of rules that used dice to advance imaginary characters along. So and then in 1977, they released the basic set. That's the red box. That's the one that makes us nostalgic, right? Yes. And then they also simultaneously released advanced Dungeons and Dragons,

which kind of had stricter rules. It was more sweeping in scope, but they both came out in 77. That's right. And then in 79, the DM guide was introduced and if you play Dungeons and Dragons in a group, you gotta have someone run in the game and that is the Dungeon Master.

That is a person that sits behind a little cardboard screen and hides all of their stories and they're the ones who create these, basically kind of write the game and like some people will spend hours and days and weeks creating these campaigns and these games for their friends to bring to life as characters. And it was definitely unique at the time.

So you've got all these additions, right? There's I think 10 now, they're working on the 10th depending on who you ask, right? And with every addition of Dungeons and Dragons, there was a, like there was a change. Sometimes there are really big changes. Like in 1989, they released the second edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons

and like it did away with a lot of like the evil monsters because like D&D had gotten a bad rap, which we'll talk about later. Right. And there is like a kind of role that you had to figure out how many hit points you lost or how many hit points were inflicted. It was just different.

And so with every addition, it's been different and different and different. Yeah. And so you get adherence to different sets, different versions. Sure. Which has kind of led to this weird fracturing in the Dungeons and Dragons community apparently. And you know, the Grabster.

Yeah. At Grabbinowski, one of the writers of many of the articles that we've talked about, he's a bit of a D&D expert, it turns out. Oh yeah? Yeah, and you can go check his stuff out. He should have written the article. Agreed.

Yeah. He writes extensively on io9.com about D&D. So you can check out his stuff. He's basically saying like, okay, you've got this big fractured community of D&D players. Everybody has their own addition that's their favorite, but everybody still wants to be able to play together, but it's just incompatible.

So what he's saying is Wizards of the Coast, the people who made Magic the Gathering and ultimately bought D&D. Yeah, in 1997. They have said, okay, this fifth edition is gonna bring everything together. We'll see about that. Well, that's what Grabbinowski says.

He says, there's no possible way to literally unify the various editions under a single rule set. It would be like trying to build a car that uses parts from a 2010 Mustang, a 1950 Packard, and a tractor. So he's incredulous, but they have it in like, open gaming testing right now, the fifth edition. I don't see what the big deal is.

I think that's one of the cool things about D&D is that depending on who you play with, like find your people, you know? Like, they might wanna play a certain edition. I know that some players like to play with the little figurines, and some people think that's an abomination. You should only use your imagination.

Some people go and make up their own campaigns. Some people stick to campaigns that are in the books. So I think that's a cool thing about it is there's something out there for everybody unless you're just not into it. Yeah, then there's nothing for you there. There's nothing for me. So let's talk about how to play.

Like, we'll just give a brief primer and we, since we're nostalgic for the Red Box, which is the basic set, the basic rule book that came out first in 77, we're just gonna go with that. Don't yell at us, but it's a very basic good intro to D&D for all the other people who are listening to this one who don't know what is going on.

Yeah, this is a single episode on D&D and you could have an entire podcast that's about D&D that you did for five years. You know what, I'll bet there are. Oh, sure. Right in, let us know. We'll tweet about it. Okay, so like we said, it is a role-playing game.

So the basic concept is, by the way, you can't win. There is no end point. It's all just about the fun of continuing with these characters that you create. Right, the only beginning and end really is the creation of a new character and the death of that character. Sure.

And even still, if that character dies, it sucks depending on how far along your character was, but you can always create another one. So yeah. That's what bothered me about it, I think, is I was too late, like I would cheat it and just make up characters with all this great stuff. You can't do that.

Well, that's why I was never invited back, you know what I'm saying? Oh, you were that guy, huh? No, I mean, I don't remember if I was. I just remember not getting it and being like, well, my guy's good at all this stuff. I'm gonna go sit some on fire. All right, so you create your character and in the red box and the basic set,

you have these different attributes and abilities that will come into play as you play the game. And they are strength, of course, that's pretty easy. How much damage you can inflict with a weapon, wisdom, how intuitive you are, dexterity, which is good if you're nimble. It could help you with a weapon or getting in that high window on the second floor.

Especially like a missile weapon, like a bow and arrow or something. If you have a high dexterity score. You wanna pair that with a bow and arrow for sure. Right. Intelligence, how smart they are, how much they can learn things as a character. Constitution, which is your stamina.

