Editor’s note: This story is presented in a choose-your-own-path style. If you happen to have a D20 on hand, feel free to roll for your choices.
In 1984, when I was 11 years old, a friend told me about something new, something exciting. He urged me to try it.
He struggled to explain exactly what it was he was talking about, and I didn’t really understand what had so fired his enthusiasm. But that enthusiasm was unmistakable, so I tried it. And I loved it.
The exciting thing wasn’t a band or a drug. It was a new kind of game. It would go on to consume most of my spare income and most of my spare time for the rest of my teenage years. Even today, barely a day goes past without my finding, in some small manner, a way to indulge this old passion.
Yet things might have turned out very differently. I would probably never have heard of the game if it hadn’t been thrust into the spotlight by a surreal drama in 1979. That drama began, as many do, with a phone call.
Roll an 18 or higher. Or to find out more about the phone call, continue to GENIUS. Roll a 17 or lower. Or to read more about my own experiences, continue to ADDICTED.
GENIUS
William Dear was a celebrity private detective — dashing, moustachioed, sporting a vast gold ring, a star with his own private plane. He dealt in a world of thrills and terrors.
The call he received in August 1979 would start one of his most infamous cases. It was from an acquaintance whose nephew, Dallas, had disappeared while taking a course at Michigan State University. The young man, said the boy’s uncle, wasn’t the type of teenager to simply run away. “In fact, he’s considered to be a genius.”
Dallas — full name James Dallas Egbert the Third — was a prodigy who had entered college at the age of 14. He was 16 now and a sophomore. He’d been missing for eight days. Could William Dear help?
He could. Dear put together a team of investigators, including an expert pilot and a sniper, he later recounted in his 1984 memoir, The Dungeon Master. To look into the disappearance, the group brought telephoto lenses, bugging devices, tracking systems and spy cameras. They had to be ready for anything.
As Dear’s team asked questions around campus, it quickly emerged that Dallas was depressed, isolated and questioning his sexuality. He had a drug habit and was clearly at risk of self-harm. The most plausible explanation for Dallas’s disappearance was that he had either run away or died by suicide.
After briefly musing that perhaps “the gays” might have something to do with Dallas’s disappearance, Dear sensed that perhaps something more uncanny might be going on. He wondered if Dallas had disappeared because of a game.
Dallas’s friends told Dear and his investigators about this game. Apparently, it was played by hundreds of students in the tunnels beneath the campus. Michigan’s upper-Midwestern winters are bitterly cold, so the campus is undergirded by a network of heated subterranean tunnels. The game played there was mysterious, intellectual — “you can’t play if you’re a dumb-ass”, one student told the investigators — and Dallas loved it. It was called Dungeons & Dragons.
But what was this strange game, Dear asked himself, encountering the same confusion that I felt five years later, when a friend tried to describe it to me. And could it be the reason for Dallas’s sudden disappearance?
Roll a 14 or lower. Or to find out more about Dear’s investigations, continue to PUZZLEMENT. Roll a 15 or higher. Or to follow my own experiences with the game, continue to ADDICTED.
PUZZLEMENT
William Dear decided that his investigations would be well served by whipping up a frenzy of media interest. This mysterious new game seemed like a great hook for the newspapers. Dear told journalists that he suspected Dallas’s disappearance was something to do with Dungeons & Dragons, played down in the campus tunnels. They lapped it up.
The New York Times, for example, told readers that Dallas might “have become lost in the tunnels, which carry heat to campus buildings, while playing an elaborate version of a bizarre intellectual game called Dungeons and Dragons”.
But when it came to describing the game, coverage was often as vague as Dallas’s friends’ description. Beyond it being “intellectual” and “bizarre”, specifics were few. Dungeons & Dragons was a blank canvas, on to which parents, reporters and celebrity detectives could project any anxiety.
In that vacuum, rumours grew. Apparently, players sometimes wore costumes. Apparently, a “dungeon master” led quests around the tunnels, in the scalding heat and the darkness and the stench. Apparently, players would sometimes have to put their hand into crevices, and they might find a rotting calf’s liver in there or spoiled spaghetti, standing in for orc brains. Or they might find a treasure.
Apparently, there were more than a hundred “dungeons” in the campus area. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. Dear didn’t either. But since he was an investigator, he was going to investigate. He called a hobby store, got the contact details of one of these so-called dungeon masters and offered him $50 to drop everything, come to his hotel room with a friend, and initiate Dear in the game’s mysteries. Sixty bucks if it was good. Back in 1979, that was a lot of money.
“I didn’t know what to expect from my dungeon master,” Dear wrote in his book. “Would he show up in a Merlin costume, with a funny pointed cap . . .? Would he be dressed as some authority figure . . . [like] a god?”
