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Subject: [The Guardian] Dungeons & Dragons at 50: the collaborative fantasy
 role-playing game that builds you up
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2024 19:28:50 +0100
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Source: 
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/10/dungeons-and-dragons-at-50-the-collaborative-fantasy-roleplaying-game-that-builds-you-up

Dungeons & Dragons at 50: the collaborative fantasy role-playing game 
that builds you up

Once the centre of fear campaigns, the classic tabletop experience is 
now more popular than ever – and even Australian educators are rolling 
with it

by Jordyn Beazley and Rafqa Touma
Sat 9 Mar 2024 20.00 CET
Last modified on Sun 10 Mar 2024 03.52 CET

Brock the barbarian is a 2-metre (6ft 6in) tall loveable gruff. “He’s an 
idiot, but he wants to do well,” explains 25-year-old Zach Anderson, who 
is 12cm (5in) shorter than Brock. “He’s very extroverted and I’m very 
introverted.”

Via Brock, Anderson has broken out of his shy nature to go on all manner 
of adventures. Once, he slew a dragon.

Brock is not real, of course. He is a character Anderson – who lives in 
Sydney – made up six months ago to roleplay in the tabletop game 
Dungeons & Dragons. “It’s been a way to think … if I could be this 
character, how would I act? And by doing that, it’s weird, I’ve noticed 
I’m a lot more outgoing than I used to be. I’m a lot more confident.”
Luke Breen is the owner ond founder of Dungeon Master for Hire out of 
Melbourne, posing behind a figure of a dragon and a 20-sided dice
‘It is very freeform and allows people to be creative,’ says Luke Breen, 
a professional DM (dungeon master or game runner). Photograph: 
Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

Dungeons & Dragons – affectionately known as D&D – is celebrating its 
50th anniversary in 2024. Dragged through the mud in the 1980s, when 
critics argued it was a gateway to devil worshipping and the media 
connected it to murders and suicides, the game has surged back into 
popularity and popular culture in recent years.

Its appeal is perhaps best captured by one of its creators, Gary Gygax , 
who once said: “All of us at times feel a little inadequate at dealing 
with the modern world – it would feel much better if we knew we were a 
superhero or a mighty wizard.”
Freeform creativity

American game designers Gygax and David Arneson released the tabletop 
game Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. But its life began earlier, in 1970, 
when Gygax lost his insurance job and began creating war games based on 
famous battles to play with friends. That evolved into the medieval game 
D&D, which drew on Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

The aim of the role-playing game is not necessarily to win, but rather 
for players to immerse themselves in an imagined fantasy world with 
their friends and work together to solve quests. The storyteller, 
referred to as the dungeon master (DM), sets the loose parameters of the 
adventure, choosing from an already set adventure or making up their own.

Unlike a video game, where rules dictate a limited range of choices from 
a set of options, each player contributes to the flow and shape of the 
game based on a character they create or choose – from a sneak thief, a 
sorcerer or, in Anderson’s case, a barbarian. Players essentially act as 
their characters, speaking as them, making decisions, all while 
referring to their “character sheet” – a set of attributes and 
statistics that informs how the character will respond to the situations 
laid out before them. The roll of a dice – modified by those stats – 
determines the success of that choice.

“It is very freeform and really encourages people to be creative,” says 
Luke Breen, who began playing D&D in 2014 on a whim and four years later 
started a business connecting groups of players to professional DMs. 
“Playing together, sitting around a table and just having fun, allows 
you to escape for a couple of hours.”
Overhead shot of multiple die lit moodily from above on top of a map
Roll for initiative … players and DMs say D&D stretches creative muscles 
and encourages socialising. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian

D&D’s reach over the past 50 years is immense. American games publisher 
Wizards of the Coast, which acquired the game in 1997, estimates 50 
million people have played worldwide.

The game is usually played in private homes but the number of public 
events for D&D fans has been growing. In Australia last year, 5,000 
people attended an event listed on Eventbrite – five times more than in 
2019.