Yeah. And how much stuff you can carry. How long you can fight. But if you had that bag of holding, you're all set. And then charisma, which is your likability. So if you wanna hook up and make friends or get out of a fight with some bad character, that's when that's gonna come into play.

And all these are determined by roles of the die. Yeah, like everything we just talked about is represented by a number. And then in addition to the armor class of the character, which is a number that represents, say, how easy it is to inflict damage on that character. And then the number of hit points, which is, I guess, a representation of basically

how much life you have left to use. It's your health. Right, exactly. Like on a video game, that would be your health bar. Exactly. You put all these together and you have a character that, so long as it can stay alive, can go out and go forth into the D&D universe

and adventure indefinitely, basically. All right, so there were seven playable characters in the basic set. And I think I remember being a cleric. But the first one is a fighter. And that's what you think. They're stronger and they're better at fighting and they're probably not as smart

or as charismatic as another character might be. It depends. You can have high charisma. Like in the D&D, the basic sets player's manual, the first character they hook you up with has high charisma and high strength. But strength is the prime record, is it? For being a fighter.

Yeah. Okay, so a cleric, I think I was a cleric. That's sort of a fighter and a wizard. So they have good fighting abilities, but they're also very dexterous and wise and you can cast spells, which is very important. Right, there's a difference between a cleric and a magic user, which is the next one,

is that a cleric receives spells through meditation. That's right. So they have to sit around and rest sometimes before they can get a new spell. And they also can turn undead, which means literally turn the undead the other way. Sure. So if you have a zombie on your trail,

it's good to have a cleric to say, hey, zombies, turn her out. Did that show you zombies? Were they called zombies? Zombies is one, brother. Ghouls is another undead. Skeletons? I didn't see, I didn't play enough.

I don't know any of this stuff. I didn't either until I went back and read the entire player's manual again the other day. So a magic user can do cool things like throw balls of lightning and learn other spells, learn new spells without meditation. No, it's learning from book learning, which means you have to have

the prime records as a high intelligence score. Right, it's not a meditative thing. Right, it's just from learning books. You have the dwarf, of course, what fantasy game would be complete without it. Four feet tall, got that beard. Males and females have a beard. Yeah, and just like in Lord of the Rings,

they're kind of ornery and super strong and have great constitution. And of course, they're good fighters because they're little short, mean boogers. Right, you've got the thief, which you would think, and it took me a long time to figure this one out too. The thief, why would you want to have a thief around you? The person's gonna steal from you.

I love a thief. Well, a thief typically doesn't steal from people they're adventuring with, but they do know how to find secret doors, traps, pick locks. Pick locks, yeah, and so they have a very high dexterity score. Yeah, but they're also gonna turn their back on you in a battle because they're not great fighters.

Okay, right, you don't want them near the battle. You want them off to the side, get out of the way, and let's get the fighter in there, maybe a dwarf or two as well. But yeah, the thief is just kind of meant to stand back and maybe be like, get him, yeah, get him over there. Suck it to him, and just cheer along. You've got halflings, they're even smaller than the dwarfs.

They're only three feet tall, about 60 pounds, and they're demi-humans, and they're dexterous, and they have a great constitution. They're tough to hit because they're tiny, and so they're good fighters. They're very spry. Yeah. They're also like dwarfs and elves

capable of sustaining magic attacks. Right. Which leads us to elves. It's another demi-human character, and they're a cross between fighters and magic users, so they have high strength and high intelligence. And it's not, you don't just say with any of these, like, oh, I want an elf, so you roll

until you have something with high intelligence and high strength. Yeah. You can, you're not supposed to, but you're supposed to roll and come up with your ability scores first, and then figure out what you have based on those scores. Yeah, and it is interesting,

and one thing I do remember is that it is about the imagination, and even though these characters exist as a series of numbers on a chart, is all it is, you create them in your mind, and that's the fun part about it. And like, I never started acting things out like I've seen other people do.

Yeah, which can go overboard pretty easy. Yeah. And I guess that was sort of the precursor to what ended up being LARP, was just sitting around the kitchen table doing accents and things, and then some people thought, hey, let's go outside and take these broomsticks

and actually do this fight. You got some cardboard. I'm in the mood for making some sorts. Yeah, I'm really an active guy. I think, you know, sitting around this table is no good. Right? So you said that everything's represented numerically, and that's absolutely true.