When the young man knocked on the door, he and his friend were both wearing jeans, sweaters and sneakers. And rather than leading Dear into the tunnels to grope for old liver, he pulled out a pencil and paper, some books and some dice. They all sat down. The adventure was about to begin.
Roll a 17 or lower. Or to read about my own experiences with Dungeons & Dragons, continue to ADDICTED. Roll an 18 or higher. Or to find out where this strange game came from, continue to BRAUNSTEIN.
ADDICTED
The activity which so enthused my friend was a game called Tunnels & Trolls (T&T), an early Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) imitator. T&T was simpler and less serious and had the advantage that it could be played solo through choose-your-own-path books, a little like this article. I quickly grabbed every solo game book I could find.
Both D&D and T&T are role-playing games, a social pastime which defies easy explanation. In a role-playing game, or RPG, you take the part of a character who may well be quite unlike you, in a world very different from your own. You sit at a table with friends who are playing as their own fictional characters. You interact with each other and with the situations dreamt up for you by the person “running” the game, variously called the dungeon master, the referee or the game master.
The game master describes the setting, plays all the minor characters and arbitrates any rules questions. The players are usually playing together, facing challenges set for them by the game master, but the game master is not playing against the players. If role-playing games were dinner parties, the game master would be the host. If they were treasure hunts, the game master would hide the prize and write the clues. If they were amateur dramatic performances, the game master would be the producer, director and scriptwriter. Role-playing games contain elements of all of those things and much more.
I quickly introduced all my friends to the game, and it became a constant presence in my life. When I wasn’t playing games with them, I’d be playing solo, reading books about gaming, or drawing my own maps and designing my own settings. Much like Dallas Egbert, I was hooked.
Roll a 14 or lower. Or to explore the origins of role-playing games, read BRAUNSTEIN. Roll a 15 or higher. Or to read about William Dear’s first game of D&D, read FANTASY.
BRAUNSTEIN
The time, 1969. The place, St Paul, Minnesota. A young physics graduate named David Wesely was a founder of the Twin Cities Military Miniatures Group — a war-gaming club, in which players re-enacted historical battles on a realistic miniature battlefield littered with miniature figurines.
Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, was a war-gamer. So was HG Wells. War games can be used for serious military training. Kriegsspiel was developed by the Prussian Army in the 19th century to teach battlefield tactics to officers.
Wesely, who was in the US army reserves, was interested in these types of training exercises, during which making decisions over a tabletop battlefield might prepare a young officer for the real thing over in Vietnam. Rather than a restricted set of moves, as in chess, these training exercises were open-ended and unpredictable, just like war itself. Anything unexpected could be handled by the judgment of a referee.
In a war game set in 1806 in the fictional Prussian town of Braunstein, Wesely took this open-endedness to the next level. As with a normal war game, he put players in charge of Napoleon’s French army and the Prussian resistance. But then he assigned them rather more unusual roles.
One player, for example, was given the role of the chancellor of Braunstein’s university. What could he do? Well, he could attempt almost anything. He didn’t command any troops, but he could rally the students and urge them to join the resistance. Or he could challenge another player to a duel, perhaps over the affections of a lady. The outcome of attempting any manoeuvre was determined by the roll of a dice.
In response, the referee — Wesely — had to improvise. The experimental game was a chaotic series of whispered conferences between Wesely and the players. It took ages, and the French and the Prussians never even fired a shot. Not so much a war game as a phoney-war game. Wesely worried that it had been a flop, but the players loved it.
One of those players was Dave Arneson, who seized Wesely’s idea with both hands. In a follow-up game, set in a banana republic, Arneson started as a student revolutionary, but managed to convince the other players he was working for the CIA. He ran rings around them, not by rolling dice or pushing pieces around the map, but by acting the part and bluffing his way to success.
What Wesely and Arneson and the group had invented was a strange combination of a classical war game, a military training exercise and an improvised acting class. It came to be known as a role-playing game. Arneson joined forces with another war-gamer, Gary Gygax — a prolific writer and game designer — and, in 1974, the two of them published the first commercial role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons.
D&D was set in a Tolkien-tinged world of wizards, monsters and labyrinths. Its war-gaming roots explain the frequent use of battle maps, miniatures and tactical skirmishes. But with each player assuming the role of a fictional character, RPGs could easily become improvised dramas.
Variants immediately sprang up to explore the possibilities suggested by the new form. Call of Cthulhu was a horror game in which, if you ran it right, the players themselves would be frightened, while the fictional characters they played would often be driven mad by cosmic terrors. Traveller was a gritty sci-fi game of intergalactic trade. Soon there were games based on comics, books and movies: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, Middle-earth Role Playing, Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game. It was a new form of creativity, full of fresh ideas and fumbling experiments. And it was also, to the uninitiated, utterly baffling.
