How Dungeons & Dragons went mainstream

In the final episode of the high school television comedy-drama weird and nerdy, titled “Discos and Dragons”, nerdy teenager Sam Weir (played by John Francis Daley) is fed up. “I’m tired of being called a geek,” he complains to his friends. “I mean, what’s so brilliant about us, anyway?” We are just boys. Then, with perfect comedic timing, his equally nerdy friend Harris (Stephen Lea Sheppard) approaches him in the school corridor and announces, “Gentlemen. Good news! New Dungeons & Dragons manual. “Gods and Demigods”. Let’s have fun on Friday night!”

Criminally canceled in 2000 after only one season, weird and nerdy it was perhaps the most accurate on-screen representation of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy tabletop RPG at the time. For a long time, D&D, with its fantasy tropes, pretty girls, intricate magic, multi-sided dice, and dull, maze-like rules, seemed to be the preserve of geeks. Culture was strictly delineated. Choose a path and follow it: are you a jock or a nerd? geeks and Greeks He cleverly proved a truism that has been true for some time, that Dungeons & Dragons is not for nice people. Harris’ D&D handbook also could have included a caveat: Leave the street credit, whoever enters.

Yet now it’s 2023, with a $150 million blockbuster adaptation, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Thievesconfidently entering multiplexes, playing one of Hollywood’s Four Chrises (Pine, to be clear), confidently rivaling greatest blockbusters, and in a beautiful piece of Karmic Symmetry, co-directed by John Francis Daley, coming full circle which had opened two decades earlier In weird and nerdy. (Daley also reunited with fellow geeks, actors Martin Starr and Samm Levine, for a honor among thieves promotion. How did it happen? How did a fringe hobby for the socially inept and a long-standing cheap and easy joke for the disreputable become part of the zeitgeist? Like geeks – like The Simpsons McBain once said it in his movie ‘Undercover Nerd’: Inherit the earth?

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I started my first Dungeons & Dragons campaign in 2017. I wasn’t alone. That year saw the most players in the game’s history: between 12 and 15 million in North America alone, according to the game’s publishers, Wizards Of The Coast. However, it has been a long and arduous quest to reach this climax. Created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, as a fantasy alternative to their Napoleonic wargame hobby, Dungeons & Dragons enjoyed early success, with over three million reported players by 1981. It became immortal in mainstream pop culture with an appearance in Steven Spielberg. Masterpiece from 1982 And the alien, in a scene where Elliott is desperate to join his older brother’s campaign. (“You don’t win,” a character in the film rightly points out. “It’s like life. You don’t win in life.”

D&D quickly became beloved and formative among teenagers and youngsters of a certain nerdy temperament. Mais la «panique satanique» des années 1980 a effrayé de nombreux parents nerveux, et un lent déclin du jeu a suivi, avec son éditeur de l’époque, TSR, au bord de la faillite au milieu des années 90. En 1997, Wizards Of The Coast a acquis le jeu. , et au milieu des années 2000, a mis à jour ses règles obscures pour introduire la populaire cinquième édition du jeu, connue des joueurs under the nom de « 5e », here a simplifié une grande partie de l’infrastructure plus compliquée du jeu. Le jeu a également été rendu plus accessible grâce à une license de jeu ouverte, qui a permis aux joueurs de créer de nouvelles expériences sur table en utilisant des mécanismes D&D, ouvrant les vannes pour des campagnes “faites casa”.

Meanwhile, the advent of streaming sites like Twitch quickly found a huge audience for countless campaigns and enabled series like critical role AND oxventura earn millions of fans. Community AND Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon started playing D&D during his live shows in Harmontown, later adapting those games into three seasons of the semi-animated harmonic search series. Solid idols like Joe Manganiello and Vin Diesel quickly became highly visible supporters of the game, providing a counterweight to the common stereotype that D&D was purely for kiddies with no friends. (It’s also important to note that women make up 40 percent of D&D players, according to a recent survey.) And then in 2016, the year before D&D peaked, Strange things he was freed

The impact of Strange things You can’t ignore Netflix’s biggest hit at the time, and still the second greatest original show of all time, it was quite a cultural phenomenon, especially among its target audience. Having young heroes not only play the board game in the series, but also borrow key D&D terminology for their supernatural enemies (the Demogorgon, Shadow Monster, Mind Flayer, and Vecna​​were all borrowed in game) was huge. The show even tackled satanic panic in Season 4, with Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) criticizing the game’s demonization (“It’s enforced conformity!” he says, in the episode “The Hellfire Club”.). kids… he’s the real monster”). Strange thingsThis culture’s sincere embrace and sense of inclusion cemented the idea in the minds of influential Gen-Zers that D&D was, in fact, for everyone.