Yeah. Except there's one thing that kind of lends itself to acting, or at the very least, decision-making of a character, and that's alignment. And there's three kinds of alignment in basic D&D. There's lawful, which is what we would equate with good. Good guys. Where if you have a lawful character,

they're probably the hero type. They're gonna put their own skin on the line in order to save the group. They're certainly not gonna turn and run without the rest of the group doing the same. Yeah. Chaotic is the opposite of that. It's what we would equate with evil.

Yeah, they just sort of look out for themselves, forget the group, and you'd think that would be the worst one, but apparently the worst is neutral, because you can't tell they're just gonna do whatever's best for them no matter what. Well, neutral is very, it's animalistic. Yeah.

Where it's basically just about the survival of the individual. And if you have a neutral person, they might fight with the group if they feel like the group's gonna win and they'll protect them. Or they may just turn and run with, hey, no hard feelings, they got nothing against you,

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you can pick up along the way and even languages that if you approach a character and they don't speak your language, then you can't communicate and you have to take a different path on your adventure. But everyone can speak at least two universal and then alignment tongue. And alignment tongue allows you to speak

to other characters in that same alignment without the other people knowing what's being said. Right. And it's your private little conversation. Exactly. So if both of us were chaotic magic users, right Chuck? Yes. And there was somebody playing

and there was a fighter who was lawful. We could say, hey, let's put a charm spell on this guy and make them do our bidding. Right. And so the player's gonna know what we're doing, but the character wouldn't. Yeah. And the person responsible for keeping all this separate,

you mentioned earlier at the Dungeon Master. The head nerd. Right. The Dungeon Master is in charge of saying things like, you wouldn't know that when the fighter says, I want to kill the two magic users who are about to use a charm on me. Dungeon Master would say,

your character doesn't know that because they just spoke in their alignment tongue. Yeah. And boy, Dungeon Master is a specific kind of person. It takes a lot of work and you can get as involved as you want to, but no matter which way you slice it, if you're the DM,

you're gonna be putting in some time coming up with these things, these stories. Even before the beginning. Even before you sit down. And it's, I'd be curious to find some correlation between people that were Dungeon Masters when they were like 12 in the late 70s and early 80s and what they ended up doing with their life.

Yeah, it would be an interesting study. Because they, I would say that a lot of them are probably running companies and running the show wherever they are, because it takes a great deal of initiative and patience and like stamina and creativity and all these things to be a great Dungeon Master. Plus a sense of justice as well.

You have to be fair. Oh yeah. Which I'm sure doesn't always sit well with the group. And yet, like you were saying, like they, it does take creativity. It takes also a total and utter awareness of the game. Like while everybody's just creating their players, the DM has to show up to that very first game.

Yeah. Having read the player's manual. Yeah. Having read the Dungeon Masters guide. Understanding all the rules. And then if you're using a game module, which you know, TSR published tons of games. Oh yeah.

Which essentially are maps of an area. Yeah. That the Dungeon Master has access to. Sure. And then running the whole game as a whole, like understanding what players can do, what players can't do. You have to understand how much damage a monster

can inflict. Let's give an example. Like the Dungeon Masters guide is intimidating. Yes. To me as an adult. So I don't know how these kids at 12 were sitting down and figuring this stuff out. Well, so they have the appearance of omniscience.

And any Dungeon Master kind of cultivates this idea that they are all knowing. But like you said, they're hiding behind a cardboard screen. And behind that screen is like the Dungeon Masters guide. The game module, which has everything clearly marked and all that. So they have everything at their disposal. But they're still a revered person typically.

The Dungeon Master. They're omniscient. Well, because I don't know. How many 12-year-olds have the initiative to take this on? I think it's about right. It's probably about one out of every 10 kids has the initiative to be the Dungeon Master. And the rest just want to be characters.

