Remember when you were young, and Dungeons and Dragons did your world-building for you?
Well, maybe you don't, but I know there has got to be a reader or two out there who understands: those fantasy-gaming books gave you endless ideas about what could happen in a shared, participatory fantasy universe.
Sure, they offered a few guidelines about what probably wouldn't happen, too. They were rule-books, after all. But in the end, they were just suggestions.
So that was just it: anything could happen. It was up to the Dungeon Master, and sometimes the Dungeon Master was you.
* * *
I played during the era of the first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D) rulebooks. I had quite a few of them: all 15 hardcovers and over a hundred modules and guidebooks.
It was the crudity of the illustrations that makes me recall that edition with such fondness. I never purchased any of the later editions (I think they're selling the fourth edition now). When I flip through the latest offerings at the bookstore, well, the rules seemed just as complex and earnest, sure, but the art has evolved into this slick, glossy, and soul-less illustration style, and it puts me off so badly I can't read enough to discover how other things have changed. (That, and I don't have the time to get into D&D again at this age.)
But I do notice that the game designers seem to have shifted their focus away from the role playing and more towards game boards and miniatures. It looks too much like playing a board game. What I liked most about AD&D was closing your eyes and listening to the Dungeon Master, absorbing yourself in the story to the point where you inhabit the body of your character in that world, and then rolling some dice with the sense that there were definite consequences to the results.
And because those illustrations were such crude line-drawings, they merely hinted at what you had to build in the mind's eye. They didn't fill in too many details.
These later editions make characters and monsters look like slickly rendered cartoons; for some reason I can't take them seriously.
* * *
The Dragon's Club met every Wednesday at the community college, all ages welcome. About 14 years ago, a few years after I stopped playing regularly, I hauled my collection of first edition books over there hoping to dump the box on some enthusiastic collector for around $75. Of course no one who plays D&D carries that kind of money, so I ended up setting up a cafeteria table yard-sale style and spent the evening doling books out for a couple of dollars each. Lots of the younger kids had to wait for their parents to come pick them up before they could give me any money, so I had to stay late, but not too late.
I understand they talked about my visit for weeks, after. "There was this guy here with first edition stuff going back to the early 80s! He was letting it go for two dollars a book and lots of it was in mint condition!" I ended up making a lot more than $75 and had an unexpectedly good time hanging out with everyone.
It almost made me consider picking up the dice again.
But by the time I sold those books, the Magic the Gathering card game had grown into a behemoth that dominated most of the Dragons Club meetings. People weren't telling stories and building worlds at the tables any more. They were playing cards. Cards!
I've never been interested in card games. They have boring, inflexible rules. And "Magic" was crassly, if ingeniously, commercial: players had to keep buying and collecting cards in order to "build their deck" into something that gave them an advantage when they played. It was like baseball cards, on crack, for nerds. I wanted no part of it.
Besides, the artwork on those cards was even worse than the second edition rule-books.
Plus, I had a girlfriend by then. My D&D days were over.
* * *
But I had an unwarranted emotional flashback today that had me remembering them.
Summer vacation used to mean the freedom to write all I liked, and to go for long solitary walks where I could imagine I was exploring the Dragon Lance or Forgotten Realms campaign setting. I loved hiking the rutted trails through the woods that cars had not used in decades: I could imagine that these abandoned routes had never hosted anything more serious than a horse-drawn carriage, and that some filthy hamlet was waiting over the next hill (with a fully stocked tavern, armorer, and provisioner, of course), and that every hill might be warrened with miles and miles of tunnels and chambers, and plenty of treasure to gather if you were strong enough to fight and had enough potions on hand to survive your wounds.
Then my walks would carry me out to the power lines where I could contemplate the warring wizards who had built all these mysterious towers (if you squinted and let your head play with perspective, they looked big enough to live in, and miles apart) and contemplate about their motivations and how many scrolls and gems they might be hoarding. Then I'd go home, write it all down, and quantify it into an adventure I could run my friends through when I rode my bike to their house the next day. (For a kid who played D&D, I was in pretty good shape.)
It was a dorky way to spend the summers, but it was rich in stories and in metaphor, too.
* * *
Metaphors: I loved the idea that wizards studied hard every night to memorize spells, and that the knowledge of those spells wove patterns in their brains, and those patterns harnessed energy in different ways (from the raw blast of a "fireball" to the subtle domination of a "charm person"). Then, when they cast the spell and the energy was discharged, the information they gained from studying was forgotten until they studied it again. I liked the idea that casting a spell was this draining thing, this exercise of mental muscle. I liked the idea that as you got smarter and gained power, the simpler spells drained you less, and more powerful levels of magic opened up to you.
Wizard magic was wild and hallucinatory, but it had an elegant logic to it which, as a piano student, I really understood. (Playing a piece of music is draining, but the more times you study and perform a piece the easier it gets.)
As I watch my mother-in-law succumbing to Alzheimer's disease I'm reflecting on wizard-magic again. What vast powers has she unleashed throughout her life, that the patterns in her mind now un-weave the way they do? Why can't she just crack open her spell-book and study to get those powers back again?
Probably because she misplaced the damn thing, is why.
Anyway, I liked that wizards started out their lives weak and vulnerable--practically useless, able to cast just one low calibur spell a day--but as they gained power and experience they came to dominate the game with magic like "fly," "polymorph other," "flesh to stone" (and its rather nauseating reversal spell), until they mastered the ultimate power-fantasy, "wish."
I rarely played wizard characters, though, because you had to earn a lot of experience points before you gained the levels that granted that kind of power. D&D was all about levels, and a 30th level wizard represented a lot more accumulated experience points than a warrior or a thief.
And frankly I didn't have the patience to stay with any one character all that long. That's probably why I usually volunteered to Dungeon Master. For some reason I did have the patience to draw elaborate maps and type up 60 page adventure modules detailing the contents of every chamber and clearing, including many that players might never discover. (Lord, how one hopes the die-roll allows one's players to discover this or that secret door. That's why so many DMs roll their dice behind a screen. They need to bend the laws of probability here and there when the story demands it.)
* * *
I wonder, now, what it would take to bring that sense of obsessive passion, joy and wide-eyed discovery that motivated me to write page after page of gaming material to more "serious" writing pursuits?
"Serious?" Maybe that's the problem. I'm taking the whole process too seriously. Consider:
- I don't have to invent a universe whole-cloth. Why not borrow wizards and elves and rogues if I want to--enough other folks are doing it. (Well, I'm not really interested in writing a fantasy novel, but maybe I could loosen up with some fan-fic.
- The prospect of sharing a story with a small group of three to five friends used to be more then enough to get me excited about fleshing out this or that villain, monster, or plot-twist. So maybe a bit of collaboration on my writing projects might get them feeling fresh and exciting again.
- I'm not out to change the world. That small audience of three to five is enough to consider when I'm pounding the typewriter. A few interesting folks in a rich-enough world will find enough ways to get themselves into trouble if I can just learn to sit back and let it happen.
- I do have a day-job. Rather than lamenting the time that eats up, why not embrace the editorial freedom granted by the fact that I'm just doing this for fun (instead of watching TV or playing video games.) Paying my own bills does grant the freedom to around in here having fun with my typewriters.
So: embracing terrible fiction in the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons. How's that for a resolution for the Fall?
Or maybe I should just apply to get a job with these guys.
(Don't tell them what I think of their artwork!)