Meanwhile, a larger trend in popular culture was happening alongside it. This hard line between jock-v-nerds has gotten blurrier than ever. Just look around: comics are now strictly mainstream; a superhero movieAvengers endinglisten)) became the second highest-grossing film in history; a high fantasy dramagame of Thrones) has become one of the greatest television shows of all time. As a result of all this, the penetration of geek culture into normie culture, the perception of fantasy changed forever. Perhaps the biggest obstacles to mass acceptance of D&D were embarrassment and embarrassment of school and fear of judgment from others. What happens when this barrier starts to evaporate?

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When I first started playing D&D in 2017, I found a sort of weird unspoken silence between new players and underdogs. There was a safe space in our game; other than that, the road wasn’t always friendly. Not knowing how people would react when they told me I’d spent the weekend traversing the mysterious lands of the Forgotten Realms, I often made up a story, carefully withholding information until I was sure I wouldn’t be ridiculed. After a while, it started to feel pretty useless. Indeed, there is nothing to be ashamed of here. It’s a harmless and healthy pastime, like going to the movies, swimming or (a bit more niche, of course) sealing with sealing wax. Sure, the fantasy setting can be pretty silly, the infinite stats pretty mind-boggling. But all of that fades away when you start playing.

To be clear: I love Dungeons & Dragons, sincerely and wholeheartedly. It’s hard to overstate, at best, how much fun an hour-long session can be; a heady mix of shared storytelling, improvisation, guile, wit, imagination and sheer luck. (There are few greater feelings than rolling a natural 20 at a time when the stakes are high). a character sheet in your lap, dice in one hand, beer in the other. My character, the 9th-level half-elf druid known as Thranduil Humblethorne, has magically taken the form of a giant eagle. AND a frog, summoned ice storms from the sky, adopted a black bear companion, formed an uneasy alliance with an undead lich, created a water elemental that accidentally broke loose, and unsuccessfully proposed to a beautiful girl. (Only in D&D can you imperiously summon lightning and summon swarms of locusts as you pause to answer a pizza delivery boy’s bell.)

My peer group, the DMG (initials stand for Daring Mortal Guard and Damage Management Control), also went through the boom: We fought minotaurs, hill giants, zombies, werewolves, chimeras, rogues, impersonators. , trolls, grick, gargoyle, goblin and of course! – gelatinous cubes. We cast the “Enchant Person” spell on an ogre named Bog to aid us in our quest, and watched in horror as the spell dissolved, the look of betrayal and pain on Bog’s face (actually, of course, on my Dungeon Master’s face), a look that continues to haunt me to this day. I’ve seen my pansexual elf ranger partner, Vioh Lencè’s Elrand, flirt with nearly every creature he encounters. I even watched another companion, Lothar Springheel, a halfling lute-playing bard, die at the hands of a fire elemental, in one strangely emotional session. He was a character with whom, by now, we had shared hours of play, fought side by side, shared the ups and downs of an epic adventure. we mourn him. We even arranged a funeral for him. I wish I could say I was joking.

Above all, Dungeons & Dragons is best when you hang out with your friends. It is, in essence, a game that provides hours of opportunity for friends to meet up on a regular basis and just hang out. I have rarely experienced a laugh or an adrenaline rush like this. Sometimes we wonder, collectively, if we’re going to be like the campaigns you sometimes hear about. Running for years, if not decades, the campaign serves as a handy feature for simply staying connected, even when the inevitables of adult life get in the way.

It’s the collective experience that ultimately makes D&D so great, the reason why millions of people eventually awaken to its offbeat charm, the reason why even one of Hollywood’s Four Chrises gets in on the action. As tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg strive to create ever more immersive games in virtual reality and the metaverse, the most immersive form of gaming already exists, and has been doing so since 1974. Make jokes and eat. night while fighting dragons and rescuing princesses and all,” as John Francis Daley’s Sam explains in the latest episode of weird and nerdy. “It’s quite funny.”