The following roundtable discussion regarding role-playing and Dungeons and Dragons is from Hobart 9, the Games issue.

Hobart #9, Games

The Hobart Role-Playing Forum
With Ryan Boudinot, Jeffrey Brown, Paul LaFarge, John Roderick, and conducted by Matthew Simmons

So, first, would you mind describing your initial encounters with role-playing? Age? Who introduced the hobby/lifestyle/obsession into your life? Was it a fantasy game? What attracted you?

Next, look back at the games that you played, and the characters you tended to create for yourself. Any themes running through them?

And consider the kind of work you do now—the creative work. Any link?

Ryan Boudinot: I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons by my friend David Reed when I was about 7 years old. They had the first edition with all the gloriously horrible illustrations. I got the edition where they briefly attempted to supplant dice with these chintzy little numbered pieces of cardboard. I remember D&D having a profound impact on me right away. I was starting to write more stories and identify myself as a writer, and it seemed such a natural extension of those initial steps into fiction. David’s mom was an artist, and she painted his lead figures and made these incredible maps and designed really fantastic adventures. D&D spread throughout my peer group virulently.

The character I remember most was a half-elf monk named Mik. I subscribed to Dragon magazine, and there was always this ad in the back for a service that “professionally” illustrated your characters for you. You were supposed to fill out a form, send them $10 and an extra buck if you wanted the illustration laminated. I believe I sent my $11 in cash to this outfit so they’d illustrate Mik. A few weeks later I received my laminated 8 1/2 by 11 illustration of the buffest half-elf monk you could imagine (He had 18 strength). I was totally impressed. In retrospect he looked kind of like Leif Garrett with a mustache.

Role playing games are a great way to train future novelists. First, you’re either creating characters or creating the worlds those characters live in. I’d guess that the other guys you’re interviewing gravitated, like I did, to being Dungeon Masters. I loved designing dungeons, drawing all the traps and passages on my dad’s engineering graph paper. And my own first forays into writing novels in sixth and seventh grade were informed by what I’d learned designing worlds as a DM.

Second, the game requires a commitment to something on-going. The aspect of continuation, of the possibility of committing yourself to characters or a world for literally years I think helped me later on when writing longer work.

John Roderick: I read The Hobbit and started playing Dungeons and Dragons in the fall of 1980 when I started the seventh grade at Wendler Junior High in Anchorage, AK. I moved to a new school district and gravitated toward a motley group of smart-alecky boys who sat reading science fiction in the back of French I. This was a pivotal time, those first few months of seventh grade, when the course of my life would be determined. For instance, it was clear that I needed to choose between The Lord of the Rings and Dune, and I chose TLOTR. No regrets. Star Trek and Star Wars? Well, Star Wars, clearly. It was also apparent that girls were getting boobs and that you could eschew both The Lord of the Rings AND Dune and choose to talk to girls instead, but no one I knew seriously considered that option.

Mrs. Elzey was our French teacher, one of those women who went to France on her honeymoon in 1956 and became a lifelong Francophile without ever actually learning French, or anything else about France, other than that it was romantic in 1956. She gave us all French names, (I was Jean-Pierre), and then showed us a bunch of basic language films where men in striped shirts rode bicycles and women with red lipstick carried French bread in baskets. We sci-fi boys pored over the Monster Manual in the back of the room by the dim light of the film projector while Mrs. Elzey dozed. My two fellow D&D pals were my new best friend Kevin H., who was almost ten months older, feathered his hair, and had lived in England, and Mike M., who was myopic and skinny and had a bowl-cut like me. Mike had studied the Dungeon Master’s Guide and understood at least the basic arcana of the game, making him the Dungeon Master by default, but we all shared in a love of magic rings, enchanted swords, and cloaked horsemen. We also liked Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple IIe.

I hardly bothered to learn how the game was played but spent hours looking at the pictures in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. All those rules and tables, it was like a college actuarial class. Besides, I understood role-playing games intuitively, instinctively. I was already role-playing every day, everywhere I went, daydreaming my life away. Roll some dice, make up a character, then sit around drinking pop and fighting imaginary battles with Orcs. I could do it!

Of course my characters would all be magic-user elves with a Chaotic-Good alignment. That went without saying. I couldn’t imagine why you would make a human character, or worse, a half-orc or something, when you could be an elf. Likewise why would you be a thief or a paladin when you could be a magic-user? These choices were as written in my DNA as my eye-color, and it was never more true than when picking an alignment. Chaotic-Good seemed to represent my core beliefs more accurately than any description I’d heard before, and I went out into the world Chaotic-Good from then on, and to this day.

