On the 50th Birthday of Dungeons & Dragons

     According to historian, Jon Peterson, the birthday of Dungeons & Dragons is somewhere around late January or early February, which would put today as some time during the celebratory period. I mean why wouldn't we spend a few weeks celebrating a game that has impacted millions of people and spawned an entirely new form of entertainment.

While Dungeons & Dragons has been around longer than I have been alive, my own foray into this incredible hobby is just a scant 23 years old. I didn't start with TSR's rules, and I actively dislike THAC0 when I encountered it in Bioware's Baldur's Gate. So I never played any stripe of Basic or Expert, either of the editions of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and definitely not OD&D, though I do have a short story about that edition that I'll share at the end.

In late 2001, my friends and I started playing Magic the Gathering with the start of the Odyssey block. This meant we would routinely go to our local game store on Saturdays to play in Type 2 tournaments (or Standard as it's called now). Playing Magic and learning about the wider world of nerdy hobbies was how I was slowly introduced to this hobby that would transform my life for the better part of the next quarter-century. I was talking with two of my friends, one of whom moved away and the other who is in a Dungeon Crawl Classics game I run, about when the three of us started with D&D, and the closest we could nail down was somewhere in 2002, maybe 2003. Having memories of my first magic set helped, but we just kind of said "Hey what's this D&D thing?" and tried it. I know we started with 3rd edition and our first adventure was the free PDF The Burning Plague (note: the linked file is no longer free.) Like a lot of first-time adventurers, our party met a quick and ignoble end at the hands of some pesky kobolds that we had alerted to our presence by triggering a trap. No I did not remember the trap, but I do remember the Kobolds being ready for us, and went back and checked the adventure to see what could have caused that. Regardless of our deaths, we were hooked.

Over the years, I have dabbled in other systems and many, many failed campaigns, but thinking about the influence D&D has had on culture and entertainment, I can't help think about the influence of people that got me into the game, and the people I've brought in by running games throughout high school, college, and even a weekly game at work with colleagues. Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop roleplaying games have been around for half a century and will probably outlast us all, but as long as I'm here, I plan on rolling dice, fighting dragons, and pretending to be an elf.

P.S. - When I was originally drafting this post up, first one on this blog, I teased an OD&D story that I thought might have had a few more paragraphs between them, but here's my story about how I nearly came into possession of the brown box. So when I was a junior or senior in high school, a small game store/old toys/comics shop opened up about a block and a half from me. I discovered a copy of Holmes Basic for about 3 or 4 dollars, much cheaper than what those books command now, as this was long before the collector's market drove the price on these books through the roof. 

The aforementioned Holmes Basic book.

While browsing their glass case of Magic cards, minis, and more rare things, I noticed the OD&D Brown Box being sold $100. The only thing was the box was missing 3 pages. I don't remember the pages, but otherwise the box was complete. I mostly had control of my money, but I was still a minor and my parents had to give tacit approval for purchases over like $20. So I asked my mom if she was alright if I purchased this box. She asked if it was complete and I told her it was missing a few pages and she vetoed it. In the end, I probably wouldn't have played it, and it probably would have sat on a shelf somewhere unused, but some place I could flip through it when I wanted to think about how the game evolved.