Well, that was a big problem with the game. It was like sometimes you couldn't find somebody to DM because there was a lot of work. So let's give an example of play if you'll indulge me. So OK, we got a group of characters are on a campaign in a dungeon. And by the way, the reason why it became Dungeons and Dragons, why they chose Dungeons was because they

didn't want players being able to just wander all over the place. They wanted to keep them together in small confined spaces in a dungeon or a cave system or something like that. It was a pretty good way to keep everybody together. Catacombs, man. It's all about the catacombs. So your group of characters are on a campaign in the dungeon. And the DM might say something like,

this is in the middle of the game. The DM is in charge of telling you what's going on where you are describing your environment. So he or she may say, you're in a long, dark corridor. You see a faint light at one end. To your right is a 10 feet by 10 feet door. It is locked. Do you want to try to pick the lock

or continue down the corridor toward the light? And so the players decide to have the thief pick the lock, right? Because that's what you do. Now here's what I don't get. And I don't know if you know this. Is it do you get together as a group and decide and take a vote? Or is it someone's turn to say, no, it's my turn.

And I make the thief go. It depends. So first of all, on a campaign, you have a caller. And that's the person who speaks to the DM for the group. But the caller is also in charge of saying, hey, what do you guys want to do? And then saying that to the DM. OK, so they're just the voice of the group.

Right, they don't make any decisions. The group's supposed to decide as a whole. And the DMs are sitting there going, little do they know. Exactly, yeah. And then there are turns as well, especially in combat. Now, if you have three fighters and a thief, and they're suddenly battling a minotaur, the thief is going to be like, I'm standing over here.

And the DM will leave them out of the turns. And then it'll be the thief in the minotaur or the one fighter in the minotaur and the next fighter in the minotaur. It'll just keep going on like that. OK, that makes sense. So back to our little story. The door is locked. Do you want to pick the lock?

We decide, let's send our thief in to pick the lock. OK, so what happens? The DM? Well, they've got to roll the dice. And that's how you figure out if things work. So if you're a thief, that means you're really good at picking locks. So let's say it's a 20-sided die, and all you've got to do

is roll like a four or higher to successfully pick it. So that just means your chances are really good that you'll be able to pick the lock. If you don't have a thief, you can send your fighter in to pick the lock. But you may have to roll like a 16 or higher. You would think so, but fighters can't pick locks. At all?

Not at all. Oh, OK. They just there and bang on the door. So only certain characters can, like you can't even try. If they don't have that, what? I believe so in basic D&D, like only thieves. They're definitely not fighters. So if you don't have a thief in your campaign,

the DM wouldn't even say, do you want to pick the lock? They may say you want to try to bust the door down. But the DM might also know in the game module it's unbustdownable. It can only be picked. So a lot of work goes into this on the DM. It is, for sure, because you're rolling for everything. And you were saying they rolled to find out

if the thief was successful. And that would be based on that low number. Like if you just need to roll a four, that's in relation to the dexterity score, because it takes high dexterity to pick a lock. So the higher dexterity score, the lower you have to roll, which gives you on a 20-sided die a lot more of a chance that you're

going to be successful at picking the lock. It's all rolling of the dice in numbers. So in this case, the DM knows that on the other side of that door is the gelatinous cube. And that is bad news if you're playing D&D. Which, if you're an experienced D&D player, that 10 feet by 10 feet door probably would have given it away, because that's

the exact dimensions of a gelatinous cube, which has evolved to move through the doors of a dungeon. See, I would be dead so soon. So what happens? The door opens. There's the gelatinous cube. Boom. And then you've got to do battle.

And when you're doing battle, you do it again by rolling dice. And you get these hits. You have the hit points that we referenced earlier. And let's say you've got to roll these two four-sided dice. You've got to roll each one once. And those will be the licks that the gelatinous cube puts on you. And if it totals seven or higher, then you're dead.

Yeah, exactly. If you had, depending on your hit points, if you have seven hit points, you'd be dead. So that, I mean, that's generally the game. You can get experience points, which are huge. Which is, it's interesting to know. Experience points, that's what you do to grow as a character to get more hit points to become more invincible, more

experience. To kill a monster, and you'll get experience points. But you get way more experience points for getting treasure. And the authors of the basic D&D rule books point out, we want you to use your head. How do you get a round confrontation? Oh, to go find the loot. Right, which if you battle a monster,

you deserve something. Sure. But the point isn't killing. The point is using your head to get around problems as well. And that's why you get more for treasure. Yeah. Well, look at there. I had a thing.

I think we made it up, because I looked it up and I couldn't find it called a bag of plenty, not a bag of holding. The bag of holding was, you could put anything large in it and still be able to carry it. Like I found all this food. And I normally wouldn't be able to carry it, but your bag of holding would allow that. Right, isn't that right?

