Fifty years ago this month, the first 1000 copies of the original Dungeons & Dragons were printed and then boxed up at Gary Gygax's house.
It's supposed to have been late in January of 1974, but we don't have a specific date. January 1974 is good enough for me. And what counts as the specific origin date, anyway? The final draft? The actual printing? The availability for sale? We're close enough. I'm saying it's been fifty years right now.
Without more precise information, it's not too early to begin commemorating the half-century of D&D. It was not the first role-playing game. It barely represents the range of role-playing games that exist and have existed. Still, its influence is undeniable, incalculable.
When David McDaniel (Tedron) tried it in 1975--this was the guy who coined the convention that we all use now, of saying dee-[number] to specify a kind of die--he wrote,
It's a hell of a game. It is, as I suspected, a new order, a new dimension, of game. (APA-L 513, March 13, 1975).
A lot of players have had that feeling. It opened a new dimension of gaming. And now that dimension is familiar to countless millions.
You have three weeks left in the month. What will you do for "50"? Raise a toast to this fun pastime? Rave about D&D to your non-gamer friends that this is now a respectably aged hobby and so definitely not just for nerds? Go back and read the original rules (maybe yet again)? Add a lament about the recent mishandling of D&D by Wizards of the Coast? Tell a sad story about how it's all been downhill for gaming since 1974? (They ruined everything when they introduced the thief class, right?) Bemoan or celebrate the commodification of shared imaginative play? Get ready for the next fifty years of fussing over the right way to play? Tell us to wait four more years for the fiftieth anniversary of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Players Handbook, 1978), the one true game, instead, before the real party starts? Break out and try any of the other hundreds of games?
It's not a new dimension of game anymore, but it's still an awful lot of fun. I'm just going to keep playing. (I'm older than D&D anyway. Why should I be so thrilled?)
What about you?
Update: Wobbuffet linked to this post with a wonderful list of further links of D&D-related curiosities. Check it out here!
I have only gone back to read the OD&D (1974) material and some retro-clones in the last couple of years, spurred on by writers including Luke Gearing, Gus L, and Marcia B.
ReplyDeleteI have two conflicting reactions:
1) There is an exhausting worship of Gary Gygax and the early D&D texts, with circular efforts to divine great hidden or forgotten truths, that I remain flummoxed by.
2) There is an exhilarating sense of creativity and hobbyism endowed in these same texts, clearly a product of the authors' milieu, yet in retrospect a clear inflection point for gaming as a whole.
I think they had the right of it back in 1974, not in any particular mechanisms of play developed, but in that sense of amateur creativity. I also intend to celebrate by just keeping playing and generally mucking about!