On a recent Sunday in Sydney, 60 people spend the day inside a mock 
medieval tavern, with iron chandeliers hanging overhead and melodic 
lutes playing on speakers. The game is run at gaming centre Fortress in 
Chippendale which has held weekly D&D sessions since April 2023 that are 
growing in popularity.

Nearly every week one of the many D&D tables has been overseen by 
dungeon master Rose Herden, 34, who began playing during lockdown in 
2020 and found it was the perfect way to connect socially during the 
pandemic. It also stretches creative muscles that often aren’t exercised 
in her job as a cyber security expert.

Herden works with an artist who creates figurines using 3D printing. She 
then paints them herself to fit each new storyline.

“Every week my husband and I are up late hand-painting everything ready 
for the game,” she says. “It’s collaborative escapism, so the world I’ve 
built goes where the characters want to take it.”

In the middle of the table is a miniature set depicting a medieval 
tavern (a tavern within a tavern). Today’s story revolves around a 
magical mariachi band that makes people fall in love, performing a 
sold-out show on Valentine’s Day.

“I’m an elk hunter-ranger,” says one player at Herden’s table, 
introducing their D&D character. “I’m a sucker for myths and legends and 
trying to divulge whether they’re true or not, and I’ve heard a rumour 
about this band making people fall in love so I’ve come to find out if 
it’s true or not.”

Will DM for rent

The first release of Dungeons & Dragons was a cardboard box with three 
stapled pamphlets and some reference sheets. It was developed on a 
US$2,000 budget but has since grown into a global empire. More 
sophisticated and intricate editions have been released over the decades.

The game was adapted for the big screen in 2023, with John Francis Daley 
and Jonathan Goldstein’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, with 
the Guardian calling the film a “riotously enjoyable fantasy adventure”. 
An earlier 2000 movie was less well received, while the 80s D&D animated 
series was also, well, of its era.

In the game’s early days, the average D&D player was a “young white man 
of a certain age”, says Prof Lisa Given, an RMIT expert in information 
science. But the realm of D&D fans has now expanded.
A hand holding a small model snowman-yeti creature with other minitures 
out-of-focus in the foreground

Part of the pull, Given says, has been the fantasy genre expanding its 
audiences through tentpole releases like the Lord of the Rings movies or 
HBO’s Game of Thrones adaption. D&D is also front and centre in 
Netflix’s Stranger Things, where fan-favourite characters use monsters 
and theories from the game to understand mysterious forces at play in 
their hometown.

Given says D&D’s increasing popularity is also linked to the mainstream 
now viewing previously outcast nerds as cool. “We’ve got so many in the 
younger generations who are embracing different ways of being and 
neurodivergency,” she says.

“I think there’s a real inclusiveness in this where people are free to 
express themselves in a whole range of ways,” the academic adds, 
pointing at the game’s communal nature. “Escaping is so often escaping 
into our own heads – reading a book, watching a movie, playing a video 
game – so this is different.”

As the game has grown, so has professional dungeon mastering. Matt 
Brown, who lives in Melbourne, started playing D&D a decade ago with a 
group of friends when he was 21. Later he discovered the allure of being 
a DM, drawn in by the ability to create worlds and narratives.
Matt Brown in Melbourne sitting behind a Dungeon Master’s board with a 
microphone

Brown now works full-time as a DM – both online and table-top – after 
making D&D content on YouTube and Twitch since 2017. Brown says there 
was a shift to playing online during Covid when dedicated progams like 
Forge and Roll20 emerged to facilitate virtual tabletops.

His DM work started snowballing and it is “paying the rent now,” Brown 
says. “It is very surreal.”
Therapy with orcs

The game hasn’t avoided controversy. In 1982, US woman Patricia Pulling 
failed in an attempt to sue D&D’s makers after her son, a D&D player, 
killed himself. She later formed the campaign group Bothered About 
Dungeons and Dragons (BADD), believing the game was connected to 
suicides and devil worshipping.

Nick Issa, who started playing D&D when he was 10 and is now a high 
school English teacher in Australia’s capital, Canberra, recalls the 
moral panic in the 1990s when he used to play the game for entire weekends.

“I remember we were planning to have this session, and one guy called me 
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