Did you have to keyster it? I don't know what that means, like up the butt. Yeah. You're the first person who's ever said up the butt when somebody said keystered. What are you supposed to say? You just know what keyster means. Otherwise, you would just say up the butt.

Yeah. All right. No, I would not keyster it. But I had something called a bag of plenty. You guys made that up, or? I don't remember, man, because I didn't find it anywhere. The only thing I found was something called a bag of plenty plus one at in Baldur's Gate, which was a video game I had played once.

But I think those Baldur's Gate related to D&D somehow as well. Yeah, it seemed like it. It was one of the variations. Yeah. So I didn't know that. But we played with- Or a ripoff, I don't know. Well, maybe. What we played was with the bag of plenty,

which is it would double whatever you put in it. So if you had like 20 gold coins you put in your bag of plenty, you'd have, you know, double that amount. Right. But I think we might have made that up, because I can't verify that anywhere. I wonder how many, you just inadvertently admitted to playing Baldur's Gate. I wonder how many people are just like, well, his credibility's out the window.

No, I think Baldur's Gate. He's a Baldur's Gate player. I think people enjoy that, no? I don't know, maybe. I vaguely remember it, too. It was one of those games that I played on like PS2 for three months until I completed it, and then I was done with it. Gotcha.

You know? So if any of that even slightly piqued your interest, I would strongly recommend going and researching and maybe trying out. There's usually, if you go on meetup.com, you can find in probably just about any even semi-major city of D&D group. Oh, sure. And apparently Wednesdays are typically days that like comic book shops and gaming shops and stuff like that, that have D&D groups where it's just kind of like anybody

who wants to come can come by and try their hand at it. I think they're very open community. Yeah, well, it depends. Oh, really? Oh, sure. Like if you tried to come in and like just plop down and like, hey, I want to join this game that you guys have been playing for seven years. And they wouldn't like me to be like, oh, I got a bag of plenty.

That's why they'd be like Baldur's Gate. I did try last night to play the online version. Yeah. Because I thought, you know what, I'm going to give it a whirl. I downloaded this Mac beta version that was like eight gigs. It took a couple of hours to download. Wow. And then there was some error in loading and it wouldn't work.

I was like, all right, well, that sucks. Let me go get my PC laptop because, you know, me and Rich, I have like eight different kinds of laptops. I know they're like falling out of your pocket. So I went to my PC laptop and tried to sign up and download the PC version. And it wouldn't recognize me. It wouldn't let me because I'd already signed up with that name. And so it was like midnight and I said, screw this.

But I think I might try and play the online version just to see what it's like. Yeah, it's called DDO. Yeah. We're not getting into that, it's a whole other thing. But there's a good article by Jonathan Strickland on Dungeons and Dragons Online that you can find on how stuff works. So I said, go check it out. And if it didn't really pique your interest, at the very least,

I imagine you would be interested to know that for many, many years, there were a lot of people with a lot of voices who considered Dungeons and Dragons to be thoroughly satanic. Yeah. And it didn't help that. What was the year that the guy? 79. James Egbert.

James Dallas Egbert III. He went by Dallas. Yeah. This was a kid at Michigan State University and he went missing. And the story out and the one that was later disproven, but the one that really got around in the news, was that he disappeared into the tunnel system underneath the school, playing D&D, and died doing so.

Yeah. He was a 16-year-old, by the way, computer prodigy in 79. So there's not such a thing as computer prodigies then. He's one of the first. He's at Michigan State. And he actually did go in the steam tunnels and he went to go kill himself to take an overdose on barbiturates. Yeah.

But it didn't work and he came to in the steam tunnels. Yeah. And it had nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons, but it was announced so in the news. And that's sort of what people remembered at the time. Right. And they used that as fuel, of course, to fuel the fire of, this is an evil game, Satanic.

They made a movie with Tom Hanks. Yeah. Maze is in monsters. Maze is in monsters. Man, do you remember seeing that when it first came out? It was a TV movie. Yeah. And I guess it's just sort of loosely told of slightly fictionalized version

of James Egbert's, you know, the sensationalized version of the real version. Tom Hanks plays a guy who gets so wrapped up in his character that he just has a break with reality. Yeah. He disappears, but they find him again. But he still thinks that he's Pardue, the cleric. And I call him Pardue, the cleric who lives with his parents now. Because they take him back home and he's just some crazy dude.