We played Dungeons and Dragons together only a few times, and then I dropped out of the game. The dice-rolling and book-consulting and tabulating that made up the lion’s share of game play was the absolute polar opposite of role-playing adventuring, in my estimation. Who cares how many hit-points your character has? Surely those fascinating multi-sided dice could be put to better use than determining the percentage chance of an arrow hitting your thigh. I continued to study the books, and to fiddle with the magic dice, long after I would never consider actually playing the game. I still have all that stuff today.

No, the real magic of D&D for me was the introduction to the idea that other people were interested in fantasy, in that parallel universe where the supernatural and actual dwell side by side. That wasn’t to say that I necessarily wanted to share in that fantasy world with others, but having my own fantasy world endorsed by popular culture took some of the stigma away. I didn’t need the “structure” of a game, or the pre-imagined world of a novel, film, or TV show to shape my fantasies, but I was relieved to discover that the world was full of nerdy dreamers.

Jeffrey Brown: I became a fantasy/sci-fi geek fairly early on in life, guided by my love of Star Wars and following the footsteps of my oldest brother who was an avid reader of fantasy novels and was playing Dungeons & Dragons early on. Somewhere around fifth grade I started reading Tolkien, and it wasn’t long before I myself was playing D&D as well as MERP (Middle Earth Role-Playing). I think I actually spent more time creating characters and scenarios and drawing pictures of both than I did actually playing the games. I leaned heavily toward the brooding, edgy Ranger class, shying away from the extremes of brute strength (barbarians) or intellect (wizards). I mostly wanted to make bad-ass characters that echoed my favorites in other media—Wolverine in superhero comics, Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe. Eventually playing D&D led us to collect and paint fantasy miniatures as well, and that in turn led us to the world of the UK miniatures game Warhammer. Although my friends and I still played role-playing games occassionally throughout high school, we became much more involved in playing Warhammer 40,000—a science fiction based tabletop battle game that indulged both our love of strategy and our artistic inclinations.

This love of ultra-violent and utterly nerdy games may seem surprising in comparison to the work I’m best known for, such as my first graphic novel Clumsy which routinely has the words sensitive, bittersweet, sappy, and touching batted around it. Then again, I’m also a fan of mixed martial arts, hockey, and loved playing football growing up. Somehow to me it all makes sense, and now that I’ve branched out a bit beyond autobiography in my comics work, I’ve had more opportunities to indulge in my sci-fi/fantasy roots, most recently in a one-page comic for the new Warhammer 40,000 licensed comics from Boom! Studios.

I figure someday that maybe these seemingly mismatched sides of myself—the role-playing nerd and the indie artist—will find some common context. For now I guess the only connection would be in the history of comics as a subculture paralleled to that of role-playing games, and the tendency of mainstream media to lump them together in the geek pot.

Paul LaFarge: My father gave me the Basic Dungeons & Dragons set when I was eight or nine years old. I know this because I still have the rulebook, the second edition, from November, 1978. I had never heard of Dungeons & Dragons; at that point almost no one had heard of it. My father had heard of it because he played wargames: simulations of the Battle of Gettysburg, or Chancelorsville, or, my favorite, the sea battle of Jutland, a game that required you to clear a substantial area of floor in order to maneuver tiny cardboard ships around. Anyway, he introduced me to the game, and at first we used to play together. He would let me be the Dungeon Master, and I would take great pleasure in killing his characters. I can’t imagine why.

For the next six years, I didn’t do much but play role-playing games. I remember some of the games, but what I remember most distinctly are the rulebooks. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, two hardcover volumes, with an illustration of steps leading down to a pinkish ocean on the back of … was it the Dungeon Master’s Guide? Traveller, three small-format softcover volumes, with dozens of supplemental books, all with the same black cover with a colored stripe across it. Paranoia, a dystopia so lethal your character came with five expendable clones: the rules were so entertaining you almost didn’t have to play it. Aftermath, a game of post-apocalyptic survival, which had so many rules, I may never have played it at all. Top Secret with its collage of handguns and foreign money on the cover. Space Opera, two black rulebooks, 8 & 1/2 x 11”. Picture of a cat in a space suit on the cover, I think. Even now, I can feel the excitement of opening one of those rulebooks, the almost unbearable promise of all the things that could happen in the game, and not only the promise but the mechanism of their happening, which made all those impossible things seem somehow real.

Now I write books. Is there a connection? Probably, probably.