Roll a 12 or lower. Or to witness William Dear’s first encounter with D&D, continue to FANTASY. Roll a 13 or higher. Or to marvel at what Wesely, Arneson and Gygax unleashed, turn to AMUSED.
FANTASY
Sat at a hotel-room table, William Dear’s first gaming experience looked mundane. They weren’t in a deserted steam tunnel. There weren’t even any pointy hats. Dear, pretending to be a wizard named “Tor”, described what “Tor” was doing, while the dungeon master described the consequences.
In Dear’s imagination, Tor and his companion “Dan” got into various scrapes around a medieval town, scrambling through escape tunnels, bargaining with a powerful sorcerer, being taken prisoner by orcs and, finally, triumphing, thanks to a combination of bluff and cunning. The dungeon master simply described what they saw and, with the aid of a few dice rolls, determined whether their schemes succeeded or failed.
Dice, pencils, playing “let’s pretend” — it was all very tame. But Dear had a lot of fun. In fact, he worried that this game of the imagination might just be too much fun. Maybe, for a troubled mind, it could be dangerous. “Dallas might actually have begun to live the game, not just to play it,” wrote Dear in his memoir of the case. “Dungeons & Dragons could have absorbed him so much that his mind had slipped through the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy.”
Roll a 17 or lower. Or to discover the response to this idea, read the section titled PANIC. Roll an 18 or higher. Or to find out more about the creativity involved in role-playing, continue to AMUSED.
PANIC
Had Dallas vanished because he had started to believe that he really was a dragon-slaying wizard? The only thing more preposterous than William Dear’s theory was that everyone seemed to believe it. The idea became bigger than the story of Dallas’s disappearance, and the ensuing panic lasted much longer than the fleeting question of what actually happened to the boy.
Newspapers such as the San Francisco Examiner tried to get their heads around what the game actually was and how people played it. Words such as “cult” were often used to describe it.
Given this void of understanding, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that America fell into a moral panic, with evangelical groups seizing on the game’s use of monsters, spells and evil spirits to blame it for suicides and murders. Police chiefs warned parents about the game.
There are several reasons why Dungeons & Dragons may have provoked such fears. Dungeons & Dragons was and remains difficult to describe, and some versions of the game feature demons and cultists and witches, albeit as antagonists. Yet for many people, the unease must have been prompted by the context in which they first heard of the game. Dungeons & Dragons? Isn’t that the game that poor kid was playing when he disappeared?
There is no such thing as bad publicity, though. In specialist hobby stores, copies swiftly sold out. Random House signed a deal to distribute the game to booksellers across the country. According to the oral history podcast When We Were Wizards, the excitement over Dallas’s disappearance turned Dungeons & Dragons into “a cultural phenomenon”. (Other histories of the game, including Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World (2012) and David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men (2013), also note the importance of the Dallas case.)
The game briefly appears in ET, which was released in 1982 and, in the same year, in Mazes and Monsters, a TV movie inspired by the media frenzy over Dallas’s disappearance. In the latter, a young Tom Hanks plays a teenager who completely loses his grip on reality while playing a RPG — the fate that Dear imagined had befallen Dallas. The film is often thought to have been based on Dallas’s disappearance. In truth, it was based on Dear’s speculation, a very different thing.
Dallas’s disappearance turned out to have nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons. But it had everything to do with the game’s subsequent popularity. Without Dallas Egbert — and William Dear — I suspect that I would never have heard of role-playing games.
Roll a 16 or higher. Or to ponder D&D’s role in human creativity, turn to the section AMUSED. Roll a 15 or lower. Or to find out where gaming is today, read the section STRANGER.
AMUSED
The year after I first heard about role-playing games, the cultural critic Neil Postman published an influential book, titled Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985). Postman lamented the effect of television on the intellectual, cultural and political life of the United States. Adapting an idea from his teacher Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that “the medium is the metaphor” — that any communications medium from the spoken word to the written word to primetime TV subtly influenced the kind of ideas that could be communicated. Politics in a TV age, for example, favoured good looks and simple stories, hence the rise to power of a former cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan.
It’s easy to read Postman as a prophet of inevitable cultural decline, with each new medium stupider than the last. But decline is not inevitable. Consider how TV drama has been changed by the availability of subscription services and on-demand streaming.
TV producers used to have to assume that people would miss episodes, and so would produce simple episodic comedies and soap operas.
Now, writers and directors can reasonably expect that people will catch up on any episodes they missed, and so they offer us longer, more complex stories and character arcs. This isn’t the result of some sudden cultural hunger for more sophisticated storytelling, but of a change in the medium itself.