Yeah. I don't think there was any better reaction to Dungeons & Dragons than Dark Dungeons by Chick Publications. I didn't know about that. So Chick Publications make religious tracks on everything about their extremely fundamentalist Christian. And they have tracks on everything from how the new Jesuit pope is in league with the devil to how if you are a Mason, you become possessed by a heathen god.

OK. And they're basically like these easy to read comic books. You're not familiar? No. I might have, if I saw one, I might recognize it. So and then they publish them and they sell them so you can go hand them out and proselytize the people on the street. It's like an icebreaker, basically.

OK. Chick Publications came up with the creme de la creme of anti-D&D material. Propaganda. Yes. And it's called Dark Dungeons. And it's a comic strip about a girl who becomes, who starts playing D&D and then is recruited into a real life witchcraft coven by the Dungeon Master because Dungeons and Dragons is just this front for Satanists to find the best of the best to come do the real thing.

And one girl who becomes so wrapped up in her character, once her character dies she goes and hangs herself in her room. That sounds familiar. I might have been forced to read that at some point in my life. You should check it out. And as a matter of fact, I wrote a blog post on these and some other ones about how it's called Back When People Thought Dungeons and Dragons was satanic. It's on our site, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

Nice. And it's really interesting, like there was this period that coincided with that whole satanic ritual abuse scare. Yeah, with the heavy metal music. Yeah. That got Judas Priest on trial, landed the West Memphis Three in prison, it was a real thing. Satanic hysteria.

Yes. And Dungeons and Dragons was, if not the originator of this huge part of it, it was in the center of it for a long time. But it came out because, thanks in part to the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. Yeah, it had a cartoon, it had a movie which wasn't very good. I'm surprised that it haven't redone that movie. Yeah, I bet they will at some point. I wrote a Time Magazine article that was saying like, why is Dungeons and Dragons not like

a huge franchise? Yeah. We didn't really get to the bottom of it. They kind of settled on, well, it's made a billion dollars for its owners. Sure. It's in, I think it does in languages, I think 20 million people have played it. So it does have a huge following, but they were saying like, it's not the Lord of the Rings, and why not?

And I think possibly because it's just totally open-ended and it's- That's what I think. It's the individual. Lord of the Rings, you go read and there's a story and it happens and yeah, you're kind of imagining it, but you're just imagining what Tolkien is explaining to you. And Gygax, by the way, thought Tolkien sucked. Oh, really? It was in a Conan.

Sure. Not O'Brien. No. The barbarian. Right. So with Tolkien, you're told, with D&D, like you, man, you're totally using your imagination. And even more than that, something as strange as a group imagination, a group of people using their imaginations together and kind of that interlocks, like that's high-level

stuff. Well, it is high-level and that's exactly why a movie failed and probably would not succeed is because for a D&D movie to work, you have to satisfy the D&D fans and no matter who, for a movie you have to create some hero character and that's not going to satisfy all D&D people. No matter who you create and what story you create, there are going to be D&D fans that think now what my guy was way better than this chomp. Right exactly. And you call that a white dragon?

A white dragon would never do that. Because it lived in my imagination as this. So I agree. I don't think it will ever happen to great success at least. Although the cartoon was pretty well received, I think. It is still, it's a classic. But that's different. It was nominated for our greatest cartoon shows of all time, 1970 and 1988.

By you? No, by listeners. I put a list up and said, does anybody have any other nominees? And on our website, people nominated more and Dungeons and Dragons was won. So it's up there. I think Scooby-Doo won. Oh, of course. Bucktails was a hard contender.

Yeah, I never watched that. I was surprised. Yeah. Let's see. You got anything else? No. I mean there are dozens of offshoots and different games and different modules and like we only covered a very small part of it.

The universe is vast. The D&D universe is vast. Go forth and check it out. Yeah. Say we. Take up those glasses and check it out. And if you want to learn more about Dungeons and Dragons, type those words into the search part, howstuffworks.com and it will bring up some cool stuff.

Oh, by the way, it has sort of been known as like a guys thing, but there's a rabid female community with D&D and I saw, I watched a documentary last night on Dungeons and Dragons. It was pretty good. What was it called? The Dungeons and Dragons Experience, I think. You know, there's another, there's like a pretty serious other documentary that's being, it got kick started. Oh, really?

It's in production right now. Yeah, this one was okay. It wasn't great. It did interview a female woman and she was like, yeah, you know, I think a lot of girls, they see it as a guy thing and it's guy nerd, so they're reluctant to get into it. But the girls that I know that have gotten into it have found that it, you know, it's really not like a guys thing after all, and they have just as much fun. And it looks, I don't know, it's a fun community.

It is funny. They show them playing though at one point and they definitely get like, the Dungeon Master is just sort of going on and on and the players will say things in character, like, I'm not sure what to do after such a long story and stuff like that, and they're taking like Barb shots in character. It's pretty funny. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah.

That's the way to do it. I guess so. Actually, however you and your group of friends want to do it and have fun doing it, that's the way to do it. Yeah, unless it veers towards Satanism and like real. But it doesn't. That was all made up. I know.

If you want to learn more, didn't I already say this thing? Yeah, I don't know. Okay, so I said search bar, which means it's time for a message break. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table.

Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty.

It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

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Josh, I'm going to call this D&D listener mail for D&D podcast. That's a really clumsy title. How amazing is this? This is pretty cool actually. Hey guys, I'm a big fan of the podcast in the TV show. I work for the Ford Motor Company at the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville. And I'm an assembly line worker and you can imagine my job gets pretty monotonous. I put on passenger side doors on trucks, 540 a night.

On specific trucks? He does. He can't just throw any door under a new truck. No, it's all very specific. But if you own a Ford Super Duty and you open your passenger door, you can thank this dude for it. That's true. You can thank Jeremy Elmore.

So anyway, he's been listening for a little while and he's listened to all but five of the shows and he's getting on his wife's nerves. We hear this a lot when one spouse is sort of annoyed that doesn't listen about the other one getting smart. And I think everyone just needs to start taking care of business in the household. What does that mean? Get the other spouse on board. Get them listening.

That way you can circumvent this defense mechanism of feeling threatened. And so that's what his wife does. She's like, yeah, yeah, I know what you learned from Chuck and Josh, like just listen. So he goes on to say, the great thing about the show is you two are very relatable to me a couple of years younger than Josh. So I love hearing about your childhood stories from G.I. Joe, adolescent shoplifting and Dungeons and Dragons, going to panic shows, watching Seinfeld and now marriage.

I feel like I've grown up with you guys. So I want to send you something. My father is where it gets good. Is Larry Elmore, he's a freelance artist who used to paint for TSR and D&D. Yeah. So like the blog post that you used, that was his father's artwork. Yeah, the blog post. I wrote a blog post on it, right?

Yeah. On D&D being satanic. Yeah. And that was like, just by chance, this dude's father. His name is Larry Elmore. Like I said, he, DragonCon and D&D have been mentioned on your podcast before and it made me want to send you something. So he has a 20 years art of art book.

I can't wait to get this. I can't either. It came out a decade ago, but it's still really cool and I want you both to have one. He has a new one coming out in August as well. So consider this a plug, I guess. He has already personalized them for me for you guys and I need to know how to get them to you. That is so cool.

It is very cool. He asked me, this is even cooler because he asked who they were for. He explained it to Pops and now he is listening to the show. In his studio while he's illustrating. So by the time this comes out, hopefully Larry Elmore is listening to the podcast about D&D. What's up Larry Elmore? So all that, he was like one of the first, or maybe the first artists early on when they

did this. He was definitely an early one because the illustration that I used from the 1983 edition of the basic set. So he would have, yeah, that's pretty early. Well I went to his website and looked at his art and all those iconic images that I remember were him. That's really, I can't wait to get that book. Yeah, it's very cool.

So thank you Jeremy Elmore in Louisville and thank you Larry. And that was it. Yeah, thanks to you both. If you want to send us something, especially if your dad is an inadvertent idol of Chuck's in mind. Agreed. We want to hear from you. So you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com and then why not just go see if we're sitting in our home on the web. On the couch, maybe watching a little TV, that home is called StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Jackthreads.com. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off.

The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hola, qué tal, mi gente. It's Chiquis from Chiquis and Chill Podcast. Welcome to the show. I talk about anything and everything. I did have a miscarriage when I was 19 years old. And that's why I'm a firm believer and an advocate of therapy and counseling. The person that you saw on stage, the person that you saw in interviews, that was my mother, offstage.

Acompanyame every Monday on my podcast, Chiquis and Chill, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.