Not every new medium is an improvement, though. If Postman had foreseen reality TV and social media, two formats that thrive on manufactured outrage, he would not have been surprised by the way they enabled the rise of Donald Trump.
Movies invite us to value beauty and classic story arcs. Streaming TV drama valorises complex plots and character development. And reality TV thrives on attention-seeking and treachery. What then is the underlying metaphor of a role-playing game?
More than anything else, these games demand imagination. They’re almost always collaborative. And they’re active rather than passive.
If you sit back and watch, nothing happens.
You need to participate in, not just observe, the creativity of others.
An imaginative, collaborative and actively creative pastime doesn’t sound so bad to me. After all, we’re constantly being told of the importance of creativity — the “creative class”, the “creative economy”, or simply the need for every child to be creative in school. And yet when we actually see some creativity, we can’t quite comprehend what we’re looking at.
Roll a 6 or higher. Or to find out where gaming is today, read the section titled STRANGER. Roll a 5 or lower. Or to find out what happened to Dallas Egbert and William Dear, continue to FICTION.
STRANGER
Dungeons & Dragons has been celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and is mainstream these days. It featured in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. One of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed video games of the past decade, 2023’s Baldur’s Gate 3, is not only based on D&D rules, but it shows players every dice roll. And last year, D&D finally got the movie it deserves, Honor Among Thieves. Starring A-listers such as Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Hugh Grant, it made more than $200mn at the box office. Live-streamed games by groups such as Critical Role are hugely popular, and the list of celebrities who are reported to play the game is too long to summarise. Of course, you might well have played a game yourself.
Given where D&D came from and the fact that feature-creep has bloated the core rules to 1,000 pages or so — remember, “you can’t play if you’re a dumb-ass” — this is an astonishing state of affairs. We can thank geek culture and the fact that Wesely’s original Braunstein concept is creatively fertile and marvellously fun. And I can’t help feeling we should also offer grudging thanks to William Dear’s gifts for hyperbolic speculation.
Beyond the flagship product, the fringes of the role-playing hobby can rarely have been more vibrant. Modern games are diverse, stripped-down, even literary.
Blades in the Dark offers fast-moving heists. Masks has the players taking the roles of teenage superheroes, trying to grow into their powers and thwart evil, without earning the wrath of their parents or the school principal. Ribbon Drive invites each player to create a mixtape, and the group uses the music to inspire an improvised narrative about a road trip. There are MicroRPGs, which set out the premise and the rules in as little as one page. And there is a rich tradition of dusting off and replaying classic games from the 1970s and 1980s.
It is commonplace for players to adapt old games to new settings, to invent imaginary worlds and to write new rules systems from scratch. The hacker culture so celebrated in software is alive and well in pen-and-paper role-playing games. For example, during lockdown, I developed a new set of rules and a fantasy setting inspired by Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea novel, and ran it for my friends over Discord. (We role players didn’t have to resort to Zoom pub quizzes to stay in touch with our friends.) That might seem a daunting undertaking, but nobody batted an eyelid. Such creativity is the norm in this hobby.
As lockdown restrictions started to ease, I began running a game for my son and his classmates — then 10 years old, now 13. The reaction from the parents to such activities isn’t suspicion, but gratitude. I’m helping the children spend their time on something creative, collaborative and far away from glowing screens. Occasionally, I reflect that they are the same age that I was when I fell in love with the hobby and wonder if they, like I, will find that gaming sustains friendships over decades.
Games are as important a creative outlet to me as writing my books. More importantly, while not everyone is lucky enough to be able to publish a book, anyone can be creative in shaping their own game. As scapegoats for social evils go, the wholesome, imaginative and sociable pastime of D&D a particularly unlikely one.
Roll any number. Or to find out what happened to Dallas Egbert and William Dear, continue to FICTION.
FICTION
The case ended, as it began, with a phone call. When William Dear picked up the ringing phone in the small hours of September 13 1979, it was Dallas Egbert on the line. Dear’s media circus had succeeded in attracting the boy’s attention.
The true story was nothing like the hype. Dallas had been depressed, attempted suicide and then run away. Dear’s book attempts to portray a tense rescue, which on closer reading is simply two grown men knocking on the door of a rented room, to find a tearful teenage boy ready to go home. Some newspapers noted that Dallas had been found alive and well, but by then the circus had moved on.
Dear flourished, penning works such as OJ Is Innocent And I Can Prove It and appearing in the Fox Network documentary, Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? He died in July.
James Dallas Egbert, sadly, did not recover from his depression and took his life a year later. The isolated young man has been largely forgotten, along with the truth about what happened to him. His mother later told The New York Times, “It was never all that exciting. He just got on a bus and went as far as his money would take him.” Yet when Dear told the story, it was an unforgettable tale about the fragile barrier between reality and fantasy.
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